The Lost Street Fighter characters

I noticed that on the PS4 store you can buy Fighting EX Layer, and that it is 80% off from now until the some time in early September; about a week or so away. From $40 to $8 was a deal too good to pass up (it cost almost that much to add Terry Bogard as a DLC character!) so I bought it this morning (and Terry, because... c'mon, c'mon. It's Terry.) I've played it just a bit, and have some very early commentary.

• I played with Kairi, who's the kinda sorta Ryu clone. My first thought is that he doesn't actually have a lot of moves; two or three "unique" moves, three special moves, and three similar and kind of unimpressive supers. Maybe there's some combos or something that I don't know about that will make him more fun to play, but in general, I thought he was a bit simplistic to play and I got a little tired of him extremely quickly; he just didn't have a lot of tactical diversity to bring to bear. Against the CPU, at least.
• The game seems specifically geared towards online competitive play. Two different versus modes, one for online and one for offline are listed before even arcade mode. I've heard that the netcode is particularly good, and will match you up with players of your same skill level much better than almost all of its competitors, so that you actually have a fun experience playing online games, instead of just getting blown out by freaks who practice all of the time. But I can't comment on this first hand, merely note that the single player experience seems to be a bit lacking.
• Not only that, the arcade mode wasn't particularly interesting to play. Instead of best two out of three, it was best three out of five matches. The CPU blocks a lot, so you throw out a lot of attacks that don't do anything before you finish your matches. I had several matches end because time ran out. Not the funnest way to play either. 
• The characters have potential but Arika do absolutely nothing with them. Very little personality exhibited, and no story to speak of. Just a brief paragraph as an ending, which told me very, very little about the character. This is another indication that the competitive play is the focus for the developer. In my opinion, any game, no matter how much the devs want to focus on a multiplayer experience, that doesn't have a good single player mode is going to be one that eventually people don't play much of. No matter the genre. Look at Star Wars the Old Republic, for instance, and how they added a massive single player experience that they didn't expect to (and that they claim at least 80% of their players are focusing on). Look at Overwatch, which nobody played for more than a few months because it was all running around with bratty little kids and there wasn't anything else to do. There's a handful of exceptions here and there, and a good cooperative or competitive scene is important for a lot of games, but people better be able to just sit down with the machine and play it without relying on someone else, or they'll likely be disappointed pretty quickly. I think the devs made a mistake with their focus here.
• The game looks quite good. In fact, it just highlights how incredibly ugly Street Fighter V is in general, although that's a post for another time, because it's a big topic. The characters look fantastic, if occasionally a little plastic. I didn't see any clipping going on, and the character and stage design was just well done. The strange anime character portraits at the select screen (which also show in the win and lose images, as well as in small form at the top of the HUD) are sometimes hit or miss, but the actual 3D models are great. The stages are really good too. Some of them have a weird deja vu feel to them, like Terry's train ride through the desert southwest of "West Albuquerque", although there's probably a reason for that, because it's Terry. But why does Hokuto (and Shirase, formerly known as "Bloody Hokuto") have a giant snaky background that looks like Mukai's stage in King of Fighters 2003? Anyway, all very well designed from a visual perspective. Nothing at all to complain about here.
• There are hints offline that there is some kind of potentially interesting story here, even if it is derivative, about sealed demons breaking loose, forgotten memories, the main character Kairi turning into an Akuma-like creature, but not realizing it because he's lost his memory, etc. Sure, sure... the story seems to be ripped off from other games that already did it better in the genre; a kind of Orochi Lite, or something... but there's something here that sadly they do nothing with. In fact, you kind of don't know anything at all about it unless you look up stuff on Arika website (or other wikis), because it's not really in the game at all.
• A lot of people probably enjoy this about the game, but I found, quite honestly, the barrage of options that you have to pick before you even start playing to be kind of strange and overwhelming to someone new. What is Classic vs Progressive? No explanation given. What the devil are all these different "Gougi" modes and what to they mean? No explanation given. Again, I have an internet and a browser, so it's not like I can't get some answers out there somewhere, although the game is sufficiently low key that there's less information on it available than you'd probably like to think. 

Anyway, I certainly recommend getting it at that price while you can, if you haven't. At that price, heck, even if you only play it for a few hours total, it's probably still worth it. I doubt it's going to really creep up into superstar status, rivaling King of Fighters or Street Fighter, but it's not a bad game so far, and there are a lot of things that it does do really quite right. It's also the repository of a whole bunch of lost Street Fighter characters, the legacy of the EX spin-off series, and the fact that it has Terry Bogard as a DLC character opens up interesting crossover possibilities that I wish more of these jokers would get on board with. Let's face it, the fighting game genre isn't the top of the heap anymore like it was in the early to mid 90s, and all of the developers need to do more to keep their brands and their profile higher, I think. Or at least keep their existing fanbase excited to keep coming back for more. Big crossover games, and characters that are familiar but in a new setting, like Terry in this game, or Akuma in Tekken 7, or a female Skullomania in the SNK Heroines game is a fun concept, and fans eat that kind of stuff up. Keep doing more of it! In fact, that whole crossover potential is part of what prompted me to start this blog and the Google Sites for Karate Supers that I have. Sure, sure... I could just collect and play these games on my own. I could even record my playthroughs or something and put them on YouTube. But what I really want to do is imagine what it would be like to imagine this whole thing as the "karate supers cinematic universe" which, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, would tell stories, somewhat "remixed" or redone with occasionally very different details to them, and mix up characters who otherwise might not be seen together in the same games already.

Terry Bogard appearing with the "lost" Street Fighter characters from the EX games in Fighting EX Layer is just a tiny taste of what I'd like to see more of.