Through the Night

Back when I reviewed the original Uni released on the PS3 nearly a decade ago, I praised it for its stylish animations and a deep combat engine. While I was impressed, I did not get too deep into the game, not playing it after my review had been completed. However, with Blazblue seemingly dead and buried, I have been looking for a new anime fighter to dig into and become at the very least, above average at. So when I played the demo of Uni 2 and loved the characters/animation and the sheer amount of freedom I was given in terms of combo expression, I decided that I would give Uni 2 my full attention when it fully released.

I’m sure there is a cohesive story in here somewhere, maybe.

MSRP: $49.99
Platforms: PC, PS4/5, NSW
Voice Over: JPN only
Played: 20~ hours

As more modern fighting games like Tekken, MK and SF have put a lot of resources in their story mode, trying to tell a compelling narrative to hook players, Uni 2 unfortunately doesn’t do much of that. The existing “story” is just an arcade mode with each character going through a gauntlet of fights with some interactions with other characters sprinkled in infrequently and after only a handful of minutes, it ends. I’m sure there is some sort of an overarching story going on here but even after playing through the arcade mode a few times with different characters, I didn’t really get a sense of anything. It’s a bit of a shame because there’s a cast of larger than life characters and I would have liked to have gotten to know more about them.

However, given that this is a fighting game, I don’t really feel it needs to have a big story and instead decided to focus on the gameplay and its various complex mechanics.

As daunting as it might seem, it’s worth going through the entire tutorial if you are a newcomer to the series.

As noted before, the original Uni was a complex fighter and Uni 2 only went further to add various new mechanics to the mix. Additional defensive and offensive options are available to all existing and new characters alike along with new properties to use the “GRD” meter which serves to constantly judge the flow of combat and reward those using its systems well with a burst of power and potent tools.

Given how important “GRD” was to the flow of combat, my inability to use it properly against veteran players was my greatest downfall which cost me a great deal of matches but I did not mind at all, knowing that if I invested the time learn its mechanics, I could play on the same playing field which would feel quite rewardingly. Having said that, I won’t go into the finer details of the numerous mechanics in the game as that would result in this review being 20 pages long but let the fact that there are 179 stages in the tutorial mode speak for itself.

As for my choice of character, I chose the newcomer “Kaguya” as my main this time around. As a wielder of two guns, this acrobatic vixen could control the space full screen with her beam attacks and when the opportunity presented itself, set up various grenades so that her opponents had no other choice than to block and take the incoming mix up. Even though she didn’t feel particularly strong compared to some of the others in the roster, I found making combos and oki situations for her in training mode to be especially fun and spent hours doing exactly that.

Speaking of new characters, I was not given immediate access to the boss character “Kuon” or the season pass that’s supposed to come with a purchase of the game during the launch window till March with the review code but I won’t hold it against them as I assume it’s some code type logistics issue. Having said that, given how expensive fighting game DLC is nowadays (looking at you GBVS:R and MK!), it’s quite generous for them to give away the first season pass with the purchase of the game.

Taking it online to fight against players to find frequently occurring situations and getting back into the lab to create new setups/combos was a lot of fun.

One of my major complaints about other fighters that have come out recently is how inflexible the combo expression and pressure feels and this is where I feel Uni 2 excels the most. I could easily create 4-6 different combos from each confirmed hit and since they all did similar amounts of damage, I could just choose the ones I like the most in terms of styles and execution. Setting up favorable options on oki was always a good idea as well and I used the feature full training mode to its potential, I often found myself lost in my own theory crafting which is an element of fighting games I quite enjoy.

The rollback netcode also felt quite responsive once the launch week patches were released as that resolved the issues with constant crashing and inconsistent connections. As of writing this review, I find the online play to be quite good for the most part, having tested it against opponents across the world with varying bars of connection.

Unfortunately, the launch woes have done no favors to the game in terms of player base, already having lost over 30% according to steam charts and as I was often just sitting waiting for my next Casual match or Ranked Match which would not pop even after waiting for more than 5 minutes, it makes me concerned about the future of the game, especially without crossplay.

The launch issues also brings me to the status of the PC port which is honestly, quite embarrassing. Not only does the game not feature any meaningful graphic options or modern features to improve performance, it doesn’t even have a borderless fullscreen mode and the aspect ratios provided as options seem broken when I try to set it to 21:9, the resolution of my ultrawide monitor, it just squished the window even further. It seems this PC port was done by “Cyclone Zero” which seems to have done many other PC ports in the past and their track record is honestly, god awful. Either they need to step up their efforts or Arcsys would be better off looking for a better PC port studio going forward.

The launch window of a fighting game is crucial to its success because that’s when the player base decides to stick around or not and when the game is quite literally unplayable online for days after release, people will lose interest very quickly. Worse yet, the same exact thing happened with French Bread’s other great fighter Melty Blood: Type Lumina not long and here it is, happening once more.

I can only find a handful of player rooms and it takes a long time to find casual/rank matches even though the game is quite new.

It’s really quite a shame because at its core, Uni 2 is a wonderful fighter with incredible depth and plenty of style to spare. The sheer amount of freedom in how I can control my character is second to none in all the fighters I’ve played but the awful PC port and the numerous game breaking issues on launch that have resulted in a dwindling player base makes it harder to recommend than it should be.

Fun Tidbit: At least the soundtrack is still fantastic and the new remixes were wonderfully arranged. I must’ve heard this song playing for 15 hours in training mode with Kaguya but I’m still not sick of it.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.