Fantasy Strike | PS4 Review

Are you unsure how to approach a fighting game beyond just mashing the buttons? Have you tried to learn to play only to get discouraged at the level of execution required to be decent at the game? Fantasy Strike from Sirlin Games may be the fighting game for you.

Starting with the Basics

Fighting games can live or die on teaching you how to master them, and Fantasy Strike’s tutorial is extremely well-done. The on-screen legend shows you what each of the six buttons does. Movement is simplified to left or right on the D-Pad and jumping with the X button. That’s it. There’s no crouching or running to worry about in this game.

You have three main attacks, a super move, and a throw. Within the first few minutes of the tutorial, the game teaches you to perform jumping attacks, super moves and combos. Additionally, you have moves with special properties, such as the ability to be armored or invulnerable. These are not only called out and explained, but your on screen fighter flashes with a halo of different colors to remind you of that move’s ability.

You perform all your moves and your super with as few as three sequential button presses. The tutorial will teach everything that you can do with Grave, your first character. While the moves will vary between the possible characters, all the concepts that you learn here translate to the rest. 

Perhaps the most interesting concept unique to this game involves the throws. In most other fighting games, you cannot block a throw and must instead counter it with a move or button press. In Fantasy Strike, simply letting go of the controls and doing nothing will counter the throw. It’s called a “Yomi Counter”. This only affects normal throws, however. If a character performs a special throw, you need to jump to avoid it. If you get hit with one of these throws, the game actually alerts you that you could have avoided the attack. This is brilliant to me and makes the gamer (and the fighting genre itslef) more accessible.

Choose your Method of Play

Once the tutorial is complete, the game offers your typical fighting game options: online, solo, local play and practice. Fantasy Strike offers you a unique mode call “Learn”, which offers a detailed video of each of the ten fighters in the roster. These characters fall into one of four different classes: Zoners, who specialize in keeping the enemy at bay);  Rushdowns, who work well in close quarters, Grapplers (expert throwers); and Wildcards (crazy attacks and play styles). These videos are excellent and explain exactly how to play each character. Since special move execution can be done without complex move sets, even newer players should feel right at home almost immediately. After watching a tutorial, I recommend hitting the practice mode for a few minutes. Then go right into either conquering the solo modes or playing online. 

Solo mode has what you would expect from an arcade mode: a small story about your chosen character. Honestly, this mode is nothing to write home about. The cut scenes are very generic, and the stories are quite uninteresting. It’s fun for some offline practice, but playing against the computer is not much of a challenge.

There is a daily challenge where you face off against a string of opponents to see how far you can last. As the name implies, you are limited to trying this mode once per day. Survival is another solo option and works like the daily challenge, except you can try multiple times. You can also play a single battle against a character of your choosing.

A Dream Online Experience

After the solo modes, I went right for online and started with a casual match. Finding an opponent was quick and easy, and once the match started, the connection quality was outstanding. In fact, I did not have a single connectivity issue.

Without getting too technical, Fantasy Strike uses a different kind of net code than most other fighting games, and I feel that this decision has really paid off. Unless you have people to play with locally, the net code is the make or break feature of any fighting game. After all, the A.I. is only fun for so long, and you want to play against real people.

As with most fighters, there are both casual and ranked online modes. Casual is 1v1, but ranked is a little different. It’s almost like an ad hoc tournament and quite fun to play. You choose a team of three characters, and the goal is to win once with all 3 of your chosen characters. The catch? Your characters are randomly chosen for you at the beginning of each round.

Finally, Fantasy Strike also offers a practice mode, which is exactly what you would expect. You choose your fighter as well as a dummy character that you will face. You can set various options for the dummy to help perfect your skills. If you really want to dig into the minutia of the game, you can even turn on a display showing frame data. Although you don’t necessarily need to understand frame data to enjoy the game, it’s a nice feature for hard core fans.

Fantasy Strike Final Verdict

There are many more things I could say about this game, but the bottom line is that it manages to be accessible and fun without sacrificing the deep strategy that makes the genre. The level of polish is very high with great attention to detail. This is a great place to start for those new to fighting game, but also has the potential to be a new favorite for even seasoned veterans.

This review is based on a copy provided by Stride PR for coverage purposes and is also available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.