Does this actually need an introduction anymore? Like, we’re on the eighth year of the Advent Calendar. How did you even get here if you aren’t already on the kuso train?

Here, does this help?

25 days, 25 fighting games of unknown quality, cue the Andy Williams. Ready your bingo cards, don your hazmat suits, and take a drink every time you feel like taking a drink.

1 - Soul Blade (PSX) + SoulCalibur (DC)

Yes, we are opening a show called the “Kusoge Advent Calendar” with one of the most critically and commercially successful fighting games ever released. You can interpret this choice in one of two ways.

Option A: the “fighting game history” lens. We always start the Advent Calendar with a First One, the start of a long-running series; it’s an anchor-point of familiarity, a low-intensity way to ease everyone back into the vibe, and can sometimes reveal some surprising stuff about games we thought we knew.

Option B: The next 24 games are likely to be snowballs with rocks in them. Let me have my fun with Sophitia 66B for one fucking day.

Controversial statement: accessible movement systems are cool. I’ll go to bat for GunZ: The Duel or Super Smash Bros. Melee any day, sure, there’s a lovely tactility to highly technical movement—but sometimes you don’t want to do linear algebra and underwater basket-weaving just to keep up with the other guy. Sometimes you just wanna hold a button down and make an interaction happen.

Technical movement can also be a big burden for designers. If the designed answer to a Big Stupid Button is “get out of the way”, and “get out of the way” is an 18-step process involving several animation cancels and a copy of your birth certificate, not everyone is going to make it through the entire process—they’re just gonna get hit. You either have to accept that, or carefully prune anything that looks like a Big Stupid Button out of your game; either way, the movement controls don’t just limit your design space, they define that space. Soul Blade and SoulCalibur feel instructive here.

Soul Blade is Solid™; it’s clunky and clumsy in places, but it’s got a lot going for it. Hit effects are satisfying, characters feel distinct, and attacks are organized in a way that makes them easy to discover and understand. Hit the A button for horizontal slashes that check sidesteps, hit the B button for vertical slashes that check ducking, and hit the K button for goofy unarmed stuff.

(Hit the G button to guard, but that doesn’t seem too important to me.)

The interplay between your movement and attacks is simple, satisfying, but somewhat linear. There’s a lot of bashing people around at close range; the Weapon Gauge and Guard Impact exist to inject some nuance into those otherwise simple situations. Guard for too long, and you’ll lose your weapon, stuck with a universal unarmed moveset. Take some risks with Guard Impact, a directional parry, and you’ll blow your opponent back, forcing them to hold your offense or try for their own Reverse Impact.

SoulCalibur’s biggest refinement seems obvious in retrospect; you can now hold a direction to walk in that direction. It sounds basic—it kinda is—but it’s a night-and-day difference. Instead of moving in increments of “one sidestep” or “one dash”, “8-way run” lets you put yourself just about anywhere on the screen, with high walk speeds and low commitment. The choice between defense and movement is gone; the two systems blend into one continuous dance.

It’s not as if Soul Blade is a mess, but it feels a lot less focused. Like, bear with me for a second and let’s talk sidesteps. Soul Blade’s sidesteps are strong: not only do they beat vertical B attacks, but a close-range sidestep can spin you 180 degrees around your opponent, making them the fastest way to reposition at the wall. Huge portions of defensive strategy revolve around stepping correctly, and a strong offense has to be constantly prepared to check them.

Since sidesteps are so important, you’d think Soul Blade would privilege them in the control scheme—but it makes a compromise. In SoulCalibur, an upward sidestep is a single Up input, and a downward sidestep is two taps of Down. In Soul Blade, downward sidesteps are still two Down inputs, but an upward sidestep is a quick flick from Down to Up.

Huh?

The raw Up input’s been reserved for jumping. A short tap will get you a normal-looking hop, superficially good for going over lows; holding Up instead gets you some Inspector Gadget spring-shoes shit. To my knowledge, the latter has never returned to SoulCalibur—probably because it’s as useless as every other PSX moonjump from every other game of this era.

Now, half a sidestep input isn’t a big deal; it’s barely a bump in the learning curve. But that input decision speaks to some strange priorities, a less-than-crystal-clear vision of how Soul Blade would be played. Sprinkle in some common tropes of the era—hardcoded pursuit attacks, interchangable branching strings, and a weird disinterest in correctly-looped music—and you get a game that still feels like it’s finding its footing, penciling in certain choices simply because That’s What’s Done.

By comparison, SoulCalibur seems like it was made by time travelers—a singular vision, timeless aesthetic direction, and weapon-fighting as natural as breathing.

No notes. Hop on Fightcade.

VERDICT: REAL

2 - Every Guilty Gear XX

T tells me to down-back, I down-back, T hits me with Testament 6P, and I do my best Steve Harvey impression. It’s a simple routine, and we’ve done it a few times before—but I’m pretty sure it’s still funny.

I don’t even play +R—but it’s a character resonance problem, not a systems problem, because Guilty Gear fucking rocks. Hell, last year I managed to write a page and a half about it, despite being the most incompetent player I’ve ever personally seen; there’s a joyful energy in every system, connecting you with the chaos and speed of the game whether or not you actually know what the fuck you’re doing.

When you’re mainlining Daisuke’s vision, it’s easy to forget that Guilty Gear is fucking old, with what feels like a hundred different revisions in the XX line alone. As we’ve learned on the Advent Calendar, “obsolete” versions of a game can often be anything but—and if nothing else, they’re great for comedy. So T took me on the afternoon-long tour back to 2002.

Honestly, earlier versions of XX aren’t unusual because they’re broken—they’re unusual because they’re mostly not. The gameplay vision and aesthetic throughline is totally consistent from moment 1, and the difference between versions is largely a question of tuning; as a novice and a dumbass, if it weren’t for the UI redesigns, I don’t even know if I’d be able to tell them apart.

That’s not to imply that it’s all subtle tuning, mind. Some balance outliers are insidious, tiny differences of frames and pixels that warp the game over the course of years of optimization; some are strictly Looney-Tunes shit, like Slash’s +3-on-block Stun Edge, which I swear is somehow the actual number. But the core is solid—let’s be real, every BlazBlue game is 200 times more fucked up and made a Brazilian dollars.

So, why so many rounds of small changes? What are they trying to do?

If I can spitball for a second (hopefully that’s what you’re here for), I think there’s only one thing XX doesn’t want to allow—a situation with only one outcome. This era of Guilty Gear is about scrambles, both players trying to keep the game under their control and yanking on all the systems when it threatens to slip away; that’s why characters cover so much distance so quickly, why the execution checks are so tight, why stabilizing a stray hit is subject to 14 different variables including ambient humidity and phase of the moon.

(Oh yeah, and 0-frame throws. Those seem important.)

Even when watching the best players in the world, it’s rare to go ten seconds without seeing stupid shit; a single pixel’s inaccuracy will suddenly leave both players staring at each other, falling at different speeds, wondering what the fuck is going on. And that’s by design! Defensive mechanics are strong and varied, timing and execution are tuned almost uncomfortably close to human ability, and five iterations' worth of centralizing nails—tools and strategies that are too consistent—have been hammered down. Everything is just barely too sensitive to be kept in control for long.

There’s a temptation for a clean narrative here, and I don’t want to oversimplify things; there are many differences between mortal humans and players like FAB, who seems to be keyed into defensive reactions with such terrifying accuracy that you’d think his opponents are hooked up to polygraphs. But if there’s a single skill driving success in this era of Guilty Gear, more so than any game I know, it’s the ability to keep your feet under you, to carry yourself on instinct when intellect isn’t enough. Make a choice—fast!—then follow through.

I think about this stuff a lot, because I think it’s easy to treat all these virtues like problems to be fixed. After all, the game wants players to make mistakes, to use the wrong route or flub their FRC or barely misplace their anti-air—more than that, it needs them to make mistakes. The heart of the game, that feeling of being pushed off-balance and still staying upright, requires it.

You could make a more comprehensible, more “accessible” Guilty Gear; you could tone down the execution, slow down the airdashes, add a bigass counterhit slowdown to let players plan their ideal conversion. That purely hypothetical game would be easier to watch, easier to understand, more “approachable”. But would it be any easier? Would players feel more in control of their fate, more prepared to solve problems and shape interactions?

In some ways, probably. In other ways, the Sol in your face at +2 now has an input buffer.

So I’m glad that Guilty Gear XX exists—that +R is still healthy and vibrant and regularly giving away best-in-class rollback for the price of a vending-machine candy bar. There’s a lot to like about dignified, elegant, predictable games—but there’s a beauty to the wild stuff, too.

VERDICT: REAL-ASS

3 - Kamen Rider Blade (PS2)

After seven years of the Advent Calendar and zero episodes of toku watched, I think I could probably call myself a Kamen Rider secondary‚ if only by circumstance. I think I dig the beat-by-beat action of toku fights; badass music and explosive finishers can melt even the most irony-poisoned heart.

The games, though? Whooooooooooo boy. I know what to expect from Eighting, at least—reused animations, great hit FX, and overtuned offense—but for everyone else touching Bandai’s infinite money printer, all bets are off. It’s a franchise for children, and the games seem to be designed accordingly.

So. You’ve got an attack button, with a scant handful of directional strings and a universal slide. You’ve got a special button, which activates a different move depending on the “card” you’re holding, selected with the bumpers. Card attacks can be cancelled into like special moves, and can charged to power them up or vary your timing, but they won’t replenish until you reset to standing idle.

…That’s actually the entire system explanation. There’s no high or low blocking, no juggles, no throws worth a damn, no meaningful way to make attacks whiff, and no timer. It’s one of those.

But hey, that’s not that bad, right? Sure, every normal string moves forward faster than your walk speed, guaranteeing that it will connect at almost any range. Sure, many of them are so unsafe that they’re not worth using without a card attack to bail out. Sure, some characters might not have a single decent card to do that with. But at the very least, chargable moves give the game a single fucking timing mixup. It’s not a good or fun mixup, it’s probably not a rewarding mixup, but it’s a mixup—in the right group of friends (and with the right choice of hard liquor), it could be one that inspires some emotion other than raw disgust.

However, Kamen Rider Blade also has supers.

The first time you use a super, you’ll probably be a little confused. For one thing, it won’t happen when you expect; when you have a super stocked, supers replace your special button. For another, they seem to start up really fast, and hit an alarming amount of the time. You might wonder: “Is that 1 frame? Is that 0 frames? Is that fullscreen? Is it just my character, or is that a system property?”

Well, screen position doesn’t matter, because supers don’t have hitboxes. Timing doesn’t matter, because supers don’t have frame data. Your opponent’s actions don’t matter, because supers can’t be blocked. And your actions don’t matter either, because supers aren’t attacks.

Like, this is really important; when you hit the special button, no matter what’s going on, your super activates. There is no way to avoid, prevent, or influence this in any way—you are immediately teleported into the Budokai-style input-match minigame. In a mechanical sense, supers function less like an attack, and more like the pause button.

…Okay, that’s pretty bad. But there’s still some chance of gameplay, right? There’s still at least a meter-management element?

Wrong!

There is no super meter. You get one super when you fall below 50% life, and a second super when your opponent falls below 25%. You can’t stock them, you can’t save them, and in every single round, you’ll see at least one—there’s no reason not to. Sometimes you’ll see as many as four. Guess how long it takes to get sick of the cutscenes!

I have never seen a game fail in this way. Like, this is a Kamen Rider game on the Advent Calendar; I’m supposed to be complaining about disallowed mirror matches (exists), jobber monster characters (yup), and Clock Up (thankfully absent). This is an entirely new, planetary-class problem, and I have no idea how to talk about it. Is there a competitive rock-paper-scissors community? Maybe they’d be interested?

Supers completely destroy all standard play, in a way that prevents even the most brain-poisoned kusoge fiends from extracting anything of value. If it didn’t look and sound as good as it does, it would be a solid contender for the worst thing I’ve ever played—and honestly, it doesn’t look that good. Those flat-plane photo-background stages are on the same level as Kamen Rider Agito, a PSX title.

Now, sharp-witted readers might notice that I’ve left one thing out. If supers don’t care about your animation state, they can be used to bail out of unsafe attacks, avoiding punishes or mixups—so as an attacker, you ought to poke with your normals, and as a defender, you have to force your opponent to use their super or suffer a thousand jabs. That’s, like, kind of gameplay, right? Doing your best to make something whiff, or punishing an unsafe poke?

Well, it turns out that card attacks can be used out of blockstun and hitstun, so you may as well just use the super.

We spent the rest of the day playing NES bootlegs.

VERDICT: ASS

4 - Change Air Blade (Arcade)

Change Air Blade is a versus shmup. We know about some of those—I think a weird number of FGC people have at least heard of Twinkle Star Sprites—but most of them are side-by-side affairs, players trying to navigate their own screen while flooding the opponent’s screen indirectly. It’s more Puyo Puyo than Armored Core; you’re not just, like, shooting at the other guy, for a whole host of obvious reasons inherent to the format.

Change Air Blade looks at the above sentence and asks “okay but what if you did tho”.

The top-down version: Change Air Blade is about burning resources, scrambling for position, and cutting through your opponent’s curtains of bullets. You take turns, swapping between the role of “plucky pilot” and “bullshit stage 3 miniboss” multiple times per round, and games are mostly decided by who can keep their cool in weak positions. It’s frantic, unforgiving, and surprisingly deliberate. I think it rocks, and the bulk of this section is just going to be me…fucking…explaining it. That cool? Good, because I’m holding the talking pillow.

At the start of the round, the vertical playfield is sliced into two halves, top and bottom, with the player ships facing each other. Players have three life bars per round, and your standard tap-fire shot slowly chips away at that bar—but because you both have frontal shots, firing at your opponent makes you inherently vulnerable to them. This is weird; with flat resources, standard shots are mostly used to cordon off space or finish a weakened opponent, not for raw damage.

The “regular” player, the one on the bottom of the screen, has two shot types and a stock of bombs. The “boss” player, the one on the top of the screen, has access to special attacks, controlled by a recharging meter; they fire special orange bullets that instantly kill your opponent on contact, and it’s as scary as it sounds.

