C74 — Gleam of Force Impressions

August 22nd, 2008

The spiritual successor to Glove on Fight, which has the best opening movie of any game ever, and boy howdy has it ever been upgraded.

Graphics look better, the engine is far more transparent (though the Engrish is hilarious… "Back stub" indeed), the character movesets are vastly expanded, and there’s a far greater variety in the fighting styles. While it is a lot of fun to button mash, counter attacks and parries are where the vast majority of your damage is going to come from, so slamming the keyboard like an epileptic ape will only get you so far. Of course, if you miss a parry, then it counts as a counter for the enemy, and if you think you can just turtle, many characters have a throw that can break guards and everybody can guardbreak by entering the "infight" mode, done only when an opponent is guarding that instantly drops the guard (though you can just put it right back up) and gives the character a speed boost for a few seconds to pummel the crap out of the turtler. It’s not that complicated though, there are only three buttons, light attack, strong attack, and defense. Most commands are your normal fighting game motions and/or double taps. Most characters can’t even jump. 

Thankfully, I really like using Kanae (since you’re forced to use her in the Story mode) for her general all around balance. I thought I’d like super speedy ninja Madoi, but a lot of her attacks require quite a bit of distance between you and the enemy (or at least, the two of you and the wall so you can actually make use of her backstabs), and her anti-air grab (22A/B) is pretty much worthless against everybody but other Madois and maybe hoppy genius acrobat Futaba. Sometimes you can chain it off her j.22B, but just as often, I seem to whiff on that. Ruki is a lot of fun to use because her attacks come out laser fast, though she has some power, range, and movement issues. Her parry is also timed a bit weird compared to most other characters. She also has a few attacks where she makes a motion, and the slash appears a moment later which are just ripe for being parried.

If you’re wondering about the mystery character in the OP video, it’s Kanae’s sister Negai. Unfortunately, she’s not unlocked when you beat the oppressively long and unskippable Story mode. Instead, arcade mode is unlocked, so I’m sure beating that with someone will unlock her. She fights like Ecoco did in Glove on Fight (based around flicker jabs), only with less range and more speed. I haven’t really played around too much with most of the other characters yet, but Makoto and her cheer squad, and Papeko’s abusive puppet boxing gloves both make me laugh, even if Makoto is slow as a glacier.

The game’s still a ton of fun to fool around with for awhile, just be prepared for the oppressively long and irritating story mode, complete with unskippable gigantic narrated wall of text to kick things off. Why did you do this to me, French Bread? The system requirements also veer towards pretty steep. My poor laptop went at about half speed when it tried to use the wrestling ring background and recording was pretty much out of the question. Even on the much faster desktop, you can still see where the FPS drops quite a bit during the fights and then things pick up again.

Posted in Doujin | 11 Comments »

11 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • sage says:

    which has the best opening movie of any fighting game ever

    Fixed for accuracy.

  • sibladeko says:

    Madoi(ninja) is mine.
    By the way she can chain like almost ALL her directional weak attacks into each other.
    Like 3A 6A 7A 9A 8A 1A 4A 5B is a valid combo.
    Just takes damage like a little girl.
    Which she is*
    *All girls in this game are 18 and over!*
    **Their disclaimer is completely hilarious**

    Anyway random Kanae combo seems to work from demo, it just doesn’t do guaranteed 100% damage anymore.
    Also rather situational because of 6AB distance.
    5AA 6A66 5B 22A 4B 6AB 5AA 6A66 5B 22A AI 22A
    AI being assault infight, which is basically a hold 6 and pressing CC type of attack roman cancel.
    Let’s you cancel specials into specials and strong attacks into other strong attacks for one meter.

  • sibladeko says:

    Oh one more thing, you can not kill characters with jabs, nor can you kill them with combos from jabs.
    The exception is if you use an Assault Infight(AI) during the combo followed by a non jab killing move.

  • Aroduc says:

    I think it’s just that there’s a threshhold of damage that you need to do for a killing blow since I’ve chained hits at the end of combos that don’t seem to knock them out, though as a standalone hit, they do. I tend to just step back and try to parry/counter at that point anyway, or spam supers.

  • sibladeko says:

    Hm what I mean is, if you hit someone with zero life with a weak attack (5A 4A whatever A), or start a combo with a weak attack, even if the combo has B’s (strong attacks), it will not kill unless you AI during the combo.
    Naked strong attacks (Bs) will always kill someone at 0 life out right.

  • Majinken says:

    This game is really fun! I love Minami, she’s a freaking powerhouse :D

    And is there any news on how to unlock Negai? I will try beating Arcade Mode with every character, but if there’s an easier way, I’d like to know ;.;

  • I like Ashita’s voice. Maybe I’ve got the wrong idea about this but I somehow had the impression ghta doujin-soft was almost exclusively a male endeavor. Do these circles actually have women in them?

    I guess they must; someone has to do the voices. (Girlfriends? Since when do otaku have girlfriends?)

    I think the voices in Magical Battle Arena are outstanding; another example.

  • sibladeko says:

    There are a lot of amateur voice actresses out there in Japan actually.
    Think about the sheer number of eroge that are made that are voiced.
    More than likely they were hired temporarily.

  • Ex says:

    Makoto is gun.

    hm does anyone know how to set up the online play? I’m not sure how it works

  • Onsokumaru says:

    This is French Bread were talking about and they hire the best voice actors. I recognized Romi Paku, Chiwa Saito, Ami Koshimizu and Ryoko Shiraishi so far. Then I cheked the kanji from the intro with AnimeNewsNetwork just to be sure.
    The game is realy great fun, strange that Gamefaqs doesn’t have anything on it yet.

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