Review: Battle Fantasia

Posted by Brad T on January 18th, 2010 | 0 Comments | Tags: Battle Fantasia

Battle Fantasia, an arcade port, brought right to your room via the PlayStation Network store. It was released in both the US (on Xbox 360) and Japan as a full retail game before finally making it’s way here. At a glance, you’ll instantly notice the game has some charm, but how does it stack up?

To start off, I jumped right into arcade mode to get a feel for the game. Turns out, it’s not hard to pick up, unlike so many other fighters out there. With a simplistic control setup, a hardcore player may not like this as much as Street Fighter IV or BlazBlue, but for anyone else (I’m no combo-fiend) it works out pretty well. The game touts a “heat-up” mode, that boosts characters abilities, and special moves, which adds to the variety of gameplay.

Me and my catgirl, Coyori, were pulling off special moves left and right. Yeah you didn’t read that wrong… catgirl, Battle Fantasia’s got a wild cast of characters. From Watson the bunny to the Fire-Knight Deathbringer, this isn’t just a Ken vs. Ryu kind of thing, everyone is really original. The trade-off here is that the roster isn’t very big, only sporting 12 fighters. An interesting aspect to this game is that all fighters have different HP values, which sets them apart but none too drastically… except for Donvalve, a fatass with 9300 hit points.

As “kawaii” as it was, I really liked the game’s fantasy/anime/over-the-top art-style. That said, with such interesting characters, it’s a shame that some of the arenas weren’t as well done. Battle Fantasia has a good soundtrack, but lacks user soundtrack features which were kind of a bummer. All voice acting is in Japanese, but this doesn’t detract too much from the game. I am sure there are some of you out there that may prefer this.

This port boasts numerous game modes and has a full story for each character with alternate paths. When you complete parts of the story you can unlock character art, movies, and alternate costumes. There are Arcade, Story, Vs, Survival, Time Attack, and Online modes. I was a bit disappointed though when I tried to play online, I was only ever able to find an opponent once, so this mode, while done well, doesn’t have a userbase to really play much with it.

While it doesn’t have the depth of some fighting games, I didn’t think I’d enjoy Battle Fantasia as much as I did. If you’re looking for a new fighter to put some time into, give this one a shot. But make sure you have some friends that are willing to get it as well. Just so you aren’t left to playing this only against the computer.

A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here. This review is for the PlayStation 3 version of the game.