Dealing damage pushes items out of your opponent—bomb fragments, power-ups, and otherwise useless score medals. The “regular” player can collect them to level up their standard shot, punishing the boss for engaging them directly; the “boss” collects them to level up their special attacks, denser and faster walls of instant death that can force a player away from items, or punish them for aggressive off-axis movement.

Critically, though, items slowly fall from top to bottom; if you’re in a strong position, you’re asked to decide between pure pressure, playing for damage, or zoning your opponent away from item drops. It’s a tough choice; a leveled-up shot shreds lifebars, and even a single bomb fragment can let you cut through a rough pattern, but the most critical item flips the screen, reversing your positions and letting the put-upon pilot play a boss character. If you’re strong, you’ll stop at nothing to keep your opponent away from it; if you’re weak, you’ll take almost any risk to snag it.

The mechanics are simple, but the power dynamic of a match is constantly changing. Sometimes it’s about honest-to-god footsies, players weaving through that tiny gap in bullet travel-time, and sometimes it’s the shoot-em-up equivalent of blocking C-Roa, where that stupid asshole at the bottom of the screen decides to spend every resource in the game at the same time. Nothing exemplifies this more than the “boss” player’s final trick—collecting enough bomb fragments, or charging your special attack meter for long enough, upgrades you from “miniboss” to “screen-spanning stage boss”, a temporary transformation that remaps your attack buttons to some truly demanding orange attacks. (It’s the sort of stuff that you would call “quarter-munching horseshit” if you weren’t the one employing it—and surviving it feels like a tremendous achievement.)

If you’re not into shmups, I don’t think this is going to change your mind. In particular, some of the boss attacks are polarizing, big orange walls of curtain-fire that some players will need heavy practice to cut through—and a few are blatant knowledge-checks, scamming away 75% of the screen in a giant unreadable flash of yellow flame.

But I think there’s something here, a type of power-play that I rarely see in versus games. At its best, Change Air Blade is taxing and terrifying and wonderfully exciting, and it shocks me that the Fightcade room is as quiet as it is.

Come fight me—I need to know if this shit is fair!

VERDICT: REAL

5 - Hokuto no Ken Luca Scattone Team (PC)

Gonna be honest, I have no idea how to construct a narrative for this one. Hokuto no Ken Luca Scattone Team isn’t really that type of experience. You open the game, things happen to you, and they continue happening to you until you close the game.

So, like, anime MUGEN game that’s taking most of its gameplay elements from King of Fighters. We’ve seen that before, but…not exactly like this. If you have functioning eyes, you’ve already noticed the way this game looks, but if you don’t, you deserve to know; most of the character sprites are mashed-together anime screengrabs. Characters shift in scale and proportion, limbs shrink and swell, colors flicker based on the lighting of the scene they were taken from. Sometimes an entire character rotates on an unknown axis, or a specific limb from one frame is pasted over a stance from another. The painful process of assembling these is fully on display, and every part of the process looks visually tortured; why would anyone ever bother putting in the effort for these results?

In the best cases, characters look like they’re teleporting, moves flickering from keyframe to keyframe like 1-frame strikes. In the worst cases, characters simply melt into indistinct blurs of their primary palettes. Either way, these…”high-resolution” visuals do a pretty good job of hiding the source material. If you strip away the visuals, most of these characters are edits of King of Fighters characters, from authors that had nothing to do with LST.

The team is pretty protective of these edits. Most MUGEN fullgames are distributed as a .zip or a .rar file, but LST ships with its own installer, seemingly solely to mark the character folders as “hidden” in Windows. When this “protection scheme” was trivially defeated, and the MUGEN community uploaded LST’s characters as standalone fighters, the team took to the MUGEN Archive forums, and the result is just the fucking worst. (Obviously, don’t bother anyone in that thread.)

Now, the editing process has some bothersome implications, but it also creates a concrete problem. LST’s “high resolution” characters are too big for the old collision data, and the hitboxes and hurtboxes need to be rescaled…but often aren’t. Every single character has at least one attack that renders them mysteriously invincible—most characters have, like, ten—but enabling MUGEN’s hitbox viewer will reveal an ant-sized cluster of blue rectangles, positioned slightly above their feet.

What happened?

If you care about games, I think you should care about designer intent; learning the grammar of game design can leave you closer to the things you care about. But what is the designed purpose of a bookshelf falling over? What is the design intent of a hurricane? LST’s only comprehensible human artifice is the custom voice clips, and they’re in a language I don’t speak, belted at maximum volume into a low-quality headset microphone. The rest is, by all appearances, a series of bizarre accidents.

Like, take Toki, beloved top tier from the Atomiswave game. In LST, he has a one-move infinite that doubles as an unlimited series of left-right mixups on block, and that trait is completely unimportant to the character. What’s actually important is whiffed 46P, a reversal with invincibility that lasts several seconds after the move is over. This makes Toki an unbeatable god tier on the level of Ivan Ooze; if you know the secret, no in-game actions can ever kill him.

How about Shu? Well, he’s got a two-part super, a dive to the ground into a multi-hit spinning kick. Like many of LST’s multi-hit moves, it doesn’t juggle properly—so, like many of LST’s multi-hit moves, the followup hits are programmed to be unblockable. That’s not unforgivable, but it’s also not enough; it still doesn’t stop invincible reversals or rolls. “Easy” fix: have the initial hit apply a special flag to its victim, disabling their ability to input movement or attacks until they take a hit. If you can connect with his super in a way that whiffs the followup (not all that difficult), you’ve effectively unplugged your victim’s controller.

Even taunts can work this way. Souther’s taunt builds meter, and gives him enough lingering invincibility to start and finish a super. The requirements for counterplay are very specific; you need a super that’s fast enough to punish the taunt’s recovery, but with a long enough superflash to wait out the invincibility, since that timer runs during superflash. If you can’t meet both those conditions, Souther can end the game whenever Souther wants.

Only some characters can be thrown out of their rolls. Only some characters have invincible guard-cancels. Only some characters map MUGEN’s C and Z macros correctly. LST doesn’t just have a tier list, it has a fucking caste system—the bugs are more impactful than any designed gameplay mechanic, and it’s not close. There’s almost nothing to be learned from this, only a hundred individual ways that invisible systems can be made painfully visible.

I am baffled by this game’s existence. It might be the Arm Joe of MUGEN, a puzzle-box game that can only be played once before it unravels—but gritting your teeth through match play is impossible. Everything LST has to offer is abrasive and janky and inconsistent and dull. It is simultaneously one of the most boring games I’ve ever played, and a Sudafed nightmare dream where the laws of reality twist and come apart. It blows and I hate it.

In a last-ditch attempt to recapture control of my life, we did what we do with any shitty MUGEN game; we ran a Sadclaps AI bracket, manually injecting glitched-out state definitions into the entire cast. Sitting back and watching the AI in this state is usually a pretty fun romp, featuring fireball supers that duplicate themselves 50 times, deranged screenwrap airwalk juggles, and completely worthless audio. But even Sadclaps couldn’t save LST from itself—most matches dragged on for minutes at a time, both combatants caught in the startup frames of one of their 40 invincible moves, waiting for the other to do something. I fucking hate this.

VERDICT: ASS

6 - SvP (PC)

On the second day of MUGEN, my true love gave to me~

Mark your bingo cards for “game that cannot be googled”. Absolutely every search involving “SVP” leads you to a company offering unspecified “business solutions”, or a bunch of weirdos extolling the virtues of interpolated seasonal anime. It helps, but only marginally, if you search the unabbreviated name—“SNK vs. Playmore” (perfect, no notes) will lead you to at least 4 different MUGEN games, in various states of preservation and modification.

I think any MUGEN project was going to seem normal after LST, but even with “normal” expectations, SvP is pretty restrained. Sure, the character select screen looks like a hoarder house, with even more characters hidden behind off-screen selections or button-hold alternates, but the actual substance of the game is…a largely normal King of Fighters game.

You know what you’re getting by this point. Aggressive hops, satisfying basic buttons, cancel rules that continue to slightly confuse me, and a set of fairly restrained meter mechanics—guard-cancel roll and guard-cancel blowback acting as costly but flexible escape-hatches, the sorts of defensive layers I sometimes wish existed in every game.

How are KOF people this motivated? There are a gorillion characters crammed into this weird little package, and the vast majority of them are totally unremarkable, operating at a standard KOF2002 power baseline. Even the characters who only got in on technicalities, the ones who were in a single unrelated SNK game a single time, are sensible conversions that feel completely fine to play.

Not all of them, though.

Following the tradition of SvC Chaos, a Capcom character stole the show. EX Sagat is probably a boss character, a button-hold alternate meant to be cordoned away from the rest of the cast, but he is a fun fucking boss character, a Sagat who captures a very pure essence of Sagat. Your slow fireball is Gunflame slow, your fast fireball is shotgun-fast, and you have one of the world’s most rewarding uppercuts (as long as you exclude Variable Geo). Go forth and run the gameplan, my gigantic dipshit son.

SvP is good for an afternoon’s worth of character sightseeing, at the very least—even if some of the roster choices make me question the author’s motivations. Like, there’s a barbershop quartet of K’ variants, three Ryus, two totally noncanon Kula edits, and…no Athena? Where am I supposed to get my cute outfits and completely brainless gameplay now? Exploring the cast? (Fortunately, unlike most KOF games, SvP contains Ken—welcome to the team, buddy.)

Honestly, SvC Chaos might be more important to fangame authors than as a game in its own right; all of its excellent spritework is attached to a largely mediocre game, letting authors borrow its high production values and resculpt them into something new. (Or in SvP’s case, something old—though the decision to leave Zero behind speaks for itself, I think.)

Sadly, in SvP’s case, the result falls short of technical excellence. Now, a handful of airwalks and crashes are totally normal for MUGEN; I usually expect (and receive) much worse. But there’s a narrow technical flaw that hugely disrupts match play: many characters take a really, really long time to transition into their win pose, stalling the game in post-KO state for up to 30 seconds.

In a 3v3 game with high damage, this massively bloats any sets that contain a bugged character—and that sucks, because in every other regard, I think I’m down to play this. KOF is cool, SNK is cool, pick Saisyu and mash his 13-frame plus-on-block overhead.

VERDICT: REAL*

7 - Sailor Moon X (PC)

Welcome to day 3 of The MUGEN Block. This time, we’re traveling back to WinMUGEN, a 2007 early-access build of MUGEN that crashes when you [verb], to play Sailor Moon S Vs.

This is kind of a fucking video game. All of the character sprites come from Sailor Moon S, the SNES game that keeps showing up at majors despite having 200 dash-cancel infinites and unlimited free guard-cancels. Sailor Moon X, a 6-button game with Marvel-style movement and chaining, exchanges this jank for a completely new and unrecognizable set of jank.

Every attack alters your jump arc, including air normals; they slow your descent on hit or whiff, and in a game with Marvel superjumps, the effect can be pretty dramatic. I think this is meant to make them work better in combos, helping you stay attached to your opponent—but Sailor Moon X has near-universal walkjab infinites. You have way better things to do than a typical magic series.

Add fast walk speeds, stellar fireballs, and some creative ideas about blockstun values, and you get a fun playground for mindlessly crashing strong tools into each other. Most of the game is coarse and straightforward, full of big goofy tools that are easy to manage, so the weird movement feels like a fun garnish—I’m mostly disappointed it’s not more relevant. Everyone’s strongest combos are grounded combos, and many of their strongest neutral tools are grounded-only; adding any combo rules, even something as inelegant as Mortal Kombat 4’s “MAXIMUM DAMAGE” 40% limit, would make Sailor Moon X substantially more interesting, making the more difficult air conversions feel worthwhile.

Sailor Saturn is, I’m told, represented at her canon power level, an unbeatable god tier who never needed to apply any effort in the first place. She’s got a fast unblockable, Spiral Swords without the meter cost, a command dash that may as well be a teleport, and a ranbu super that builds back half its bar on hit and links into itself. She’s even got a guard cancel, which is an incredible privilege in this environment. The only comparable cast member is Usagi, and even then, not for fun or interesting reasons—just by virtue of having a combo-escape tool in a game full of infinites.

Sailor Moon X is a messy game. WinMUGEN requires Joy2Key and graphics wrappers and prayers to Moloch on modern systems, and still peaces out more or less whenever it wants—so T hastily ported it to MUGEN 1.0, which worked better than it had any right to. That’s just the technical stuff, though; it didn’t update the long sentence-mixed superflashes, the single long-ish GIF that passes for an opening movie, or the soundtrack that alternates between copyright infringement and unapologetically 2000s trance remixes. I can feel the energy of a manic fan—the sense that Sailor Moon is worth giving every Normal Fighting Game Feature your best shot, going beyond the functional.

Sailor Moon X doesn’t quite come together in the end. It’s a balancing trainwreck, taking it seriously turns off a lot of its most interesting choices, some of the stages are 10+ screens long, and half of the game’s palettes disable most of your move animations (currently the record for most baffling programming error in this event’s history). But there’s something compelling about it regardless—and it makes for a pretty hilarious Sadclaps tournament, just as long as you throw Chibi-Moon into the ocean beforehand.

Not everything’s gotta be esports, and not every system needs to hold up to scrutiny. For a night of goofy fun, all you need is buttons that feel good to press, and interesting reasons to press them—and even if was visibly falling apart the entire time we played, Sailor Moon X just barely held out.

VERDICT: REAL-ASS

8 - Dragon Ball vs. Street Fighter (PC)

Welcome to the bottom of the barrel. I like like to do a little trick during these write-ups; when a game has absolutely nothing worth commenting on, absolutely zero noteworthy ideas whether they’re successes or failures, I’ve gotten pretty good at talking about something else instead.

