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Yuyuko Lunatic Story — No Spellcard, No Miss, No Mercy 
 

Now that I’ve had a few days to mess around and play with it, I guess I should at least share what I have to say now that the novelty has worn off.

 If I had to sum up my feelings in three words, it’d be "needs patch badly." There are just so many things that are, for lack of a better word, really sloppy at the moment. Hit detection is a bit wonky, some attacks are clearly implemented incorrectly, some backgrounds are blazing white and impossible to see anything against, the weather patterns are far too random and some are just plain broken, story mode difficulty is all over the place, the AI is still awful, and the controls can be infuriating. Especially for a fighting game, control needs to be tight. When you press a button and your character does something completely unexpected, there are issues. It’s mostly a case of the ‘turning’ timeframe being WAAAAAAAAAAAAY too long and it doesn’t automatically turn you when you’re hit or knocked down, so you might get up and then if you’re quick enough, fire off your wake-up attack in the wrong direction, or even do the wrong one since it thinks your 236 is a 214.

Some of the things are just incomprehensible though. Take Yuyuko’s 66A attack. The recovery time for it is longer than the hit or blockstun. So even if you connect with it, your opponent gets a free hit back on you. Many other attacks have similar issues. Some characters will whiff entirely on their AAAA melee combo after the first hit if it’s a counter because of the extra knockback. There are all sorts of other minor issues like that just all over the place. It kind of boggles my mind how they made it through. At least this is Tasofro and I’m confident they’ll be releasing a lot of patches over the next couple months to fix all these issues.

Practice Mode… Bugged? No way…

All that said, it is a very fun game, but at the moment, it’s also a very frustrating one because of the sloppy control. There’s some fun to be had in the story mode, and I suggest playing through all of them as a quicker way to unlock spellcards than just playing Arcade or Vs over and over again, but as I said above, be prepared to get your ass handed to you by some of the most random characters. Yukari, Remilia, and Yuyuko all have nastier spellcards than the ‘main’ bosses Iku and Tenshi. Some characters also have no real hope against others aside from just acting as a berserker. Yuyuko faces Komachi for example, and one of Komachi’s cards is a vacuum that holds you in place, and then slams you from above. Nobody’s really fast enough to escape the vacuum if they get hit, but Yuyuko’s not fast enough to avoid the ‘real’ attack even if she’s not in the vacuum, so you’re basically forced to take at least one hit unless you just go into a butterfly berserker rage.

Anyway, the AI is lacking, the lasers are overpowered, the control is frustrating, and there’s no China, but it’s still a pretty good game. I’d stop short of saying it’s a worthy successor to IaMP at the moment, but hopefully it’ll get there. I think now that I’ve slaughtered the Story mode with my chosen girl, I’ll give it a rest for awhile and wait for some issues… especially the control wonkiness to be fixed before I dive into the online netplay world.