Strip Fighter ZERO - Story Mode (Mikan)
10Purchase the game here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2249070/Strip_Fighter_ZERO/
Strip Fighter ZERO is yet another entry in StudioS's long-running lewd parody fighting game, continuing the series trend of parodying Capcom's Street Fighter series - more specifically, the Street Fighter Alpha (known as Street Fighter ZERO in Japan) sub-series of games. This game was originally released in DLSite around June 2022, with an English translation from Eroge Japan coming out on April 2023.
Like previous entries in the Strip Fighter franchise, Strip Fighter ZERO is a slow-paced, footsies-based fighting game, with dashes and backdashes being fast but short to reflect the game's pace. You can have up to three bars of super meter ("STRIP gauge") to play with, and this meter can only be used for super attacks ("Strip combos"), which are universally done by pressing 236236 + any attack button. Pressing A as your attack button gives you a level 1 strip combo (using up one bar of STRIP gauge), while B and C gives you level 2 (uses two bars) and level 3 (three bars) strip combos respectively. Unlike Street Fighter Alpha, where a similar system is used simply for stronger variants of a super attack, each level correlates to a different super attack.
There's also the RUSH gauge, which increases every time you take damage (in addition to slowly increasing automatically over time), and resets after each round. The RUSH gauge is only used for Strip Rushes, which can be activated by pressing F and requires at least one bar of RUSH gauge to activate. Strip Rushes are the "Custom Combo" parody function in this game (taken from the Street Fighter Alpha games), and is a state that allows you to cancel normal and special attacks into other normal and special attacks (as long as you have RUSH meter, which decreases under this state). Other mechanics include a forward roll you can do after being knocked down (by pressing 632), but since it's not invincible (and is therefore subsceptible to opponent attacks) I rarely use it.
0:00 Story Mode
In this playthrough, I play as Mikan, a guest character from Kotatsu Ice's Uchinoko Kakuge. Having lost her owner (because she's a part-cat), she decides to participate in a martial arts tournament, in the hopes that her owner would recognize her. What she would encounter instead, after going through all the trouble of defeating everyone else, is S, who then beats the ever-living shit out of Mikan despite her clearly besting him.
11:15 Hard Mode
As expected in a StudioS-developed fighting game, clearing Story Mode grants you the option to continue playing in Hard Mode, which involves fighting all of the playable cast (including mirror matches) under a more difficult AI. That's all, though, and since most of the cast has already been fought previously on Story Mode, there isn't much to talk about here.
24:52 End Screen
Mikan's story mode route mentioning an "owner" is strange, because AFAIK she doesn't have one in her source material. Maybe her friend Mizuki and that god she befriended Megi counts?