And this is the fourth straight MUGEN game, so you bet your ass I’m doing that. See, before today, I had the idea that we’d seen the full spectrum of creator motivations, the Three Big Types Of Thing that come out of creation kits like this. We’ve seen SvP, a largely competent fullgame with a vision and a passion for the source material. We’ve seen Sailor Moon X, a scrappy proof-of-concept that’s full of holes but full of heart. And, to my dismay, we’ve seen LST, a piece of utterly baffling outsider art that transports you adjacent to, but not actually inside, someone’s brain.

Now, before the Unity Engine guys fucked up, and the words “made in Unity" became synonymous with opt-in financial bondage, there was a time where “made in Unity" meant “low-quality amateur bullshit”.

(Stick with me, this is going somewhere.)

That’s a weird phenomenon, right? Unity is a fine engine, a completely normal piece of creation software. Long-time Unity devs certainly have their gripes—and if I lose all my script references in a VRChat SDK migration again, I’m going to end up on the news—but by and large, if you want to make a video game, you can make that video game in Unity, and it would be technically sensible to do it.

Unity’s reputation for amateur bullshit isn’t because it’s bad software; it’s because it’s good software. Unity makes it drop-dead easy to make a 3D video game that will arrive on someone else’s PC and play the way you programmed it.

I think MUGEN has this reputation too, and it’s because of the unfortunate Fourth Big Type Of Thing: blatant fucking theft.

Dragon Ball vs. Street Fighter isn’t a fullgame—it’s a screenpack, a collection of menus and lifebars, that comes preloaded with other peoples’ characters and a handful of strangely arranged MIDIs. Absolutely no attempt at integration is ever made. There’s an intro, there’s a select screen, and there’s a wacky voice line over the pre-game portraits. That’s all the work you’re getting.

Now, this is a 2001 “release”, so it’s not as if this is surprising or uncommon. “Source: the Internet” was kinda the default operating mode for a lot of people. Still, I think it’s funny how badly this plays specifically because the characters have been removed from their intended context. The Dragon Ball characters are probably superficially fair when they’re fighting each other—at least the ones from the same author—because they more or less all have meter charge, flight, and the sort of bullshit hitboxes you’d expect. Place Zangief on the same screen, and you’ll rapidly discover that he doesn’t really have a way of dealing with someone who just…leaves the top border of the screen. Fullscreen fire breath isn’t enough; you need to be a Saiyan.

Don’t get me wrong, each of these characters are individually incompetent in their own way—they hadn’t invented frame data in 2001, and walkjab infinites are everywhere, provided you’re tall enough to get hit by jabs at all. But when you combine the scale differences, the sound differences, the mismapped controls…the experience is feverish. If you are actually trying to meet the game on its own terms, to treat the systems like they’re worthy of your brainpower, this is a 15-minute pipe bomb of an experience.

I think there’s something I’m probably missing here. I respect that a lot of work goes into setting up and scripting characters, and I’m not so dense as to think that work was for my benefit. The Dragon Ball characters aren’t really meant to be approached as sets of rewarding gameplay tools; they’re a roleplaying kit, a way to reenact and become a part of fights from the anime series you love. That’s cool, and I hope people do that forever, but I’m always left wondering why people choose fighting games.

If you don’t know anything about how fighting games work, if you don’t play them enough to be able to find the walkjab infinites on 80% of your cast, why would you choose MUGEN characters to express your passion for a series? Surely there’s something less specific available, right? Something less painstaking and time-consuming to set up, only to be played through and discarded in minutes?

Maybe I’ve just forgotten what it’s like to be naive and inexperienced—the version of Young Tyron that had to be taken aside by forum moderators and politely but firmly told “people on the internet are actually real people”. Fighting game die-hards may live and breathe this stuff, but we have all been new and dumb, insisting that Ganon is the best character in Melee because you die when he punches you—knowledge doesn’t create passion, it just deepens it.

Regardless of the tooling, whether it’s MUGEN or Game Maker or fucking Scratch, there will always be upstarts unknowingly biting off more than they can chew—and that rules. But I think I can believe that, firmly endorse it, and still acknowledge that Dragon Ball vs. Street Fighter is worthless to everyone besides its creators.

(And don’t use Unity for new projects. Learn Godot.)

VERDICT: ASS

9 - Killing Zone (PS1)

Leaving the Four Days of MUGEN feels like surfacing from deep, dark water. I think I could have played almost anything and enjoyed myself by comparison, so I want to be really careful when I talk about Killing Zone: it’s probably not very good.

It suffers from one of my least favorite design pitfalls—tons of garbage-time interactions that put the game on pause, whether it’s trades that send both characters to fullscreen, on-block situations where active play breaks down, or long, long knockdowns without much interplay for the attacker. It’s also a 30FPS game with an incredibly sensitive camera and tons of moving background objects, on the PS1; my motion sensitivity doesn’t like it when the entire screen starts melting.

But Killing Zone is one of the few 3D fighters of this era with fast, responsive, and relevant movement—movement that compels the player to find an answer to its combat puzzle. It fumbles the execution in some pretty amusing ways, sure, but I’ll take “amusing fuckup” over “boring success” any day of the week.

The core’s straightforward enough: four attack buttons, guard, sidestep, basically zero combos unless you employ a Big Stupid Mid Launcher. Almost everyone’s full arsenal fits on one page of a jewel-case manual, but that’s value-neutral; some people dig huge movelists, others (like me) are inclined to stick to six moves even if the game offers 60. Sidesteps are short and have tons of recovery, but dashes are fast and travel quite far; it feels natural to start slipping in and out of attack range, looking for a counterpoke or a whiff-punish. That sounds pretty normal and sensible, right?

Well, TCRF user “Athena” documented Killing Zone’s hitbox viewer, accessible via dummied-out debug mode, and it reveals an important internal quirk; characters have a maximum of two hurtboxes and one hitbox at a time, and those hurtboxes are doing double-duty for collision. In most games, extended limbs or bigass weapons have matching hurtboxes, but in Killing Zone, they don’t. They can’t—a hurtbox would push opponents away from the attack!

This trait defines the game, no matter what character you pick. There will be no sick launcher reads on extended limbs, no stuffing advancing moves with quick jabs, none of the things that pop into your brain when you think “footsies.” Killing Zone is played at two ranges; point blank, and infinitely far away. You’ll spend most of your time trying to navigate your opponent’s biggest button, or pressing your advantage state as far as the engine allows. If you want to shut down a midrange gameplan, you have exactly one option—get in there!

Crouching has a strange place in this system. Most of Killing Zone’s most fucked up moves are highs, and every character can crouchwalk, avoiding Big Buttons and throws while slowly advancing. It’s a good ecosystem for characters with strong lows, especially because knockdowns guarantee at least one OTG—and because switching block directions doesn’t work properly, attackers can set up a nightmare scenario where you choose between eating extra OTGs or an unblockable meaty string. It’s exhausting; every knockdown turns off your PS1 and turns on your N64, inviting you to play a Mario Party minigame.

At least the rounds are short. Eating two strings usually puts you at risk of ring-out, and it’s a big risk; all backward movement will kill you the moment your back foot touches the edge. Forward movement can never ring out, though—Killing Zone wants you to be aggressive, to take big risks whenever you’re under pressure, and it sucks that the intent chafes against rigid knockdowns and clumsy sidesteps.

I think my stream viewers have the right idea; the best way to interact with Killing Zone is to watch someone else play it. “Auto Mode” is a series of AI-trainer tournament brackets, asking you to pilot your character with tactical instructions instead of joystick commands. There’s some standard-issue RPG nonsense, determining damage, health, and overall AI responsiveness, but you also get access to more tactics over time; holding a button tells your AI to “move in to throw” or “mix them up” or something like that, commands that are specific enough for strategy but general enough to be surprising.

It’s a short diversion, but it’s a pretty solid diversion, especially if you’ve got friends watching over your shoulder and whooping at the wacky AI skeleton man (“FUCKING DO SOMETHING!"). Losing in the final tournament straight-up deletes your character, sending you back to square one, and I was totally okay with another attempt. This stuff would have been a childhood obsession for young Tyron.

I’m conflicted: would Killing Zone be better with a more traditional system of extended hurtboxes? I’m not sure; instinctually, it seems so invasive that it’s hard to imagine. It would certainly make the game more immediately comprehensible, but at that point, it might just be a worse version of other games—and the thing that Killing Zone does well, that razor’s-edge play when transitioning from midrange to up-close, is worth doing!

We’ve done the One Second Galaxy Fight bit before, where we set the timer as low as it can go and let every match end in timeout—but setting Killing Zone’s timer to 5 seconds genuinely makes it feel more like itself. It prunes all of the garbage time, removing okizeme as a gameplay element; the rest is all speedy risk-taking, even if the janky hitboxes make that risk feel lopsided.

It doesn’t hold up long-term, or even medium-term; if you want a PS1 game with a diverse cast, responsive movement, and short movelists, you should be playing Soul Blade, not this. But it’s going to be bouncing around in my brain for a while; how many tweaks would it take to turn Killing Zone into something solid?

VERDICT: ASS

10 - Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm Generations (PS3)

I’m pretty familiar with netplay hate mail, whether my crime is selecting Armor Lock in Halo Reach, doing X-Factor Astral Vision infinites in Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, or playing Elsword and…using the game mechanics. Not a specific mechanic, really, any of them will do.

But the medium shapes the message; every competitive community has their own house blend of hatred.

For a while, I expected free games to have the loudest, angriest players; they haven’t sunk any cost, so they can say whatever shit they like without much to lose. I was wrong, and in retrospect, it’s obvious—it’s the $60 games that get people screaming. If you’re not enjoying a free game, you can just walk away, totally guilt-free, telling yourself whatever story you like about its balance or community or monetization schemes. When you pay $60 for a game, you’re trying to get your money’s worth—and if it’s a fighting game, doing that involves crushing someone’s dreams of victory.

So, what do you get when you combine sunk cost fallacy, zero-sum competition, delay-based netcode, horrific balance, shoddy combat design, and the irate rage of anime fans circa 2012?

On a surface level, Ultimate Ninja Storm Generations seems like a largely competent arena fighter. It’s focused on simple controls, accessible movement, and resource management under pressure, forcing you to budget chakra, substitution, and assists to wrestle you way to the top of scrambles. It feels alright to hit buttons, it feels pretty good to get around, and movelists are small and simple. You can pick this up, spend ten seconds working out a gameplan, then jam out to good music and hit The Rasengan Button for as long as you like.

I think if your engagement with the game begins and ends there, going for a relaxed romp around Generations' single-player offerings, it’s very easy to feel like you got your $60’s worth—that’s probably why there are, like, 30 of these fucking games. But if single-player isn’t enough for you, PlayStation Network beckons, and with it comes…some of the most upsetting play patterns to ever be competitively relevant?

Generations has chicken-blocking that would make Persona 4 Arena blush. You can jump in any direction while holding the Guard button, blocking the few attacks you don’t laterally swerve around, and pepper your opponents with assists and meterless projectiles. Even air Chakra Dash, a universal move that reads like a group of CIA scientists striving to create Earth’s mightiest anti-zoning tool—tracks, fullscreen, projectile invulnerable, active frame 1—can’t reliably punish air projectiles. You’ll get to range 0, sure, but that’s all you’re getting unless you can bait a guard-cancel or substitute.

We’ve done this before—it’s a resource-management game. Spend your resources well, force your opponent to spend theirs recklessly, and come out on top in all the messy scrambles that result. Your mileage on the aesthetics may vary—you may or may not agree that this “feels like Naruto"—but it’s a perfectly fine way to build a game.

But stages are enormous, defensive movement is free, and offensive movement has a cost. Substitution and assists come back on their own, asking for nothing but your survival—but chakra, the thing limiting the Chakra Dash, requires you to stand still and charge. Air Chakra Dash, the most comprehensively cracked offensive tool in arena fighter history, is in the lamest, most defensive game I have ever played. It just isn’t enough.

It’s scams on scams on scams on scams, one giant scam made of a thousand individual smaller scams. We played for hours, and Abbock and Rockforge always had something else to say—how the team gauge could grant you practical infinites or neverending lockdown depending on your assist types, how chain combos inflicted “button lock” that prevented you from acting even if the chain was cancelled early, how the Soldier Pill consumable granted its user unconditional super armor (at only a modest decrease to defense). I can only characterize these things as the singleplayer and multiplayer fighting each other, because otherwise, like…how do you make sense of this? What is this doing here?

Losing a game in Generations summons a familiar feeling—black-tar spite, the thing you get when you mix “I must accept responsibility for my loss” and “no one should have to play in the ways I’m being made to play”. It’s a feeling that I’ve only rarely been acquainted with in my days since Elsword, and it’s one that Generations seems almost designed to invoke; even though you and your opponent are doing the same thing, largely working with the same types of tools, playing from a losing position requires unimaginable finesse simply because aggression is that bad.

Almost all games among skilled players should end in timeouts, and all of the little things you can do to improve your odds are opaque, erudite, or completely counterintuitive. And that’s with a group call of patient players explaining the mechanics—the people you’re fighting on PSN are less likely to explain chicken-blocking, and more likely to start a loud conversation about your sexuality and parentage.

But there’s something compelling here; this sort of thing has ensnared me before, and in any other month, I can imagine losing weeks at a time to a game so interesting and so hostile. It doesn’t come from a good place; it comes from those bubbling, spiteful losses, and the desire to feel what happens on the other side.

VERDICT: REAL-ASS

11 - Fatal Fury 2 (Genesis)

Another Takara port! They seem to have a weirdly high hit rate when it comes to handheld conversions—the Game Boy King of Fighters titles are pretty unique among Game Boy fighting games by virtue of being, like, even remotely interesting to anyone at all.

I wasn’t disappointed; in an era of very shaky arcade conversions, Takara’s Fatal Fury 2 feels snappy, fun, and largely faithful to the vibe (if not the specific mechanics). It’s got a bit of a Feel™ to it; walk speeds and jumps are both pretty slow, and advancing special moves are often your best way to get around, so it’s less about precise space control and more about setting up unexpected timings.

