I'm going to give you my honest review about this game! I'm someone that played the original game before making a purchase here on Steam, in fact I bought just because I could support the devs once more to make an awesome doujin game, but unfortunante I have some criticism to do over here.
[h1] Comparing Japanese version to Steam release[/h1]
First, this release is very very and I mean very different in comparison to the original I cared so much. This Steam release uses pretty much the same game engine which makes the whole interface in Japanese only (which can't be very good for English audiences) and dialogues in-game in English (Which probably is going to make Japanese people be disappointed). The game doesn't have difficulty in the game menu, but I think the difficulty is related to the speed of the game which can be adjusted on options.
In the title screen It's the same game in comparison to the same Sono Higurashi vs Touhou Universe 2 Special Edition, but then when you proceed I noticed this Steam release have more characters, more BGMs, more Characters and also a final true ending boss which is also new in comparison. Also story itself is very different in comparison to the original, so I made a list of the main differences:
[list]
[*] New Characters for you to play with
[*] Existent characters + New ones are in high resolution in comparison to the original game
[*] New fresh story
[*] New control scheme
[*] New moves!
[*] New bosses in the end (Good luck trying against them)
[*] Some characters were removed in this version also, I guess for the fact they were broken and not balanced like 圭一さん, but at same time some new characters are completely broken, like 早苗さん which you get your distance and she will pop up her magic, you get close to her she will grab you and 1/4 of your health bar will be gone with just one grab, but don't worry she likes to grab you a lot in no time you will lose already on Stage 3 or with her.
[*] Bugs! Yeah It happens very often in this version, for some reason when you knock out an opponent it just refuses to go down and the character will be stuck in the knockdown animation forever until the game shows up the "dialogue finished".
[*] No Online Multiplayer, only Local (Maybe It can work using Remote play, but didn't have time to test it with someone)
[*] Music in each stage start playing from the beginning, they removed the intro music it had to make the transition to the stage.
[*] No Japanese language, only English for dialogues, also no way to change back to Japanese... (Now even with improvements make the Japanese version be obsolete, but I still love the original, so I will keep playing the original instead)
[*] Sometimes you read the dialogues and it seems it was translated directly using a translator tool since some sentences don't make sense or are often rough to read and understand a sentence... (I can be wrong again, but I believe no human translated this to English, or the person had a very limited English knowledge which for a title like this would make sense, since the budget is not that crazy)
[/list]
[h1]In resume:[/h1]
If this is your first time playing a doujin game like this, I would recommend you to give it a try. It can look junky in the beginning and very unresponsive, but keep in mind this tilte is old, from the 90's era for Windows 98, XP and Vista, so don't expect to be a King of Fighters or any modern game you played before...
Also this concept is nothing new, I played fan-games using IRL characters in a fighting style before from other countries, maybe Japan is the pioneer, but other countries also did the same thing.
Now if you are a fan of Touhou and Higurashi series, you probably are going to like more the music of this game and it's going to grow on you, so for that I recommend buying the soundtrack also, believe me you won't be disappointed.
[code]Me personally, I like weird fighting games like this... Honestly any weird game Japan can deliver me, I'm up to give it a try, but again I already knew about this title before and because I have a lot of care for the original release, I'll keep playing that version instead, but if you never played before then I recommend the title. For people that's like me, have the original and want to see what was improved in this release or maybe the original don't run on modern system anymore and if you don't mind the differences I said before, then I think you wouldn't mind getting this version. [/code]
[h1] Game I would recommend[/h1]
https://store.steampowered.com/app/546390/Brief_Karate_Foolish/
