Critical Blow: Chiaki Ichinomiya Tournament Playthrough [Normal Difficulty, PS1(Duckstation): 1997]
11I've been playing Heaven's Gate for quite a while as of yesterday, but little did I know that the company that developed that game, Racdym, made a few other fighting games as well for the PS1 in a similar style. This one here is a pure Japanese exclusive called Critical Blow, which has a 2.5D presentation to it. I know even less about this particular game than I did about Heaven's Gate even after discovering it, but from what I got, it's a 3-button fighter (Punch, Kick and an Action button) that certainly goes all in on the 90s anime vibe with it's presentation and character design. It has KOF like forward rolls, air blocking like various Capcom fighters, string combos like DOA, position change throws akin to Tekken 4, and 3 bars of meter for super attacks (each character has one normal level 1 super and a level 3 Desperation super when at low health, named.... well, the "Critical Blow", that basically ends the round on the spot if it hits the opponent in a similar manner as BlazBlue's Astral Heats). What did take some getting used to is that despite being a 2.5D fighter with only 2 direct attack buttons, the cast has a lot of command moves, some doing the traditional direction+button input, and others requiring you to HOLD a direction before inputing the button (usually HOLD forward or back), which surely overlaps at times.
Here, I'm playing as Chiaki, the resident combo happy speedster girl of the roster (just my style naturally), and once again, she's got a move set I can totally gel with. Just like Heaven's Gate, this game is fun to play despite it's primitive nature (.....minus the final boss. SCREW that thing. Whoever thought having constant hyper armor on a giant monster in a 2.5D game with no way to tell when to punish him needs to be slapped. That being said, the exploit that I eventually wind up figuring out to beat him is downright hilarious... and heavily ironic considering my usual playstyle.)