On net, though? Solid. The game looks good, sounds great, and stages do that fun palette-switch time-of-day swap between rounds. At a core level, I can pick Terrence Bogardio and cancel into light Burn Knuckle with impunity, so I’m pretty much getting what I need out of the experience, but there are some truly evil combos lurking from deep contact; on-hit advantage is higher than it seems.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Eight-paragraph rant about unlimited desperation supers removed.]

But this is a Takara port—and so, like Toshinden GB’s double-speed “Jet Mode”, you can probably expect at least one goofy secret. A handful of button codes will enable playable bosses (don’t mind Axel’s trivial infinite), hidden DMs, a combo counter, tons of extra palettes (stolen from other characters), and a dipswitch menu.

The dipswitches aren’t labeled, just a line of 0s and 1s, so you might not realize what each one does at first—but each one we tried had us grinning wider and wider. That single magical byte can enable unblockable meaties, disable plane switching, add easy-input unrestricted supers, and even enable…unconditional free-juggle?

In a game that doesn’t even have regular juggle?

With every switch on its dumbest available setting, Fatal Fury 2 becomes the best bootleg game you’ve ever played—SNK production value, a working input parser, and such outrageous dumbfuck gameplay design you’d expect it to be titled Killing Rage 2000 Special (and break in 90% of emulators). The worms in my brain got pretty excited about this one.

Desperation moves are strong in the base game, and when they decide matches it can sometimes feel like an anticlimax. But when DMs routinely hit full-health characters at round start—and when every special move can kill as effectively as a super—they take on a different character. It feels almost cohesive, even down to the grinding friction of stun slowdown; it’s just enough added difficulty to make a particularly stylish air-to-air feel earned. Fatal Fury 2 is a fine conversion in its vanilla form, but in my opinion, these options are the real reason to boot it up.

Kim is a problem in every version of Fatal Fury, and this port is no exception. He’s got strong (and safe) advancing special moves, an extremely rewarding (and safe) DM, a (safe) multi-hit divekick that’s good for both corner chasedown and mixups…you get the idea. He’s obviously strong, and strong in a straightforward, linear way; it makes you wonder

Well, there are only 8 dipswitches in the hidden menu, 8 precious bits controlling as many gameplay behaviors as the developers could hook up. So it should say a lot that one of them is dedicated entirely to Kim’s DM; normally his multi-hit ranbu cancels on block, but with bit 1 set high, the entire sequence plays out on block—making it punishable.

They knew. It’s the first switch! They fucking knew!

Whether or not you’re using the dipswitch menu, the plane-switch button—Fatal Fury’s central gimmick—is a reliable way to waste everyone’s time. It’s the only mechanic that ever felt out of place to me; when your opponent is on a different plane, all of your normals turn off, and all your attack buttons swap you to that plane instead of doing what the fuck they’re supposed to do.

Some stages lack a second plane, and attempting a 3D MOVE—attacks that slap your opponent into the other plane—instead electrocutes the victim against a fence, or pushes them into running bulls. It’s cute stuff, a low-cost way of providing a simple gameplay switchup, and I’d leave them on solely for that—but the rest of the switches? All high, baby. Fatal Fury 2 is fun enough in its own right, despite the slow walk speeds and the occasional lame DM endgame—but Fatal Fury 2 Rainbow Edition is, somehow, a comfort game.

VERDICT: REAL

12 - Ys vs. Sora no Kiseki: Alternative Saga (PSP)

Alright, history lesson. After 2017’s Advent Calendar, the one with the GBA version of Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance on it, I put my foot down: no more handheld games. We sectioned them off into a two-week summer block, the Kusoge Vacation Calendar, and for the next Five Fucking Years, only one handheld game would appear on this event, WWE Undefeated for Android. (I guess that’s lost media now. Thanks, nWay.)

Handheld fighting games, especially older ones, are a different beast than console or arcade titles. They suffer from screen crunch and button crunch, they’re working with less powerful hardware, and the ergonomics of a handheld system aren’t as friendly to marathon sessions of technical inputs. Many of them will be designed with multiplayer as an afterthought; no dev team wants to work on underutilized features, and compared to a single extra controller, it’s hard to sell two systems, two copies of the game, and a link cable.

In 2024, the line between “handheld” and “console” has blurred, hardware horsepower matters less and less, and arcades have faded into the cultural background noise of Child Gambling; handheld design artifice has started to disappear. To me, the PSP seems like the crossing-point, the first piece of handheld hardware that didn’t ask for structural compromises; it’s got six easily-accessible action buttons, a bright widescreen LCD, two kinds of network play, and enough juice to run a Tekken game that actually looks and feels like Tekken.

Sure, there was a Viewtiful Joe: Red Hot Rumble for every Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus—but it feels meaningful that there was Guilty Gear at all. (Guilty Gear Petit doesn’t count. It’s not Guilty Gear if the music sounds like a pitch-bent vacuum cleaner.)

Anyway, with that kind of high-falutin preamble, this is the part where I tell you that Ys vs. Sora no Kiseki is a substantial and deeply rewarding game that breaks the chains of handheld restrictions, right?

…Not exactly.

Nihon Falcom has spent the last four decades producing Extremely Solid JRPGs—the Ys and Trails series have earned their legacies. At the same time, playing any of their console titles paints a picture of a company continuously teetering on the brink of complete financial ruin, pushing the scope and production values of their flagship series even if it means they can only afford to voice 1/5th of a cutscene. Not 1/5th of the game, mind—1/5th of any given cutscene, the most impactful lines of dialogue interrupting stone silence with industry-leading talent. According to at least one friend, you get used to it.

When you’re keeping your studio afloat with tight delivery timelines and tighter budgets, you simply can’t afford to use anything just once; enter Ys vs. Sora No Kiseki: Alternative Saga, a party fighter that borrows as much as it can from last year’s Ys Seven. You know—the single-player action RPG?

Alternative Saga is mechanically confounding, with lightspeed omnidirctional movement that makes runaway trivial and chasedowns impossible. The PSP’s face buttons have been allocated in kind of a telling way here; you’ve got a jump button, a dash button, a guard button, and one (1) attack button, which controls a dial-in combo or a charged attack. Charged attacks feed your SP gauge, which you can spend on four different skills; besides that resource, you’ve got a comeback super gauge and a single “support skill” per round. Supports are chosen at character-select, and there seem to be no restrictions on what they’re allowed to do—from SP regen to invisibility to thirty fucking seconds of automatic perfect guards.

Even for an ostensibly multiplayer game, Falcom seems most concerned with the RPG power fantasy. The story mode is basically just a big list of vertically scaling fights, and it hands out stats and accessories that slowly change the way your character plays; there are a few interesting lateral upgrades, but for every option that interacts with your combat decisions, there are a hundred pieces of bland stat-modifier equipment. This isn’t Sugoroku mode; Alternative Saga is relying on core systems to keep the grind interesting, and I’ll readily admit I’m not part of the target audience.

Instead, I’m here for match play—and unfortunately for me, against human adversaries, the RPG mechanics hurt the game more than help it. For starters, stat disparities are enormous; an early fight in the single-player campaign was a depressing blowout at level 4, but an automatic win at level 5. We played with maxed save files, but if you’re trying to play Alternative Saga as intended, I hope your friends like grinding for experience. Alone.

More fundamentally, character skills are designed to be fun to press, not fun to play around. With SP-regen accessories, the occasional pause-button lockdown scenario starts cropping up much more often, an exhausting game of red-light-green-light constantly interrupting the flow of play. Add a third or fourth player to the mix, and battle dynamics totally break down; sure, you can gang up on a problem player, but if that problem player can airdash worth a damn, you’ll probably beat each other to death by accident while trying to work together.

Up-close, it’s hard to understand the rules of advantage and defense. You can cancel into skills to bail out of normal strings, and the zippy dash-heavy dogfighting plays nicely there; you can combine homing and aimed dashes to flicker in and out of attack range, trying to maneuver into the right spot, but most characters are so mobile that they eliminate the concept of “midrange”. Perfect guards ostensibly give you an escape-hatch out of mindless attacking, but they’re riskier than runaway and not much more rewarding; they give you a crit buff when they connect, but since hitstun doesn’t make any sense, perfect-guard punishes are more frustrating than exciting. I know it must follow some rules, but what are they?!

I don’t think you’re meant to take this seriously—I think you’re supposed to chill out, hit the buttons, and kill some time on a bus ride or at the doctor’s office. That’s fine against AI opponents, who can be designed to fold under pressure and get hit when it “feels right”, but humans are bastards; when you’re pushing for a win, the game’s two halves chafe against each other, frictionless combat becoming thorny and abrasive. It’s great for a laugh, and in high moments, the movement can be joyful—but if you wanted to meet Alternative Saga on its own terms, to take it seriously without crushing the intended gameplay design, where would you even begin?

VERDICT: REAL-ASS

13 - Chain & Combo: Chaos Light (PC)

Rest assured, Chain & Combo has both chains and combos.

The traced art, stolen sounds, and Castlevania MIDIs all rolled off my back—after four days of MUGEN, it doesn’t even register anymore. It’s clumsy and amateur shit, and it’s worth laughing at, but it’s not why we’re here—even if you have to look at Wish.com Alex after every round with Leon in it. (Also, if you just stole everything, why even credit a composer? Were they just the one person on the team who owned a sound card?)

We’re here because, despite looking like fake video game footage rendered for a soap opera cutaway, Chain & Combo actually gives a fuck about frame advantage. They don’t do it well—infinites and death combos are everywhere, and there’s no way any of them are intended—but in this era of Windows games, a game with decent-feeling buttons and somewhat reasonable offense is a delectable little treat.

Chain & Combo is very up-front about its intent. The default jump arc can’t even go over fireballs; it’s an aggressive lunge, lower and scarier than any KOF hop, and you need to superjump for anything higher. Jump attacks are all fast, highly active, and lead to the starter of your choice, with most of them sporting bigass full-body hitboxes to back the threat. Add universal corner crossups, sprinkle in a handful of standing lows, and crank the damage up until smoke starts billowing out; the result is a compelling contender for the best offense on Windows, and even if it’s not particularly nuanced, I’ll take it over a sluggish and defensive game any day.

Most special moves cost EX meter, which regenerates slowly over time. It seems like this is meant to limit pressure extensions and high-damage conversions, and it serves as a soft comeback mechanic; since your meter still regenerates while you’re being hit, you’ll usually get up from knockdown with more resources than your opponent. In practice, hop D is scarier than almost anything you can do with your meter—and the special moves that are scarier, like Megito’s ninja-archetype air shuriken, weren’t given a meter cost!

The EX meter does manage to limit reversals, at least, and it adds some complication to combo routing; a lot of characters want to stall for time, dragging out their target combos and hitting the latest possible cancels, in hopes of regenerating a little more meter and getting one more special move loop. Not everyone cares about this (at least two characters have death combos from jabs), but it’s there, and it’s at least mildly interesting, even if it gives me cold-sweat flashbacks of Yama Raja’s cooldown-stall routing from Elsword.

Chain & Combo plays the way that it looks; it’s sticky, it’s awkward, and the finicky proximity block will often yank the controls out of your hands, requiring you to return to neutral before you’re allowed to walk again. But, to my genuine surprise, it’s technically competent; everything that makes it feel strange or shaky happened on the design level, not the implementation level, and it makes the game easy to approach. (The only major exception is the control settings menu, which is completely fucked up in ways I don’t even know how to describe.)

Chen mirrors are a sight to behold, mainly owing to his BlazBlue-ass setup super. For the low price of a single super stock, he’ll blast a gout of dragon-shaped flame into the air, which leaves the top of the screen, silently tracks your opponent for 5 seconds, and then comes down on them like a waterfall. Chen can act freely during that time, and since there’s nothing his opponent can do to interrupt the super’s second half, he’s free to go for whatever fucked up pressure sequence or corner crossup he wants, covered by the threat of a timed airstrike. It’s not as if the guy struggles on defense, either, since his 1-bar reversal is totally safe on block—and not even a low-life endgame can keep him down, since that pillar of flame can hit you in your win pose and rewrite the match result. Chain & Combo exceeds my expectations; I expected it to crash.

Chen’s probably top 1, but the power baseline is high enough that everyone seems to be pickable—even safe reversals can be blocked or baited, and once you’re dry on EX meter, everyone in the cast can abuse that vulnerability with hop mixups, strike/throw, or the rare standing overhead. Viewed through that lens, a surprising amount of Chain & Combo’s design is functioning as intended; after two decades of fighting game evolution, players getting craftier and craftier, any game that manages to stay even partially intact is worthy of some praise. Sure, it doesn’t make me feel particularly smart or nuanced—it’s a junk-food game full of stolen assets and the input systems blow—but if a game’s going to be scrappy and shitty, this might be the ideal set of ways for it to be scrappy and shitty.

I don’t think Chain & Combo holds up to long-term scrutiny at all, and if I have to hear another Castlevania MIDI I’m probably going to end up on the local news. But this goes comfortably in the category of “games to play at the local after my third drink”, and I apologize in advance.

VERDICT: REAL-ASS

14 - Lightning Legend: Daigo no Daibouken (PS1)

Picture this. 90s anime soul, cute 2D character portraits on one of the most lovingly rendered character select screens of all time, a novel story mode with a bunch of cute RPG chibi spritework, killer music, quirky single-player content, fucktons of alternate costumes and palettes, hidden cheat codes, a charming and diverse cast…

…and then Konami doesn’t just fumble the bag, but straps a rocket engine to the bag and intentionally ejects it out of a fucking satelite, committing to the same core problem we’ve seen on every goddamn year of this event—fluid animation over responsive controls. Want to do a crouching jab? Well, how would you like to watch the world’s longest stand-to-crouch animation first?

Lightning Legend has some animation cancels, sort of. Most attacks have a strange pseudo-recovery window tacked onto the end, where your character seems to be standing still and ignoring your attack inputs; you can take certain movement actions out of that state, like jumping and backdashing, but you can’t attack again. However, one of the actions you can take is a meter charge, and that meter charge is cancellable on frame 1 onto any other action—including attacking. Cue whooping and groaning from the studio audience.

