Uppers Impressions

I reached Upper's four chapter, curious about the idea of the game offering some sort of way to build up your characters.

To this end I rushed through two full chapters and while that helped a lot to improve the overall experience (beating people up is entertaining) it does makes clear the game doesn't has that much of a longevity. Is clear they were aware of that since your progress through the story is gated behind your in-game achievements.

Thankfully is nothing to complicated, you simply need to replay a couple of missions to raise your completion percentage (something that can be done in a couple of minutes), rather than locking behind the girls' requests

While the game has improved, it also make clear a lot of its faults lie on pretty questionable design choices. Takaki clearly had a pretty ambitious idea for this title but the implementation is at odds with what the system can actually offer. Simply rushing through the game is fun and is actually somewhat reminicent of Burst. But playing the game like that not only makes the game incredibly short -I finished those two chapters in an hour- it also hurts your ranking

So, to get good ranks you need to go through the stage but fullfilling the request from the girls. Putting aside the language barrier, some requests are pretty easy and play well with the idea of doing crazy stuff the game promised. But others are a pain in the ass to fullfill due the clunky combat. The stages also give you a single shot to finish those requests and if you fail, you have to redo the stage again. As a side note, the game lacking a retry option is a pretty glaring flaw. It is a flaw due the request system. If you fail to fullfill one, you have to exit the mission, wait until you're returned to the hub, enter the stage selection menu and pick your stage again
There's always at least one request that is a bitch to complete per stage, making the whole thing pretty tiring for completionists

A middling level design and at times odd enemy placement don't help to make thing easier either. When the levels are just moving from point A to B, they are pretty good but every now and then you find maze-like stages that totally break the flow of the game. As the stages are finished simply by killing every enemy present, those stages end with multiple segments where you are just walking around looking for the enemy you missed. Another thing that complicate things further is that the Vita clearly wasn't powerful enough for the game and pretty often you'll find enemies literally popping into existence as you walk pass by them.

Your only indication about their location is that the cursor placed beneath your character is red as long there's still enemies around. The game lacks both jump button and a run/dash one. A pretty weird decision for a brawler. It wouldn't be so bad if your enemies didn't move too much, but is pretty common for your punches launch them across the room so you have to walk towards them to finish them off

Pressing X when a broken arrow appears on downed enemies prompts your character to move towards them and giving them a stomp regardles their distance, this alleviates things somewhat but is not perfect and a lot of times is hindered by background elements...Like the cheerleader girls

Talking about the playable characters, by chapter four the wrestler is unlocked, and he's the first character with a notorious stat difference:He packs quite a punch but is very slow.

With chapter four you also unlock the gym where you can buy stat boosts and new "techniques" for your guys. But here is where comes those weird design choices I was talking earlier. Why put something like that until the middle point of the game?
And what's more, instead of having the available techniques simply gated behind high prices, a lot of them are tied to your progress. That only makes sense when is a game like DMC were you get new weapons as you progress, but you don't get new weapons here. And in fact, buying one "technique" makes it apply to the whole cast. Once again, making clear all the characters are the same at their core.

The only stats you can buy are more health and strength, but you can only buy one of each per character. I hope this is also tied to your story progress because otherwise the boost is too pitiful to be worth it. Another thing is that far as I can tell, buying those techniques the only thing it does is adding more attacks to your attack string. While this comes handy against the damage sponge enemies, it makes fullfilling some requests harder and by having a longer combo string, increases the odds of being hit by the mooks before your animation is finished.

Because that is another weird choice, there's no real way to cancel most of the attack animations but at the same time, you don't have invincibility while those animations play, turning you into a sitting duck. I actually got hit more times after buying those additions at the store.

The combat is not designed to allow subtleties. For every request you have to bait the mooks into specific points of the map and you can't just bait one, every enemy on screen will follow you. And once you got them where you want, you have to use your finishers in specific ways to complete the request. If you mess it up and kill the enemy then you have to look for another pack of enemies and repeat. If there's no more enemies in sight, you'll have to repeat the stage. This vicious cycle is why I find the cheerleader system to be more trouble that is worth.

Anyways, when you take into account the lack of noticeable differences between the characters and the way the story is laser focused on the blue haired pretty boy and his red haired pal (On four chapters, I've only used other characters on four stages. Hell, even in the special missions you unlock by fully raising the affection of the "queens" you're forced to use the two main dudes.), I find the big cast to be entirely superflous. Using two characters is also unecessary. There's only one special gameplay mechanic between them, you can't use the tag to cancel or expand your combos and the game isn't hard enough to warrant having a "backup" character with you at all times.

The way the game handles different tiers of enemy is by simply increasing their health and defense, so there's no reason to use anyone but the wrestler (or Daidouji) since they reduce the time you waste on those damage sponges. Most bosses are like that by the way.

There's little variety among enemies. No long range attackers, no gimmick ones, no airborne ones. Just a bunch of different dressed guys that punch you or use a blunt object as weapon. The bosses do have different gimmicks and tend to have better AI, but you can stun lock them by punching them non stop, so yeah...

Lastly, compared to the way Mirei was translated to Bikkhuni (or even the Battle Vixen chars on EV) Daidouji is pretty dissapointing.Whereas those characters had references to their original series (and in Mirei's case, the game system was tweaked to be faithful to the anime rules) Dai lacks any sort of references to SK.Taking aside the fact Uppers lacks the "magic" present on SK, there's no attempt done to translate even one of her attack animations from SK to Uppers. Uppers' multiple special attacks would've been perfect to slip references to SK. Make Dai punch dudes into choppers by using the OHKO punch she had on Burst or I don't know, add a tiger roar to her finishers. Anything to make her stand out. But instead she uses the same canned animations than everyone else.

Well, to be fair they did lift something from SK. A lot of her lines are exactly the same she had on EV, weirdly enough, given they brought Yuu Asakawa back to record some new lines like the system ones.