It's a fun 3D battle game with lots of energy attacks.
Gameplay:
That said, I might not play many battle games so I don't know if this is normal, but I find it a bit difficult to break out of an opponent's combo. I mean, all defensive measures (dodge/shield) seem to fail if you don't guard before the first hit lands and your opponent starts an X-X-X-X punch combo. It'd be great if you can break free somehow, otherwise it seems stupid absorbing damage for if you don't guard in time. I wonder if you can interrupt the combo chain if you overdrive.
You wouldn't think it, but your companion bots are a lot more important than you would expect. You need them to execute your best moves, run interference, and boost your stats depending on the formation. If used well, it can make a difficult opponent easy. And if ignored, even an easy opponent can become a pain in the butt.
Story mode is very easy. The CPU tends to crumble very easily if you perform an all out attack. And you don't need to worry about ultimate attacks. But don't let the ease of your completion fool you. Wait till you unlock and try out Magical Battle Festa mode. That's when the gloves come off and the CPU becomes serious.
Controls:
Let's see, what else. I play with a Xbox360 gamepad and I've found that the default controls work well enough once I get used to them. I've heard that keyboard players have a bit of trouble working with the camera, of which careful handling is needed. More on that later.
Sound:
It's partially voiced. During story mode, when the characters are performing the prebattle and postbattle conversations, the conversations are punctuated by bits of Japanese here and there. It's sort of like emoticons. It's cute I suppose, but it's also strange when you see multiple lines of text and you only hear like 5 words of Japanese.
Camera:
Because this game is battle royale capable, you might find the camera a bit awkward. Unlike Virtua Fighter or other 3D fighting games your character and follow-cam do not automatically follow your opponent. The reason is because there can be up to 3 other opponents. You can't just jump the camera back and forth automatically. It's not a movie, it's a fighting game. Without the automatic tracking, you're left with manual handling.
And when you play you'll soon find that part of your success in battle is keeping that camera focused on the action. If you're not diligent, you can soon lose track of the battle and find yourself blindsided.
That said, my pet peeve is that there is a button that allows you to lock the camera onto an opponent. The button itself is fine, the problem is that it doesn't force your character to automatically face that opponent when you've locked on, you have to handle the direction your character is facing yourself. So I have to spend a frame or two to run toward an opponent in order to face him before unleashing a long range attack. Otherwise, I'll find the attack shooting off in the other direction because my character happens to be looking the other way.
Story:
The story is really short. It covers a few days of a yearly tournament where the characters each have their motives. Most of them have pure motives...some do not. Saying anymore would probably spoil it. I kind of like how the story mode is arranged. Basically, the match results are predetermined. Because of this, the matches that you find yourself playing will be as the character that is supposed to win. So it's best not to lose, okay?
Multiplayer:
Right now MP rooms are hard to find. I guess everyone with the game is trying to unlock all of the characters first. That said, it was a joy to discover that it's not local multiplayer but internet multiplayer.
So let me share my observations. I'm in the US and I found an opponent playing in Japan. It's a situation where two players are playing each other from across the world, a 12 hour difference seperating them. We found that when we were the host, there were no response issues. However, the situation is different for those players who weren't the host. They would experience latency issues. When he hosted, I've found that it could take a second for a button press to register. While this delay won't mess with your ability to execute a combo since that's just button mashing, it will interfere with your camera control, movement, and timing-related actions like perfect blocks. I need to test against someone closer to see if the delay is smaller.
Overall:
A few minor annoyances here and there, but overall the game is rather fun to play.
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