Predictably, charge-cancels lead to tough pressure sequences and infinites, but Lightning Legend isn’t content with being broken in a goofy way—they also lead to situations where your attacks phase through a blocking character at point blank, as if block recovery has invincibility of some kind. This is…confusing. Pressure is chaotic enough, since every attack has exactly one correct block direction, with no special mids—no one is excited about a third outcome where your strikes don’t fucking work. (We weren’t even able to use this for surprise throws.)

With a gun to my head, I’d guess that those whiffs have something to do with Lightning Legend’s unusual autoguard system, where trying to mash out of true blockstrings causes you to take significantly more blockstun—changing the timing of block recovery. That’s speculation, though; I have a vague suspicion that the entire concept of hitstun and blockstun is fake in some more fundamental way, and that all of my attempts to explain it are like trying to climb a waterfall. We were never really able to figure it out, and it wasn’t for lack of trying; attacking slower seemed to be more reliable, but never airtight.

If it weren’t for that strange behavior on block, it would be easy to snap the game in half, because charge-canceling is easy—just hold the combination throw/taunt/charge macro button. Yes, all three functions are mapped to the same input. Meaty throws are totally inescapable, which is wonderful for the knockdown situation, and taunting drains the opponent’s meter—you’d think this is good for stopping metered guard-cancels, but you might be doing them a favor, considering that players at full meter can’t charge-cancel.

The in-game timer is pretty short, and playing for timeout is trivial. Somehow, in a game without air-blocking, holding up-back feels invincible; offensive movement just isn’t fast or flexible enough to chase disjointed air normals, and since there are no worthwhile juggle conversions, there’s a low ceiling on your damage even if you make good decisions in the chasedown. Low-health desperation supers should help (grumble grumble), but in practice, they’re not even useful in normal circumstances; there are multiple ranbu supers that won’t combo on crouchers, guaranteed to be punishable by the defender’s starter of choice.

Not even the camera is immune. Special moves occasionally cut to a dramatic off-angle, giving you a look at the animation from a new perspective—but that perspective makes it impossible to judge distance, not that you have the movement tools to do anything with that information. It’s already hard enough to block at close range, considering that almost every attack is a mid or low, with very few duckable attacks or special mids—but it’s also hard to block at range, for reasons that seem even more arbitrary.

Lightning Legend is a messy, unresponsive slog; no matter how good it looks and sounds, no matter how much heart was put into the auxillary systems, the refusal to fucking do what you tell it to do ruins the fun. Whether it’s genuine match play or lab-monster exploration, it resists your efforts to make sense of it at every turn. The secret button-hold turbo options don’t help, either—they just make the mix faster.

I don’t want to handwave this entire section with “PSX game bad”, but, like…PSX game bad. Konami gave me a pink-haired tomboy brawler Kick Girl with toku intro poses, a walkjab infinite, a fire divekick, and a Burn Knuckle that hits overhead.

OVERHEAD BURN KNUCKLE.

Any one of those things is enough to get my attention, but even with all of them in play simultaneously, every match was like pulling teeth. Abbock nailed it during the stream: if Lightning Legend has cultural impact beyond YouTube ryona compilations, I’ll be shocked. (They’ve even got the swimsuit alternate costumes for it.)

It should come as no surprise that I’m really trying to like this; if I knew a damn thing about reverse-engineering or ROM hacking, I might have even tried to turn it into something worth liking. But there’s so little here, no identifiable gameplay ethos or design intent; every combat mechanic feels incidental, programmed into the game without ever serving a distinct purpose. Why even modify the existing game? Just rip the assets and start over.

VERDICT: ASS

15 - Naruto Shippuuden Gekkitou Ninja Taisen EX (Wii)

…Can we do another Naruto game this year? Does the union allow that?

We like Gekkitou Ninja Taisen (Clash of Ninja outside of Japan). GNT4 is one of the earliest games that appeared on the Advent Calendar, and when it comes to the mechanical demands of a Naruto fighting game, it seems like a pretty noteworthy success, a clear vision benefiting from three sequels’ worth of refinement.

Compare Naruto to something like Dragon Ball, where the entire cast’s signature moves can mostly be compressed into the two categories of “big beam” and “big punch”—both sensible fits for a fighting game, with plenty of established gameplay abstractions. Naruto has, like, sand clones and weird dogs and whatever the fuck Minato is doing. You want a Naruto game to feel like Naruto, sure, but you also want the gameplay to, uh, make sense.

Eighting—because of course it’s Eighting—found a pretty good answer. Gekkitou Ninja Taisen is happy to let you have your character-specific gimmicks—but they all run through the Chakra meter, and Chakra is a precious resource.

Substitution gets you out of nearly any combo or pressure situation, provided your opponent doesn’t blind-read your timing, but “Y-cancelling” can turn any hit into big idiot damage, or an outright infinite—and they both need Chakra gauge. Push too far on offense or slip up in neutral, and the next opening is going to hurt—no matter where your character is on the canon powerscaler charts.

The result is pretty close to ideal; everyone gets to keep their canon gimmicks, all tuned up to be strong and impactful, but moment-to-moment gameplay spends more time in the core systems, midrange games of sidestep weaving and kunai chicken sandwiched between the ebb-and-flow of stagger pressure. It’s got an admirable character to it, despite the grody backturn situations and occasionally sticky movement—there’s a lot to like, and the GNT community has been happily indulging for a long time.

In the wake of all that, Gekkitou Ninja Taisen EX, the series’ debut on the Wii, is a strange case. After four games of refinements, EX seems to methodically un-solve every solved problem, as if every mechanical tweak and carefully considered edge case vanished overnight. It’s a dramatic and confusing step backward, regressing in almost every area that can be named.

It also released one week after Naruto: Shippuden started airing.

…I guess that makes sense.

I don’t feel good about this. It seems obvious that EX had some troubled production, whether that was timeline or scope or licensing fuckery, possibly all three. And EX isn’t shovelware, either; I can only assume that Eighting has a literal warlock on payroll, because no matter the fucked-up timeline, they reliably produce games with all the charm and button-feel and superficial polish required to move discs. But the limitations are there, and they’re not all mechanical minutiae; the cast is small, the story mode is smaller, and the new mechanics are awkward, small-scope additions.

Like, sure, I guess you can do stage obstacles. Throw a tree stump onto the stage, then add some contextual actions for when you’re close to it, vaulting and landing and circle-stepping—but what gameplay function does this actually serve, besides unexpectedly changing your constrols? Obstacles just enable a goofy game of grab-ass where someone flash-steps in a circle, and that’s when they’re at their best—most of the time, they don’t do anything at all.

Stage transitions are the same deal, offering wall or floor-breaks that trigger a short cutscene and some input-matching rock-paper-scissors; they break gameplay flow for spectacle, and the spectacle gets old fast. Those two features are basically the only “new” mechanics; it’s trivial to disable both of them with Gecko codes, and doing so changes almost nothing.

So what’s the appeal for a casual player? The new story mode is mostly outnumbered team-battles, which showcase the game’s systems at their worst; the framerate struggles, the relative movement is unreliable, and gameplay constantly stutters to a halt with cutscenes and super cut-ins. (Apparently prior games used lower-detail character models in free-for-all and teams, but in EX, it’s just another missing feature; the Wii may have been the next generation at the time, but it could have used the help.)

Even singles play is dominated by clones and summons; they’re stronger than prior games, with frequent attacks and proactive movement, but they’re also stronger by circumstance, offering low-risk pressure in an environment where direct offense is often impossible. Sidesteps are as strong as they’ve ever been, but blockstun is a character-specific privilege, leaving most of the cast helpless versus lateral movement: better to stay out of the way.

Counterhits now cause an extended launch state, popping the opponent into the air, but most strings don’t seem to have been designed with that in mind; many of them combo on normal hit, but bobble the opponent out on counterhit. This is confusing, sure—you’d expect counterhits to be more rewarding, not less—but GNT EX one-ups itself here; “counterhit” means “the defender was in any kind of attack animation”. If your string fails to combo on counterhit, it fails to combo as a punish, too. Remember, this is a game with only one normal attack button—if your AAA string can’t be used as a punish, what the fuck are you supposed to do?

EX superficially looks like GNT, but all of the systems that make GNT function are twisted and warped, invisibly incorrect; everything that decides games is mindless, boring, and most of all, annoying. This section is already starting to read like a Wikipedia article, so I’ll speed you through the other mechanical failings—super-button throw tech OS, looping un-subbable OTGs, the entire character of Temari, ranbu supers that don’t combo on normal hit, point-blank projectiles being unblockable because they spawn in your back, on and on and on. Progressing the game state feels like dental work.

When I asked Abbock and Rockforge to do this backwards—to list all the systems in the game that weren’t fucked up—there were about 45 seconds of thoughtful silence.

“…Dashing.”

VERDICT: ASS

16 - Battle Monsters (Saturn)

…Wait, this is the prequel to Killing Zone? Scarab, what the fuck?

Regardless of your fighting game background, Battle Monsters presents a pretty steep hurdle right away: the Visuals, capital V. In my opinion, this game is comfortably in the running for “worst usage of the Saturn graphics hardware”—the bouncy camera and super-high moonjumps constantly show off the awful sprite scaling, grody and grainy in a way that I haven’t really seen before. The fact that it’s being applied to heavily compressed digitized actors doesn’t help, either.

Once you tear your eyes away, you might notice the mana meter, which…I mean, I dunno. I don’t want to blindly assign creative intentions that aren’t there, sometimes the art is just weird, but this has a decent chance of being a prank, right? It’s ostensibly a super meter, “MANA OK” flashes when the bar is full, but we couldn’t find any concrete information on what gains or loses meter—only that it happens a lot, even with players sitting idle at midscreen. Rockforge thinks taunting does something sometimes. I think it’s completely random.

Now, the Saturn has a 6-button controller, a famously good fit for fighting games (and a style I wish had survived into the modern age)—so, of course, Battle Monsters has two attack buttons. X, Y, and Z are all mapped to “JUMP” (which is different from jumping), and a nearby bottom-row button is dedicated to taunting. Awesome. It’s Fighting Masters all over again.

“JUMP” is a partially invulnerable leap; maybe it’s easier to think of it as a homing dash to the closest platform. Stages have destructible pillars, upper catwalks, crumbling scaffolding, moving clouds, and pits, of both the “instant death” and “screen wrap” variety. Hell, there’s even a tiny stage that rethemes these as ringouts, forcing you to hold your ground on a high platform or tumble into the maw of a carnivorous plant—or, uh, get teleported into that maw when you land too far away.

It’s ambitious, and that’s cool—but even if you fuck with the vision, it’s hard to call it well-executed. The most important aspect of JUMPing is the invulnerability; it’s just a visually exciting way to slide out of bad positions, and there’s not much an attacker can do to chase it down. Worse, it’s clearly a struggle to render this much stage at all; when the camera zooms out, the game slows down, giving the framerate a lurching, stop-and-start quality. It was a rough time for both my execution and my motion sensitivity; whatever the fuck this team is doing to the Saturn, the Saturn is having none of it, and neither is my stomach.

Still, in Battle Monsters’ brightest moments, you can see the idea; pick a few characters with good fireballs, lower your expectations, and you might find yourself momentarily swept up in the rhythm of combat, chucking plasma and leaping from place to place as the stage crumbles around you, alternating between ranged dogfights and close-range lockdown. The L and R bumpers are mapped to dashing, and even the slowest dashes are very fast, so it’s clear that movement is supposed to be the game’s primary focus—but in practice, success is usually determined by how fucked up your offense is.

See, those platforms come with some…Implementation Scruples. When standing on a higher platform, you might be able to hit a player with a crouching kick at head height, and it doesn’t make much intuitive sense for the attack to hit low. Enter Location-Based Attack Properties; if a move hits your head, it’s an overhead, if it hits your feet it’s a low, and if it hits your back, you bet your ass it crosses up. Street Fighter Alpha has low-hitting crouching punches, and we thought that was fucked up on offense. Now imagine crouching punches that you can turn into overheads.

Somewhat predictably, this system makes defense pretty tough, especially at close range: a meaty strike or angled fireball can be a self-contained mixup, capable of hitting on either side and at either height. The designers were at least somewhat aware of this, and programmed some attacks with fixed properties, ignoring their hit location—and this is how we got Makaryudo’s divine can-opener, the game’s only overhead command throw. God, I love that sentence.

(All other throws are blockable mids. I have no idea what function they’re supposed to serve or how they’re supposed to connect, but Ed Boon’s probably happy with it.)

La Fa is one of those characters given to me directly by God, with a downward-angled fireball that’s mysteriously missing its projectile limit; if you can tiger-knee worth a damn, you can run mindless, fucked-up pressure while your character screams her head off, enjoying the pleasing input-rhythm and doing absolutely nothing to respond to your opponent. Given even mild motivation and a few hours of prep, I think a 10-year-old could play her at a tournament level, and that owns.

Somehow, as I played longer and longer, the stomach-flipping revulsion of the camera and scaling and variable speed started to slowly fade away. Parsec troubles cut the stream short, but if Cox had cooperated with me a little more, I think I could probably have played some more of this. If I have access to decent movement and big buttons, I’m willing to forgive many sins—especially if those big buttons lead to death combos that feel like like highway accidents.

They’re not complex combos! Most of the game’s most rewarding punishes are just “launcher into launcher, repeat”, and it makes you wonder what the fuck Scarab was up to; the game clearly has juggle limits, they’re obvious enough when they trigger, so why didn’t you put them on the combo starters? My best guess: between the inconsistent game speed and the strange, sticky input-recognition on command normals, nobody could actually get a launcher to come out more than twice in a row. Can’t blame ‘em.

Now take all of that, all of this hazy and messy nonsense, and cover it in a thick layer of stock vocal sounds, stuff I recognized from Dance Dance Revolution and Groove on Fight and the Super Mario 64 beta footage. I don’t think characters have a single original voice line, and even the JP announcer went missing in the US release—but wherever Makaryudo’s win scream comes from, it’s thankfully intact, and it’s the single funniest intentional noise in any game this year.

