Rivals of Aether II

I'm having fun playing this game casually with friends, but it's because we're furries and choosing to have fun with the furry game. Character actions and movement are not conducive to casual play. Many 'fun buttons' from Smash are shortened (in range and duration), complicated, and otherwise nerfed, making them unintuitive and unwieldy. Totally appropriate for its primary audience that's mastered platform fighter movement... But I like when a character is fun out-of-the-box, you find simple uses for each of their moves, and you can pepper in fancy stuff at your leisure. Only 2-4 characters are like that. Was hoping the casual-focused Fun-For-All update would smooth the gap. But the items and hazards aren't a hit with my friends. And [i]I love casual Smash.[/i] It just doesn't compare. They're balanced to be nuanced and less disruptive than Smash equivalents, contextualized in the world and art style of [i]Rivals[/i], lacking the shorthand of simple, toony iconography... adding a significant learning curve to have fun [i]in the silly for babies mode.[/i] I'd like to play more with em, but friends'd rather not, and it's rare to get a Casual game online at more than 2. At this rate they'll have to make another set of items and hazard stages that are more obviously fun in a Fun-For-All-For-Real-This-Time update. I'd only recommend this game if you wanna play it seriously and/or are a furry. If you could play Smash Ultimate with better online, I would recommend that 9.999 times out of 10.

only losers play this game

If you like any smash bros, or any other platform fighter, this is a good one. Everybody is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in a fun way, the game has pretty solid balance once you get the hang of it, and it's approachable. The deep technical skill and fun movement iconic to the genre is far less mechanically daunting in this game. You will have fun hitting people, and if you give yourself the time to learn the intricacies, it's a fun competition.

I've tried my best to like this game over the course of its lifetime, but it seems like each update the game gets worse and worse to play. The game is less optimized than before, runs poorly on some devices (luckily not mine, but some of my friends weren't so lucky), and latency has gotten worse overtime to the point the game feels sluggish and mushy no matter how high your fps is. The bugs get worse every single update, the game frequently crashes, and generally the game just feels worse than when it came out. The balancing is horrible, and no update has actually fixed it. The developers seem to actively ignore player feedback in favor of what they see as broken, and it has resulted in a game that's an unbalanced mess. Even when the devs do make the right call on nerfing a top tier character, they do it with band-aid fixes that either barely change anything at all (e.g. adding 1 extra frame to Clairen tilt attacks, which doesn't change her insane combos, her grab game, or how tipper stun makes comboing extremely easy) or don't fix the underlying problem with the character and instead makes it less fun to play them (e.g. Kragg up-b and side-b nerfs, which does make his offstage play less effective, but in the least engaging way possible that practically removes a core aspect of his gameplan). Meanwhile, low tiers suffer in this game, not being given any real balance changes at all. This makes for a meta that somehow feels volatile and stagnant at the same time. I want to like this game, I really do. But the blatant ignorance of the devs and the sorry state the game runs in right now just makes it not worth it to play over something like PM or Melee for me. I simply can't recommend anyone play this game right now.

I don't often leave reviews but this game is just that horrible. To go from such a unique and well made game as rivals 1 to this buggy, un-responsive, poorly done hitboxes is extremely sad. Why try to be a smash clone when you did your own thing SO well the first time? Going 3D just leads to so much jank. If you want a new and fresh 2D fighter go get A Few Quick Matches instead.

Is not as fun as the first game. Feels like it lost what made the series a great addition to the platform fighter genre.

Game is terribly optimized - loading times are horrendous. Options they display don't even work (Ex. In arcade LT + RT + Y = runback. No it doesn't. It just brings you to the game over screen anyway.) If you mess up in arcade and are trying to mash through, don't worry you can accidentally press B and ruin all your progress! It won't ask if you're sure - it's just gonna send you back to the character select and you can think about what you've done. Could complain about ranked but what's the point - just a scrub right? xd

This game only rewards counterhitting. 90%+ of all interactions are won by mixing up shield, parry, spotdodge, and CC. Because most moves have 0 end lag after them, the defense was cranked up to 11 to compensate. Probably the worst fighting game I own, when movement, spacing, footsies and advantage barely matter at all.