Recent reviews by Rebatca

This is the worst localization I have ever seen. Do not play this game in English.

I have 800 something hours on RIvals of Aether 1 and I absolutely adore it. It's one of my favorite games of all time, bought it for all my friends since i wanted more people to experience it, I just love the game so much. Everything is so smooth and feels so nice to play and a fighting game never clicked so well before and resonated so much. Rivals 2 is nothing like that.

Ive played like 15-20 hours on the demo and since then have barely touched the full game, I come back every now and then to see if things have improved over if it's better than I remember but I'm just left frustrated and disappointed every single time. FIrst of all this game just feels slow, everything is really clunky, awkward and nothing flows well at all. Even just jumping feels like a comittment compared to rivals of aether 1. This is only furthered by the fact that shields were introduced and they feel like just the best option in the game. A shield shuts down every single aerial option and every non grab grounded option. Shielding is so safe in fact that its genuinely more worth it to play defensively and just wait til your opponent hits your shield and punish there hit that it is to risk being aggressive and overextending this makes the backs and forths in this game feel so painfully slow and boring and uninteresting. Aerials are further worsened by the weird ass momentum this game has where everyone flies way too far from them making non grounded combos either super short or outright non existent heavily downplaying most aspects of juggling and chasing, and since the momentum is so strong it can still carry you to the blast zone if you got a poor angle even after the point where your character becomes actionable! Off stage play is similarly god awful now with ledges being introduced making that 100% of the time the best option for recovering as youre completely invinicble once you grab it which just entirely undermines any of the options you had before to edge guard without going super deep to challenge them as theyre recovering, but sicne you dont refresh your up special after a wall jump anymore, going that deep in rivals 2 is suicide for most characters so often your only option is just to let your opponent recover. All and all it just makes the gameplay experience feel so slow and clunky and awkward it ends up being boring at best and just frustrating at worse.

Even comparing it to something like Smash Ultimate, which i feel like the gameplay shares a lot more in common with than Rivals 1, it still feels worse. Both games are slower but at least Ultimate has everyone feel a lot lighter which still allows a good amount of aerial and offstage play. In rivals 2 everyone is slow but also heavy which just even makes the act of jumping often feel like an over commitment. Rivals of 2 is just trying to be everything but Rivals of Aether while still trying to have the Rivals cast in it. I dont even like Smash Ultimate but it's genuinely more fun to play.

And stepping aside from gameplay from a second both Smash and Rivals of Aether 1 have so much more content in it. As of right now the cast in Rivals 2 is so much smaller than the cast of Rivals 1 with many important characters missing and yes I'm sure eventually thell get the numbers to be more comparable but they'll never match the sheer scale of the rivals 1 workshop which is what made Rivals 1 celebrated among casual too. So not only is rivals 2 is significantly worse competitive game but even for people who dont care about that, it's just a worse casual game too not having the same types of things to play around with.

Ultimately, Rivals 2 is so fundamentally flawed and just made with such a different philosophy from the first game that I dont see any amount of patches and content updates ever fixing this game and making it actually fun and worth playing. It genuinely makes me wonder if Rivals of Aether 1 was only good because of constraints and limitations and if it was just an accidental success, because I dont see any other way how the same team that made that could actually put out Rivals 2.

Mike Z didn't die for this.

Really adorable game, looks amazing, dialogue is so charming and funny and I already love the cast. Havent seen this type of gameplay done before and it works really well. All I can really say is it's a bit light on content but nothing in a way thatd be unexpected of a puzzle game.

this dlc is awful. balancing is somehow even worse than in the main game you just fight an overwhelming amount of enemies in back to back to back encounters way beyond the the cr your party should be facing. The story was entirely unsatisfying and felt like a waste of time and the tie ins with the main game are insignificant. Save yourself the money, time, and frustration and don't bother with this.

"No dnd is better than bad dnd"

It's like Cookie Clicker, but worse and with optional paid content.

It's Smash Bros with less content but better gameplay.