I feel like this is really, really close to being a particular kind of kuso kino; if it was less physically disorienting, I’d think of it more fondly. Even the digitized actors are kind of adorable—like, those guys are in Spirit Halloween costumes. It feels fitting for a game about a handful of movie monsters. The final boss is a special four-round bout, four palette-swaps of the same character, and I’ll probably be thinking about it for a while; regardless of the end result, in spite of the team’s slim resources, Battle Monsters is at least trying to do something.

Sure wish it didn’t make me want to vomit sometimes.

VERDICT: ASS

17 - Yu Yu Hakusho 2 - Kakutou no Syo (SNES)

This is a game about proximity throws.

I mean, ostensibly it’s a game about Yu Yu Hakusho, but like almost all licensed games on the Advent Calendar, I’m the wrong person to tell you about that. I’m a secondary, with three fighting games and zero episodes of experience; my primary takeaway so far is “stay the hell away from Toguro”.

YuYu2 follows a pretty simple four-button formula, with some strange ideas about frame advantage. Nothing is outright unsafe on hit, as far as I could tell, but despite rapid-fire light normals and functional special-canceling, there are almost no grounded combos.

Within this kind of system, any physical contact is likely to lead to some frantic mashing—and despite the goofy animations, it’s fun to mash, with fast walk speeds and good hit feedback. That’s why it might take you a few rounds of scrapping to realize that YuYu2 has 0-frame proximity throws—and the range varies wildly by character.

Throws, as you might expect, convert to advantage—and this makes them the foundation of almost all damage and offense in the entire game, with other force-knockdown moves in a similar state. If your character has a short-range throw or a bad throw OS, you’re probably going to suffer. If you’re Toguro, with spectacular throw range and the ability to fake-corner someone afterward, you’ll probably do okay for yourself; versus the handful of normal moves that are worth attempting to whiff-punish, walk-in throw might be your bread and butter!

Like its successor, Yu Yu Hakusho Final, YuYu2 has a bit of a weird stun system. The stun gauge builds quickly and drains slowly, clearly meant to create a feeling of rising tension. But, like…what are you supposed to do when you stun? Most characters can barely link jump normals to ground normals!

Maybe you’re supposed to punish stun with supers, but they’re low-life only, with incredibly precise inputs (and that’s not just my useless hands, Rockforge couldn’t do them either). The most dramatic stun punish is usually just a jumping normal into a grounded normal—and even that’s not guaranteed. Sometimes, it’s better to take a jump-in to throw their landing!

If movement is a fighting game’s beating heart, the system that keeps all the other parts moving, then advantage is the lungs. Advantage is a rhythm atop the rhythm, the tension between players expanding and receding with each incursion into the other’s territory. That motion drives all the moments we remember, the ten-second staredowns and once-in-a-lifetime parries; it’s what takes a round of combat from a contest to a story.

YuYu2’s lungs are fucked up.

I feel like I should have more to say about this game—it’s fun, I played it for hours! But it’s a narrow sort of fun, one that almost seems accidental; these lungs were not designed by a benevolent creator, but evolved via natural selection. There’s four of them, and they each have six chambers, and they’re all coated in mango vape.

Put another way, I don’t think there’s anything Intentional or Designed about the airtech situation, or Jin’s canned-mixup rush punch, or fully invulnerable safe-on-block DPs—they were allowed to happen, but not intended to happen. There’s just no way anyone would animate all these goddamn moves, no matter how half they assed it, only for 95% of them to be worse than throws and reversals 95% of the time. YuYu2 should be a fireworks-show of a game, each character carving out huge areas of the screen with their unique special moves and varied proportions (why is Chu’s jab so big???)—but it’s not. It’s a handful of scary, impactful decisions sandwiched between periods of furious mashing.

I like games that aren’t afraid to strip themselves down; I think removing unnecessary distractions can make you feel closer to your opponent, skip you to that “meeting of minds” nirvana that it sometimes takes years to reach. But in YuYu2’s case, what that means to you is going to vary a lot; this game doesn’t inspire thought, it simply permits it, and only barely.

This is a deeply, deeply broken game. Depending on your mindset, what remains of the pieces might be pretty entertaining, but it will never not feel broken.

VERDICT: REAL-ASS

18 - DragonBlast SE (PC)

This marathon sometimes gives me a magical sort of Christmas gift, where I boot up the game and immediately grind three hours of match play with no caveats or complaints whatsoever. So it goes with DragonBlast SE, crystallized gay furry kino abandonware.

You’ve got your light button, you’ve got your heavy button, you’ve got your Universal System Button for throws and tag and an SF4-like focus attack—and you’ve got some of the most delicious, explosive hit effects in the genre, utterly beyond over-the-top. To the layman, DragonBlast might be nearly unwatchable—but strap into the driver’s seat, and every single visual system dispenses pure endorphins.

DragonBlast’s most impactful system is “Judgement”, a set of universal rock-paper-scissors rules about attack properties; beat a technique with its matching counter, and it triggers a unique slowdown counterhit, steals a huge chunk of meter, and does one fuckmillion damage. The tutorial, translated poorly into English, still manages to be exceptionally clear about this: “Judgement is more important than combo.”

Accordingly, combo scaling is highly aggressive past the first few hits. Sure, DragonBlast has some longer combos, but if your combo theory ends at “normal into special”, you’re not missing out on all that much. This feels right to me, especially for a game with optional easy-input specials—though the special-macro button seems to have some kind of simulated startup, to prevent mashing invincible moves in pressure gaps. (Motions are standardized anyway; everyone’s got two quarter-circles and a DP.)

Every special also has an EX version, and most characters get exactly one of each EX special per round, a resource that stands apart from your super meter. Accordingly, they’re fucked up strong, and you can cancel into them from anything—including other EX moves. Hang onto that information for a second.

DragonBlast SE follows Tekken Tag rules; it’s a 2v2 game, and a single dead character is a round loss, so tagging out low-health characters is vital. It’s easy to keep an eye on your health, since dropping to low HP triggers an invincible “Awakening”, pushing opponents back and activating some temporary buffs. You can also trigger it manually, for the price of your entire super gauge—and I think that deal might be better than it looks, since the automatic Awakening can be dodged and whiff-punished!

But if you’re like me, you have a better meter-dump in mind. There are two ways to tag; 2C is slow and vulnerable, but if you’re willing to dump your full meter, 3C is a fast and fully invulnerable tag—and if it hits, the tagged character is allowed unlimited EX moves in the follow-up combo, chaining back and forth between their most fucked up options. You can use this to extend pressure or find big conversions off stray hits, but you can also do it raw; doing it raw leaves both characters on screen, and both of them have unlimited EX moves!

These moments are, to put it mildly, sick as hell. Raw 3C gives you access to DragonBlast’s longest and most damaging combos, confounding double-input loops that look like the MMA equivalent of a drive-by shooting, but they’re costly and difficult to access; not only do you need to land a predictable attack at full meter, when your opponent will be watching for it, but a single Judgement counter will drain your meter and seal the option away.

And hey, that’s all assuming you even decide to tag—what if you keep your bleeding character in? If you haven’t landed a hit recently, you slowly build up a damage boost on your next combo starter, and it stacks with Judgement; the results aren’t flashy (well, not for DragonBlast), but they’ll erase your opponent’s lifebar all the same.

It is completely fucking impossible to ignore how gay and furry DragonBlast is. There are a grand total of two humans in the cast; Takuto, who we affectionately nicknamed “John Dragonblast”, is notable for having a recharging EX rekka, and Shino, the only woman in the cast, is notable for being complete garbage. It’s like you took the best parts of a can-opener setup character and the best parts of a zoner, then threw them into the garbage and made a character out of what’s left; she takes enormous risks on offense for mediocre damage, and her midscreen presence isn’t even good.

Compare this to not one, but two giant bara grapplers, both of whom sport stellar up-close pressure, workhorse big-body midscreen buttons, and plenty of ways to scam their way in and abuse Judgement. I would call this a clear statement of developer intent.

DragonBlast is a weird doujin title. The “weird” part is self-evident, but the “doujin” part might be less obvious; it seems to be a solo effort, hailing from a bygone Comiket, and you have to use Cheat Engine to unshackle the demo, since it doesn’t seem to be purchasable anymore. But despite its origins, DragonBlast has a decent training mode, a color edit menu (rare for 3D games!), and an entire alternate 4-player party mode that plays like Super Smash Bros. coin battles. This is a ridiculous amount of what seems to be solo developer give-a-shit; the fact that DragonBlast has these features but only has one music track is deeply funny to me.

Maybe this opinion is obvious by now, but you should play DragonBlast. Seriously, hit the wiki to grab that Cheat Engine table; it’s delay-based doujin netplay, so Parsec may or may not be a better bet, but it might be worthwhile for button-feel alone, even if you don’t have anyone nearby to play with.

I’m sure there’s some stupid shit lurking in this game if you take it seriously; Dragonblast is at once linear and unhinged, the perfect environment for small tuning choices to manifest as gigantic gameplay walls. I don’t think I care. We’re all collectively better at fighting games than we’ve ever been, at each others’ throats in search of rank points and colored squares, breaking down differences of frames; there’s a satisfaction to that feedback-loop, the constant cycle of observation and optimization, but man. I feel no compulsion to analyze or critique DragonBlast’s balance. I am here to hit cool buttons, watch cool hitsparks, and wire my brain into this weird-ass resource-management system. Don’t talk to me about numbers. I am here for the experience of play.

(Okay, if you put a gun to my head, I might ask for Shino buffs. But it would feel sort of homophobic.)

VERDICT: REAL

19 - Battle Arena Toshinden 3 (PS1)

Hey, uh…what the fuck is Takara doing? What is Battle Arena Toshinden even supposed to be?

Before Toshinden 3, all of my Toshinden experience came from the Game Boy port of Toshinden 1. That probably seems like a pretty cursed starting point, but it’s not straightforwardly ass; it’s ass in a more complex and robust way. GB Toshinden is a cute little rebuild of a game with neat ideas and unmistakable heart—which unfortunately happens to run at 15FPS with input latency measurable on a geological scale. I don’t think this data generalizes into trends about a developer or a publisher, it’s just…a weird thing that someone made. (And a worrying number of stream viewers seem to think it’s the best game in the series.)

When opening Toshinden 3 for the first time, it’s easy to buy into that idea of “one-off weird thing”. The camera is a total mess, and since it’s a back-to-block game, it’s constantly wedging you into deranged camera-unblockables. The input parser really wants to help give you special moves, regularly producing them even after you’ve been walking for a full second, but the normal-input buffer doesn’t seem to know about command normals at all, apparently requiring a timed directional input to go with your buffered button. And in general, Toshinden 3 really likes making you watch 100% of every animation—giving it that wooden, almost turn-based quality that you hear me yell about every goddamn year.

But more than anything, Toshinden 3 has some strange ideas about frame advantage. Even if a string consistently combos (not a given), and even if it stays on-axis long enough to fully connect (also not a given), there’s no guarantee it won’t leave you punishable on hit. Normally, I think of this as a pretty ridiculous thing to design in a traditional fighting game; it relegates entire moves to an incredibly narrow niche, “only use this if it kills”. But Toshinden 3 has at least half an excuse; bombs, limited-use attacks intended as fast interrupts, are worlds faster than almost all standard offense. The best of them are 1-frame attacks that shred 40% of a lifebar—and as a class of move, they’re probably Toshinden 3’s most interesting idea.

Bomb stocks are per-game, not per-round, and fighting through a bomb disadvantage is tough—after all, half your standard offense might instantly lose to them. It produces a strange sort of tension, where both players have the ability to immediately blow up the game state, but rarely opt to use it; when you’re wedged in a corner waiting for the 3-frame overhead, you don’t want to be dry on defenses.

You can also use bombs in the air, so you might guess that Intended Play involves a nonzero amount of air combat. Indeed, Toshinden 3’s got those familiar PSX moonjumps, high and slow but tough to anti-air; you’re given plenty of time to interact with the strange progressive-gravity mechanics, forcing juggled characters to fall faster and faster each time they bounce off a wall. Some characters get their best damage off double-DP ceiling-bounce combos; some of them get it off backturned air bombs, repeatedly slamming their opponent up and down between ceiling and active hitbox. This is novel and exciting stuff, exactly the kind of goofy ambition that you might expect, and I think Toshinden 3 is at its best in these areas, even if the controls produce a lot of garbage time.

Unfortunately, Toshinden 3’s best characters are often defined entirely by grounded infinites, something the game has no tools to handle; in fact, there’s not even corner pushback, so several jab strings that are merely midscreen links become corner infinites, where bombs are useless. You’re fighting the input interpreter every step of the way, and sometimes even fighting the camera, since wall-slides can push the camera off-axis and into a side-switch—but a failed infinite is still more damage than the “fun” stuff, and it keeps you on the ground, where Toshinden 3 is the least interesting.

Sidesteps are slow, but mostly invincible, letting you slip out of bad positions or mindless pressure. That’s probably a good thing on net, but strong sidesteps, poor tracking, and buffered strings are a scary combination. At its worst, Toshinden 3 is visibly falling apart, systems operating in their own isolated boxes without ever communicating—you submit your inputs, pray, then watch the game use them as a creative writing prompt. It’s hard to stay invested in a game that’s so difficult to predict or control.

There’s cool stuff here! There are tons of camera settings, a toggle that doubles the framerate by simplifying the stages, a massive cast full of cool designs (even if many of them share chunks of moveset), and a solid soundtrack with that cheeseball ROMpler vibe—I’m a sucker for that stuff. But the input systems are just…offensive. After nearly six hours of break-in, I still couldn’t make it any further than “I wish this was good”, no matter how hard the music slaps.

…And I didn’t even mention how the US version of Toshinden 3 turned every low attack into a special mid.

VERDICT: ASS

20 - Kunio no Nekketsu School Fighters (Genesis)

I think I might love Hamoopig. Fighting game creation toolkits are a gift to the world—what would the Advent Calendar be without MUGEN or UFE?—but a fighting game toolkit for the Genesis? Hell yeah. Bring that entry barrier down to zero. Bring weird bootlegs to the masses, whether they’re FIGHT GAME II 3000-level clusterfucks or not.

