Value Bin Review - Battle Fantasia

Written by Craig Will, puffkix Wednesday, 27 April 2011 10:30

I've never really been good at fighting games but I love them all the same. Something about conquering a list of moves and unlocking characters while playing through a fragmented storyline has always appealed to me. Alas, I tend to appreciate the Mortal Kombat fighting games because of simpler combos and a sense of forgiveness and more control. Fighters in the vein of Street Fighter just tend to frustrate me with the convoluted combo system and precision required to pull off any move. Battle Fantasia definitely falls into the Street Fighter category.

Off the bat there are several different gameplay modes:

• Arcade - Beat all 9 stages, just like in the arcade.
• Story - Experience each character's story
• VS 2P
• VS CPU
• Survival
• Practice
• Time Attack - See how fast you can clear all 13 stages.
• Online

There is also a gallery of illustrations to unlock, which is nice because the art direction is one of my favorite parts of this game.

As I previously stated I'm not overly competent when it comes to the technical fighting games like Street Fighter, I have large clumsy hands and I do not own a fighting stick. This leaves me with the already fighting retarded 360 controller and a maddening scramble of my fingers as they furiously switch between the analog stick and the d-pad in hopes that I can successfully input that super combo before my brain forgets what said combo was. This works about half the time. To make this easier Arc System Works only supplies about six combos per character, some of which are Super Special Moves that require the little green gauge at the bottom of the screen to fill up before they can be used. I would have preferred a more in depth practice mode with many more moves, a la Dead or Alive, than this skimpy offering of commands.

The story mode is a melodramatic soap opera throwaway that is hard to follow (even after playing through multiple characters) and the only value I see is the alternate costumes unlocked.

There are some good qualities to the game - every character and little story moment are well voice acted (in Japanese), the art style of characters during story progression is reminiscent of Vagrant Story (sketchy looking with lots of lines), and each character has a very different feel to them.

While I did find entertainment the game I can't recommend it to anybody that enjoys their fighting games like I do - visceral, simple, and visually engrossing. For everybody else, this feels like a solid fighting game entry and the faults that I found were more personal gripes than anything broken within the game. If this sounds like your type of game, maybe you're over SFIV or you're looking for something similar but still a little bit different, then grab Battle Fantasia for 300 points on Goozex.