Unlike the Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm series which is more and more a mess of technical, balance and
gameplay issues these days, Brave Soldiers delivers what is a nice, franchise - based fighting game,
at first, i was expecting a simple fighting game with some button mashing, however, the game proved me wrong and i fell in love, the combo system, while easy, is a lot more deep than the one in the Naruto games, with all of the characters having two special attacks, two «burst attacks», a knock - away and a launcher respectively, a throw and an ultimate attack (called a «Big Bang Attack»), every character also has an universal dodge - action that sends them behind their enemies while spending one cosmo bar, making bar management that much precious and shielding you from a half - a-hour combo, unlike in the NUNS series, the fighting and the characters are nicely balanced, with every character being fun to play and viable
at the same time, the game runs smoothly without frame - rate issues and the cell - shaded graphics, character models, arenas and effects alike are nice to the eye, battles are divided into rounds, with all the tiny nice stuff like character introductions and outros being intact (fun fact: the characters will even comment on their score after the battle), the game also features an awakening system, called the «Seventh Sense» awakening, unlike the NUNS awakening system which became severely unbalanced in the later game, every character simply gains a damage / defense boost, with the conditions being the same for all characters, eliminating
situations when one character can use awakening
at almost any point in the battle, or one awakening being drastically stronger than the other, the game has a story mode with three story arcs used to unlock characters, a collection mode, tournament modes, a survival mode, a series of special versus modes and online battle modes.
Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy served as an inspiration for few names and
situations (Dite, the world the game is set in; Charon Corps, the game tasked with the exploration of this world; the AI named after Vergil, and so on), which as an Italian I particularly enjoyed, but isn't as deep as hinted
at during the first hour or so of
gameplay.
Valley of the Yetis is more Far Cry 4
gameplay that,
at times, forces you to approach familiar
situations differently, but it does not have the same spark as the source material.