Kunio no Nekketsu School Fighters is comfortably in the “not” camp. It’s not just competent, it’s charming; that’s in part from the visuals, borrowing its character sprites from WayForward’s River City Girls, but also in part from the bigass scary hop normals that shape almost all midrange interactions. That’s right—it’s KOF! Maybe that should go on the bingo card for next year.

No need to stop there, though; School Fighters has KOF DNA, sure, but it’s also got its own set of strange mechanical scruples. An investigative player will probably discover the throw system first, because…there isn’t one. That’s a weird omission, but apparently throws are tricky to implement, so School Fighters covers its ass and saves some effort; hop mixups are potent, and blocked special moves absolutely shred lifebars, so blocking for any longer than you have to is usually a bad idea.

Metered guard-cancels are almost always in play, so it’s easy to get out if you’re willing to commit—but they’re performed with the fucking taunt button, so trying to blow up fast buttons on reaction can end really badly. This rocks.

Also, while I was thinking about how to bait guard-cancels, Sleepmode hit me with a one-move relaunch infinite.

So that’s it, right? Solid music, pretty spritework, fun character designs, and goldilocks-level kusoge, the perfect combination of strong offense and fucked-up evil labwork for a single play session. Good episode, y’all, see you tomorrow!

Just kidding. It’s my emerging favorite class of bug—the Unblockable Air Reset Situation.

You can’t block meaties while landing, whether it’s from an air reset or a jump; besides creating the worst trip-guard situation on earth, this also gives every character inescapable touch-of-death sequences from any juggled normal. This makes the game more balanced—you don’t need a good 2C whiff-cancel to kill people anymore—but whether it’s better designed is, uh, possibly sort of up in the air.

What remains is a lot of funny hop dogfighting, where you live or die by your best air normals and your best whiff-punish tools—and, rarely, how advantaged you are if you miss your best air-reset meaty. In the span of one session, we went from “rolls seem bad” to “rolls seem good” to “rolls seem bad”, a break in your rhythm that gives your opponent free rein to chase you down; in an environment like that, where nothing but winning the dogfight matters, guard-cancels feel even more important, both a defensive panic-button and a means to advance your screen position.

I don’t have much to say about this one, honestly. That’s not because it’s boring—if School Fighters had quick-rematch, I’d have probably played it for a few more hours. It’s not even because it’s same-y; sure, it’s a pretty linear game when you’re abusing air resets, but if want a break from “performing combos” or “playing neutral”, Misuzu’s always right there, shredding your lifebar with comedy rushdown and turning every round into several nested “which way was that” situations. If I have a single unambiguous complaint, it’s the fact that guard-cancels can kill; since they’re so inexpensive, playing from life disadvantage can be pretty rough.

School Fighters is just…cool. It’s got a handful of oversights that narrow the design space, sure, but even if the impact is huge, the mistakes are small, and I have no desire to be mean about it.

I hope that UsagiRu keeps iterating on this for as long as they desire, sculpting a game that rewards the things they want to reward and celebrates the things they want to celebrate. I’m curious about what that might look like in the end—but if this is the last build we ever get, I’m still glad to have gone for the ride.

VERDICT: REAL-ASS

21 - Smash Remix (N64)

This one is definitely cheating.

Super Smash Bros. (N64) might be my favorite game. Maybe it seems weird to cling to The First One, but I think it captures something that the later games don’t: committal, comprehensible movement. Every jump and drift and dash feels immediate, with very little barrier between you and the motion, but it has huge, clear consequences; push-and-pull isn’t defined by timing windows, landing lag and jumpsquat and shield advantage, but almost entirely by the space you choose to take up on the screen. It’s a narrower playspace than Melee, a slower system with fewer options, but I don’t think it’s in dire need of added depth—the movement, simple and joyful and immensely powerful, is enough.

I’ll admit I have a sentimental attachment, though. Smash 64 was my first introduction to tournament play, and the simplicity of its systems made it look all the more impressive; people took these characters, these Nintendo-branded bundles of 15-ish attacks, and turned them into acrobats, fighter-jets, surgical implements.

I never struggled to understand what they were doing, only how: it felt natural to pursue it for myself. It felt natural to play on Kaillera, to attend tournaments, to buy a new-in-box Hori controller that one of my roommates later stole—all because of one video, occupying a permanent spot on my iPod Nano, and access to really, really bad N64 emulation.

So I approached Smash Remix, a far-reaching ROM hack, with some predictable hesitation. I think anyone who’s been really, really attached to a game can relate to this feeling—the fear that a second round of attention could leave the game feeling lesser somehow, that new additions might narrow the playspace or take away from what you feel is the central appeal. And Remix is one of those terrifying, far-reaching hacks, crammed with everything from interface tweaks to massive mechanical additions—and that’s before you get to its characters.

I’m done burying the lede: Smash Remix is the definitive version of this game, and every living human should play it with a friend at least once.

For 64, mods and competition have gone hand-in-hand for a while. Over the years, the legal stagelist has drained away (Saffron’s unfair to Ness, Sector Z’s way too huge, Kongo and Yoshi’s are circle-camping fuckfests), and players have used GameShark codes to access the single-player event stages, the layouts we now know as Battlefield and Final Destination. Doubles play can’t maintain 60FPS unless you overclock your console, and until relatively recently, most events had a “stalling” rule on the books; without access to an Everdrive and ROM hacks, there’s no timer in stock modes, leaving organizers to adjudicate based on vibes or kitchen timers. (The competitive community even allows keyboard adapters and other digital controllers—but no tilt mods, come as you are!)

The Remix team obviously understands the position they’re in; on default settings, basically all of its features are turned off. The vanilla cast hasn’t been changed at all, not even “common-sense” tweaks to long-time low-tiers; you can boot Smash Remix and play Pikachu vs. Falcon on Dreamland exactly as you would on vanilla, just with a combo counter and music byline and a quick-rematch option.

That’s some thoughtful restraint, a deeply felt consideration for tournament players—because the Remix content is top-notch, the sort of thing that it should be very easy to be confident in. Its new stages offer a ton of fun and visually exciting new layouts, all the music tracks are excellent arrangements, the gameplay modifiers are all well-polished despite their goofy premises, and there’s even special attention paid to single-player, with new endings and modes and character-bios. Best of all, the Remix characters feel akin to the vanilla cast’s most compelling members; they’re built with that same formula, simple moves with subtle nuance, the same feeling and “flow” that made 64 so easy to pick up in the first place.

Instead of buffing Link and Samus, Remix gave us Young Link and Dark Samus, which absolutely tickles me; it feels like an obvious compromise, a way to bring those playstyles and kits up in power level without having to modify the original 12. But it also fills in tons of missing archetypes, grapplers and swordies and proper heavyweight bruisers—eighteen characters I’m happy to spike at 50% using the same moveset I’ve piloted for a decade.

That’s worth examining. When I boot up Smash Remix, outside of some guffawing at Marth and Sheik being almost as fucked up as their Melee incarnations, I’m largely doing the same things I did in vanilla. I fish for pivot Bair, I kill people off Falcon’s preposterous throw, and I occasionally hit a unicorn drill-Rest and scream like Oprah just gave me a car. Sure, I appreciate the new matchups to learn and new stages to navigate, and man, that gimmick with the Pokemon Stadium announcer is such a cute flourish. But Smash Remix isn’t for me, not directly, because I already loved this game as much as a mortal can love anything.

I think Remix is for the people I’m playing against: the people who had no inclination to ever touch my favorite game, but got coaxed in with a new favorite character, or wanted to turn down the hitstun values, or needed C-stick aerials to feel at home. It’s more friendly, more appealing, more complete as a package—and none of its new additions really ask me to do anything differently. If it gets more of my friends into my favorite game, I have nothing to complain about; if they can feel the sorts of things I feel, even for fleeting moments, Smash Remix is doing immense good.

https://smash64.online

VERDICT: THE REALEST IT EVER WAS

22 - Rakugaki Showtime (PS1)

Rakugaki Showtime is the first game of the month that forced me to ask “is this a fighting game?”

…Well? Is it? It might be fair to call Rakugaki Showtime a dodgeball game, but is “dodgeball” a first-order genre on the same level as “fighting”? Are they mutually exclusive? If you’re four-player scrapping with gravity fields, nuclear missiles, and a pinch of Proton Cannon, does it still count as “dodgeball” because there is a ball that you hit people with? Does it still count as “fighting” because it has lifebars and strike/throw?

Treasure (of course this is a Treasure game) seems uninterested in answering that question. Or any others you might have, like “what the fuck am I looking at” or “what settings make this make sense”. Also, Marina Fucking Mischiefmakers is here, and her presence was apparently enough to trigger legal action, getting Rakugaki Showtime pulled from store shelves almost immediately after release. You’re 23 games into the list, I could type anything I wanted this far down and you probably wouldn’t notice, but I swear this is real.

So instead of pinning down a genre (party game?), let’s get object-level. Rakugaki Showtime’s got character-specific attacks, perfect guards, and something like a “homing dash”—but its gameplay verb is “throw”, and it wants you to know it. Get your mitts on the bright yellow smiley face that passes for a ball, then chuck it at the other guy’s head, or lob it in a slower arc for a timing mixup. If something’s flying at you, block it, reflect it with a perfect guard, or get out of the way. You’ll figure it out.

Walk speeds are pretty middling, but you’ve got a bigass arcing dash, which you can aim at your opponents to get close from anywhere on-screen—though the speed is very character-dependent. You can also aim for an item-spawn point, special locations that periodically cough up mystery-boxes full of distractions; five of the six possible distractions are different varieties of thrown explosive, all of which cover the screen in flashing no-fly zones, and the remaining item is a rock. I think this speaks for itself.

Rakugaki Showtime has a pretty wild cast. You’d expect a…sports game?…to keep a lot of its power in universal systems, and it does, but when supers come into play, all bets are off. As the ball makes contact with players, it charges up, eventually flashing rainbow with a delicious stock hallelujah.wav. The next player to pick it up won’t throw it—instead, you can pick one of three Stupid Fucking Bullshit Moves, all of which either kill someone instantly or turn the gamestate into Mario Party.

Rakugaki Showtime seems like it’s meant more as a four-player fuckfest than a straightforward competition, at least if the single-player mode is any indication—it’s almost all horde fights. I think there’s something interesting here, something like a more developed Lethal League, but that description itself points towards the strange place this game finds itself in; it’s too weird and loud to be truly pick-up-and-play, but a lot of the depth is pretty abstract.

There are very few systems directly guiding player behavior; Rakugaki Showtime’s most consistent feedback teaches you to Throw The Fucking Ball, sure, but you’re left on your own to find the rest of the game. We struggled with that process, and the result was mostly just a loud, overstimulating mashfest—but we were also trying to play it in a very specific and very strange way, so it’s hard to pin that on the game itself.

I dunno. I think this thing is cool, but it might not be for me; I don’t have the eyes, brain, or stomach to play it for long sessions, or even medium sessions. Its presentation is totally overwhelming, on both a visual and audio level, and the selectable game speeds hit that exact point where “Normal” is slightly too slow, but “Fast” is like being tied to a rollercoaster by your braces. PSX texture-warping doesn’t play nice with the low, fast-moving camera, and the game seems to struggle when trying to render more than one character holding a single item. It’s a mess, and the brightly-colored outlines don’t help much—though I have to admit they’re a nice visual flourish.

Jury’s out, though. Now that there are DuckStation netplay builds with multitap support, 4-player sessions are on the table; if it’s gonna be loud and fucked up anyway, may as well go all the way, right?

VERDICT: REAL-ASS

23 - Touhou Hyouibana - Antinomy of Common Flowers (PC)

I never really see anyone talk about the later Touhou fighters. Are they just too weird? I lost my grip on fighting game “normal” a long time ago—I genuinely don’t know. Like, this came out on Switch! Is it just the netcode?

History lesson (yes, another one): Antinomy of Common Flowers is a direct follow-up from Hopeless Masquerade and Urban Legend in Limbo, sharing many of the same sprites and systems. You’ve got one button for attacks (with a proximity throw), one button for bullets, and one button for Gimmicks: dashing goes through bullets, but gets hit by strikes. There’s an obvious set of incentives at every range, and the Spirit meter—regulating both bullets and movement—gives these games an easy-to-grok flow of advantage, something vaguely reminiscent of Eighting’s best Naruto games.

However, all three games share a movement quirk; in addition to jumping upward, you can jump downward. Unlike their predecessors, Hisoutensoku and Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, these games take place entirely in the air, similar to Sunsoft’s Astra Superstars; characters naturally return to a middle line, which functions similarly to landing from a jump, but can fly into an upper or lower lane to attack from above or below. It looks weird, but after a few minutes of practice, it’s easier to control than you’d expect.

It’s a strange choice, though—it looks weird because it is weird. AoCF and its ilk want to sell the fantasy of spellcard dueling, and they’re willing to be kinda restrictive and bizarre to do it; that means short combos, harsh proration, and supers that make you call your shot (card name and all!) before you can use them. That extends to AoCF’s tag mechanics, which relegate your second character to a backup option; your partner regenerates life for your point, and you can tag to escape some hard knockdown scenarios, but it’s regulated by a short meter that gets even shorter when you block. Better to not need your partner at all, except for tag-attack confirms and chaining spellcards together.

It looks like a complex affair, but there are simple joys to it: swoop under someone, press Ichirin 8C, and scoop them with THE HAND OF GOD (while silently wishing it was a command throw and not a hitgrab). Touhou’s character designs are pretty exceptional, not just for fighters, but for doujin games as a whole; IMO, they’re the best reason to play Antinomy of Common Flowers, and the way they’re implemented here strikes a great balance between design diversity and up-front complexity.

