Go Fight Fantastic! demo playthrough (Next Fest June 2023)
1This hack'n'slash demo ended up on my radar after seeing Cypherin play it earlier in the week. Its hand-drawn/animated art style really stands out, so I wanted to see how its mechanics hold up.
At first glance, some of the mechanics vaguely reminded me of games like Lone Ruin, in terms of having a bunch of different attacks with cooldowns, and having a horde mode with intermittent upgrades. Unlike the Lone Ruin demo I played last year, however, Go Fight Fantastic's demo contains _both_ horde mode _and_ a preview of its story mode, for a more complete idea of what's in store.
The story mode feels rather brawler-esque, in terms of needing to fight your way through a room at a time and clear it before moving on. It definitely took me some time to get the hang of how I wanted to utilize each character's moveset, but it eventually became clear how to use them to my advantage.
You'll collect various resources throughout story mode, including meteorites, which you can use to improve your characters' abilities back at the hub. There's also a NG+ mode available for the story, which is where I realized just how drastically meteorites can improve both survivability and power - enemies felt like they outright melted and I barely broke a sweat, in contrast to my first playthrough where I hadn't equipped any. NG+ does change up enemy formations and also adds new enemies to the mix, to keep things interesting.
Horde mode is, as one might expect, wave-based, giving you the opportunity to select one of three upgrades (e.g. more powerful abilities/attacks, or faster cooldowns/attacks/movement). You've got 10 minutes to get as far as you can, so you need to make time count - but you'll be hard-pressed to do so as you progress, as later waves become increasingly dangerous.
The demo presents a very solid and promising foundation; the thing I'm most curious about is how long the full story mode will be. In terms of areas for improvement, I'd love to see the options screen expanded. Being able to rebind controls would be great, especially LB/RB given how confusing I found character-swapping to be (it feels reversed from how it should be, given the HUD). Having some accessibility options e.g. ability to reduce/remove screen flashes would also be nice; maybe also figuring out a way to show active cooldowns closer to the character?
One aspect of gameplay I'd like to see improved is clearer feedback when a character becomes incapacitated - right now as far as I can tell there's no sound or animation, they're just suddenly flat on the ground. I like a well-executed anime-style frame-perfect faceplant as much as the next person, but I reckon losing a teammate is something that should really be clearly and unmistakably called out.