UNDER NIGHT IN-BIRTH II Sys:Celes Review
“A Great Night Fight!” Written by: Kyle (@RunicBlade98)
You know, I wasn’t expecting a lot when I played the open beta for Under Night 2. I was familiar with the series, thanks to dumping an unhealthy amount of hours into BBTag, but I had never actually played an Under Night game before. I figured I’d try the demo, then hop back on Guilty Gear and forget about this game. However, once I hopped in and started playing, I was immediately hooked.
Everything about the game just hit correctly. From the gameplay, to the music, to the visuals. Everything about it was just good, simple fun. By the time that the weekend ended, and the beta test closed down, I immediately wanted more. But I wouldn’t get more for another two months!
And now here we are! Under Night In-Birth 2 [Sys: Celes] is finally here! How is it, and how does it stack up to other games in this fighting game renaissance that we’ve been in over the last three years? Let’s take a look!
Image Credit: Arc System Works
Under Night is a 2D, one-vs-one fighting game created by Soft Circle French Bread, and published by Arc System Works. The goal is to take away all of your opponent’s health and win two rounds before your opponent does.
Okay, now that the five people who haven’t played a fighting game are caught up, Under Night is a 4-Button fighter where you play competitive tug-of-war against your opponent. All of the characters’ moves consist of light, medium, and heavy attacks. You’ve got a meter for special attacks and super moves. This is all basic stuff if you’ve played a fighting game in the last decade.
However, there are two things that set UNI apart from its peers: the Grid Gauge, and its combo system. The Grid Gauge is the previously mentioned tug-of-war mechanic, and acts as the game within the game. The Grid Gauge consists of twelve blocks and completes a cycle every 13 seconds. When a cycle completes, the player with the most blocks gains a slight damage boost, and the ability to cancel their moves. This adds another thing to pay attention to in the match, but it won’t make or break any matches for you.
Image Credit: Arc System Works
Next, the combo system. In most fighting games, you’re only allowed to combo one way: light, into medium, into heavy. However, French-Bread games work a little differently. They implement a mechanic called “Reverse Beat”. Essentially what this means is that you can combo into moves of any attack strength, but the trade off is that once you use a move, it’s locked out until the combo ends (with the exception of crouching lights).
I really love this combo system as it allows the player to employ more of a freeform approach to combat, rather than something like Street Fighter where combos can be somewhat flowcharty.
Not to mention the fact that this Reverse Beat system is perfect for newcomers. What do newcomers like to do? MASH! With a system that somewhat encourages mashing, it will help new players not get discouraged because even if they don’t fully understand how everything works, they can at least do some combos, regardless of how good they are.
One last mechanic worth mentioning is “Smart Steer”. This is a feature where if you repeatedly hit your standing light attack, your character will perform an auto combo. Another good feature, giving newcomers a short combo on demand. Obviously something like this will only get a new player so far, but it will at least get them started.
Image Credit: Arc System Works
To me, the biggest selling point of this game is the characters. Under Night’s roster is filled with some of the most cracked characters I’ve used in any fighting game. Let’s look at Vatista. If you’re familiar with Guile from Street Fighter, her gameplay is similar. She’s a charge character, meaning that you hold a direction for a bit, then quickly press the opposite direction and an attack button to do your move.
Vatista takes this one step forward though. Not only does she have the typical back-to-forward and down-to-up charges, but she ALSO has forward-to-back and up-to-down charge moves. Meaning that she not only has access to a flash kick and fireball, but she also gets a full screen laserbeam (which is also an anti-air) and a divekick!
And every character has their own brand of crazy offense in this game. Byakuya is a setplay character whose game plan revolves around knocking down the opponent and setting up these spider webs to trap them. Carmine sacrifices a bit of his own HP to do his special moves, but can get it back with a well placed command grab on the opponent.
This game has TWO flavors of grappler: traditional big body, and a more agile, hit and run grappler. Merkava has funny noodle arms and can send out these little worm guys. Seth and Hilda are two different styles of not letting your opponent not play the game. Yuzu is who you play if you want to break your fingers. Chaos fights with a dog. And this is all without talking about the three new characters they added to this game!
Kaguya is a gun-kata waifu character, meaning that she’s going to be incredibly popular online so like it or not you’re going to learn how to fight her. Tsurugi is a super cool character. This dude fights with a massive shield, and he can use it like a skateboard! This gives him a unique movement option that no one else in the cast has. Finally there’s Kuon. For all intents and purposes, this is a boss character, similar to Akuma from Street Fighter. You know, if Akuma could shred your lifebar from the next town over.
From a pure quality standpoint, this might be my favorite roster of characters from any fighting game I’ve played. Every character feels different from one another, and I can see why someone would play any character in this roster.
Image Credit: Arc System Works
Summary
Under Night 2 is a great game. From the zany cast of characters, to the addictive, freeform combat, to the absolute banger of a soundtrack, it’s a game that I think anyone can pick up and sink dozens of hours into.
The lack of meaningful single player might be a turn off to some, but that’s kind of expected of modern fighting games. The focus has been turned to giving great online experiences against other people, rather than a short, single player campaign to go through.
We’re not in the PS2 or PS3 era anymore. We’re in a time where playing fighting games online against other people is actually good thanks to Rollback Netcode. At the end of the day, this game is just fun, and sometimes that’s all you need! The thing with fighting games is that you’ll get out as much as you put in. You can be as casual, or as competitive with it as you want to be.
I think that this game is harder to get into than something like Street Fighter, mostly due to not having easy inputs for special moves, but it’s just as fun once it all starts to click.