The movement is loose and floaty, which may not be to everyone’s taste, but standard attacks are designed to complement it. “Anti-air” is a fuzzy concept here, because there are two directions to jump, along with straight-ahead grazing; most options only cover one direction, or cover two directions badly, so preempting approaches requires either good timing on the right tools, or reading your opponent’s attack timing with far-reaching bullet moves.

Like all the Touhou fighters, AoCF is strongest there, in those moments of push-and-pull where you’re searching for an open path—and sometimes, that open path is jumping to the lower lane and hitting a big, stupid move. This is definitely a messy game, though, especially in the early learning stages—and sadly, combining floaty movement with delay netcode doesn’t help.

That’s with a fan patch, too; unless you live on a certain small island nation, the vanilla netcode is likely to fail outright. SokuRoll, a fanmade rollback mod for Hisoutensoku, has been around for a long time; if you’re in the strike zone for these types of games, SokuRoll is basically the default, since Hopeless Masquerade and its derivatives are so much less accessible; next to the prior games’ crisp movement and more familiar structure, I imagine it’s hard to justify branching out.

Antinomy of Common Flowers is a 2017 release, with a second life on PS4 and Switch a few years later. A gap this long is pretty uncommon; if we get another Touhou fighter, it’s likely to be something totally different. I’m excited for it, but I also wish this line of games had taken off a little more; it’s been more than a decade, no one else has done anything like this, and I hope someone will someday.

VERDICT: REAL

24 - Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection (PS3)

Here we go again. “Tyron. Did you seriously put one of the most universally well-regarded fighting games of all time into an event called the Kusoge Advent Calendar?”

No. Rockforge and Sleepmode did. Here’s an i11 forward-moving tracking mid that combos to itself on hit and is -2 on block.

I have to admit that I feel weird talking about Tekken 5—it’s been discussed to death, then discussed back to eternal life, by smarter and more experienced players than me. I am a dumbass trying to play Paul with four and a half moves, because I can’t do Demoman in games where it requires the just frame. You shouldn’t trust me for commentary on anything, but definitely not for this.

All I can offer with confidence is my own experience—and my experience is pretty limited, because we live in hell, and we have neither faster-than-light information exchange nor a modern port of Tekken 5. I got about 30 minutes of shoddy Parsec netplay with Rockforge before the sound of his keyboard closed our window of opportunity—turns out Mishima movement is too loud for the average roommate—and Sleepmode gave it 5 minutes of best effort, under 9 frames of Australian delay, before we retreated to training mode and YouTube. Sometimes it’s just like that.

And, like, you don’t need me to tell you that Tekken 5 feels great, right? Movement flows more like a figure-skating routine than the traditional Footsies Shuffle, so flexible and powerful that it forms the backbone of all risk management; sometimes your movement directly becomes your offense, with fast moves used less to check mashing and more to “counterhit movement”.

Watching tournament footage gives me a feeling I recognize from my high-school days; while I was playing GGPO and Soku Lobby on an ailing Macbook, finding my footing in what seemed like a strange and vast new world, this is the type of stuff that pushed me forward. I think a lot of people feel the same way; scroll the comments on any footage of JDCR or Qudans or Knee, and it won’t take long to find someone pining for the days of Dark Resurrection, where Tekken was…honest?

I mean, you definitely just die in two hits and change sometimes, but go off.

If players have access to impactful and responsive movement, I think they’re willing to tolerate just about anything—at least, that’s how I feel about many of the games I hold closest. Whether it’s Smash or Hisoutensoku or Elsword, the ability to Just Avoid The Move makes even the strongest offense feel justified—elegant, even.

And Dark Resurrection’s buttons are some of the strongest in Tekken history; in subsequent entries, every one of the top-tiers would quickly have their signature strengths scaled back. But movement is an equal-opportunity strength, and it makes it easy to give your opponent the “yeah aaight” head-nod when you walk into an 80-damage df2. Or an 8-frame counterhit launcher that confirms itself. Or whatever the fuck Kazuya is doing at the wall.

…Yeah, when you put it like that, maybe it’s no surprise that Tekken’s modern direction is a little different. Strong movement doesn’t just complement strong offense, it nearly mandates it; look at the elegant dance of top-level play, the mutual cowardice on display each time a range-0 interaction ends in a pair of backdashes, and imagine how much slower things would get without an incentive to take risks. You’d be watching Mishima crouch-dash animations for 30 seconds at a time.

Strong offense puts the pace of a round under the player’s control, but it also relies on them to seize it; in a high-volatility game, where two reads can kill a character, Rage and Heat and resource-management can only do so much, and strong movement makes the push-and-pull of advantage more abstract than meters or wallslams can convey. Spectator play becomes less legible, comeback mechanics become less impactful, and it’s tougher to give novice players a free pass to high-impact choices. It’s not a better or worse way to design a game, but there are reasons it’s become less trendy in recent years.

With that in mind, it’s hard for me to be upset about the direction that Tekken is moving—still exciting and compelling and obnoxiously well-polished, but more tightly controlled, bit by bit, trading that dance of expressive movement for games of Heat chicken. But I think there’s room for someone to slide in and recapture that older style.

…Sega? Anyone home?

VERDICT: REAL

25 - The King of Fighters XI (Arcade)

This is another “committee member talks about something they love” day. Brief interlude: there were a lot of those in this year’s lineup, huh?

They’re making shitty fighting games faster than we can play them, and I expect that to be the case until fighting games disappear as a genre; there will always be something new to try and analyze backwards, to crack open and see what the hell it’s even trying to be. I will be tripping over those weird, forgotten Fucking Things until I die—and that’s fucking great, beccause they’re a lot of fun.

But my New Year’s resolution was to make an active effort to enjoy things—and there’s an intimate, fulfilling quality to the Unambiguously Real Game days. There’s a different kind of joy in sitting down with someone, receiving three hours' worth of intrusive thoughts via direct brain-to-brain transfer, and then hearing them explain why the game you’re talking about is fucked up.

I think there are gonna be a lot of those in the Advent Calendar’s future. Not a ton of them, never enough to eclipse the broken stuff—but enough. So it goes with The King of Fighters XI.

XI is, as I accidentally found out within the first five seconds of round 1, a tag game, an anomaly in SNK’s long-running series. You can tag freely to either partner, but it’s got a long startup and punishable recovery; you’ll probably want to use the Shift gauge instead, which regenerates slowly over time. One stock lets you Quick Shift, a fast tag that you can cancel into for combos or pressure. Two stocks let you Saving Shift—a defensive tag to do the opposite, even interrupting combos.

The rest is familiar; four buttons, four jump arcs, and a familiar super meter, used for desperation moves as well as guard-cancel roll/blowback. But XI’s guard cancels are tight, demanding an input not during blockstun, but during blockstop; it’s difficult to overstate how hard they are. Tiny timing switchups can lead to counterhits, and even immediate timing can be hard to stop directly; attackers can spend a little meter and cancel their attacks to roll, going right through a naive guard-cancel if they have a hard read. In a lot of other ways, XI is a resource-management game, but when it comes to blocking, it has a very clear intent—don’t, or suffer the consequences.

There’s no recoverable life here, either; all your damage is permanent, no matter how long you leave a character in reserve. Almost all of the tag mechanics are focused on Doing More Damage; Quick Shift enables big grounded combos, team supers create explosive endgames, and even team order affects how you cash out for damage, since your “leader” character gains access to a leader-exclusive level 2 super.

The result is pretty remarkable—it’s KOF, but faster, replacing KO knockdowns and “READY… GO!” with fast incomings and faster tags. And I’ve never heard anyone talk about it! Like, it’s got scruples, sure; the sprite filtering looks terrible, all the console-exclusive characters are fucked up in ways I’d expect from MUGEN, and balance is…about as good as you’d expect from a cast of this size.

But in almost every regard, KOFXI is a totally serviceable KOF—and this stream was the very first time I had ever heard anyone say “KOF” and “11” in the same sentence. At the very least, I’d expect someone to tell me about Garcia’s partially invulnerable forward walk.

T and Sleepmode had hours of strategy talk and trivia on hand, filling space between ancient combo videos and my best efforts to find a usable anti-air. Out of all of it, one line struck me more than any other: “Everyone who plays KOFXI only plays KOFXI.” And that makes sense: it exists in a weird space, not traditional enough to be a straightforward KOF sequel, but not grimy and fucked up enough to be a “proper” tag game.

But, like…this shit is on Fightcade. Nothing is actually stopping you. Break the trend!

VERDICT: REAL

EX - Fight Game 3 500 (Genesis)

Welcome back, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (Genesis). No, we’re not playing it—but we are abusing the Fightcade room, probably confusing anyone else in the lobby, to play some certified grade-A homebrew jank.

I do not love all the children of the Advent Calendar equally. Some things are boring slogs, some things are uncontroversially good in uncontroversial ways, some things are Shrek Superslam (GBA). And some, like FIGHT GAME II 3000, unintentionally achieve that magical, dreamlike quality, that cross between “mastercraft puzzle-box” and “improv comedy routine”—a misunderstanding of mechanics so vast and complex that it becomes a sort of character-study. A geode, unassuming on the surface, cracked open to reveal a beautiful, glimmering inner structure of unknown motivations and bugs that ascend to features.

I love FIGHT GAME II 3000. Not a joke, not sarcasm, not some meanspirited SomethingAwful coded meaning. It is a genuine, deeply felt fondness for the way it makes me feel, for an experience I wish I could forget and redo all over again, violating expectations I didn’t even know were expectations.

And they made another one ARE YOU SHITTING ME

This puts me in an interesting position. FIGHT GAME II 3000 is a beautiful game, and that beauty is specifically because it is a disorganized, unpolished mess—full of walking infinites and backturn shenanigans, unblockable resets and “dead frame” guard-crushes, move properties and hitboxes and collision that completely defy all experimentation or analysis. It is almost, but not quite, completely fucked.

…So what would you change about it?

In one beat, my reaction is simple: nothing. You can’t change anything: you can’t make it more broken, that’s a nonsense endeavor, but you also can’t fix anything, or you diminish the whole, make it more comprehensible but less interesting.

The next beat amends that reaction—nothing except player-asymmetry. FIGHT GAME II 3000’s most powerful “tech” is exclusive to player 1, and it is not a short list; they win all trades, have turn-frame unblockables off any crossup, and player 2 can’t block their fireballs when waking up. It’s unbalanced to the point of hostility; you can’t even play the game like chess, having players take turns as “white” and “black”, because P1 vs. P2 should genuinely be 10-0. At least.

I got everything I wanted for Christmas and more. FIGHT GAME 3 500 removes player asymmetry, putting P1 and P2 on completely equal footing.

It also removes the ability to combo into fireballs.

Not, like, the ability to meaty unblockable with fireballs—that’s working just fine, although it’s a lot tighter than II because it seems to only work on the first frame they connect. I mean that if your opponent is in their hitreaction, any fireball that makes contact with them silently disappears. Fireball links were the most impactful and broken thing in II, overwhelmingly the most important trait of every character; this single change, whether it’s intentional or not, resets all of our labwork to a clean slate.

I was blind all along. Sure, I wanted FIGHT GAME II 3000 without player asymmetry—but I didn’t know what was best for me until FIGHT GAME 3 500 provided it. I needed something as broken as II, but broken in completely new and unpredictable ways, and somehow they delivered.

I am completely at a loss for how to explain the…magnitude of this game. It’s rare to come across something like this, where literally every single mechanic and system violated my expectations in at least one way—but for a sequel, that’s not rare, that’s impossible. FIGHT GAME 3 500 cannot exist—and since the developers seem to have disabled the download link, I’m starting to wonder if I imagined it.

Everyone’s got some shortened bizzaro-world version of their own name—Kyo goes by “Kusa”, Terry by “Boga”, newcomer Mai by “Maya”. Genjuro, the prior game’s undisputed unbeatable god tier, is gone entirely; the new characters taking his place have no special moves and almost zero sound design. Stage select has disappeared, stage graphics sometimes go missing, the game froze more than once, and “Maya” uses voice lines from Gillius; what we played was obviously unfinished.

All the better. When it’s done, I’ll have another Christmas present to unwrap.

VERDICT: REAL-ASS

It sure is November again. Whoops!

…Motivation’s always highest around the holidays, you all get it by now.

I’m missing the date this year. I’m moving coast to coast, reuniting with found family and settling into a new home—like, “we have to finish building it before we move in” new.

I really, really want to spend December the way I always do, but if there’s somehow another version of Street Fighter Alpha 3, it’ll have to wait. You don’t have to wait for me, though; while I’m moving sheetrock and shouting at fixtures, go play some kusoge on my behalf.

IMO, this year’s match-play star is Smash Remix, far and away my favorite game of the Advent Calendar—but of course I’d say that, and Kaillera is understandably a dealbreaker for some people. Give it a shot before you toss it out, though.

Failing that, SoulCalibur and The King of Fighters XI have rollback via Flycast, and you’d be doing yourself a disservice not to at least attempt to play them. For more traditional Advent Calendar fare, smuggle FIGHT GAME 3 500 into a Fightcade lobby, throw the DuckStation netplay build at Battle Arena Toshinden 3, or use the Arkadyzja build of DuckStation for some 4-player Rakugaki Showtime. Bring sunglasses.

Lab-monsters might find some interest in the unsolved mysteries of Lightning Legend, Chain & Combo, or Hokuto no Ken: Lucca Scationne Team—but if you want to play something that isn’t glowing with radiation, SvP might be one of the most normal things available, and good fucking lord did you see that character select screen.

It stings a little, missing my Christmas tradition; I feel like I’m letting y’all down. But if all goes well, next year, I’ll be settled into a new place with old friends—and, more immediately relevant to this event, I’ll have a soundproofed office with fiber internet. If your reaction to that information was “oh boy here we go”, you’re on the money; NO MORE COX. The wait is going to drive me completely fucking insane.

Much love to The Committee—Abbock, Keeg, Rockforge, Sleepmode, and TTTTTsd, with ongoing moral support from Zari0t. The Kusoge Advent Calendar is only possible with their support, and I’m eternally grateful for it. They Are Cool.

Thank you for playing. See you soon.