Dogshit game full of smurfs and toxic people

I put about 1000ish hours into Rivals 1. That game was very solid despite them messing up the balancing and making characters that were just awful to play against (Etalus, Ori, Clairen). I wanted to hope they learned from that but no, they somehow got worse. Floor Hugging and Crouch Cancelling are way too strong to the point I stopped having fun. It punishes you for hitting your opponent in a fighting game. Olympia is yet another awful character to play against. Yes, everything she does is safe and her recovery isn't even close to the worst in the game. Clairen for some reason gets to ignore Floor Hugging and CC with her tippers. WHY? In its current state, you are better off downloading and emulator and playing melee. Or hacking your switch and playing HDR. Or going outside.

Devs have made a series of either incredibly annoying to play against gimmicky characters or incredibly overpowered characters when compared to the rest of the cast, sometimes both, Unless you are a massive furry don't waste your time with this game. Rivals 1 is about x2 as fun,and satisfying to play and costs 1/5th the price.

If Rivals 1 is Melee PC, than Rivals 2 is Ultimate PC, except 2/3 of the characters play like Steve and Simon Please keep in mind that I was looking for something else out of this game. I've been in a platform fighter itch and wanna play against people, but I'd rather kill myself than willingly interact with smash fans in person again. so I'd rather play online, but we all know how bad smash online is so we got no other choice but to choose Slippi, or other games. I'll start with the positive, The art style and animation are fucking amazing, I will say it looks way less impressive and more cheap on a lot of videos of the game and i don't know why (i think the shaders are fucking up the video compression or something idk). The attention to detail on these character animations is god tier, Like Absa's Little eye twitch towards the cloud in the victory screen. Ranno losing his composer and his facial expression reflects that before regaining himself. and I honestly don't mind the skins ...

I really enjoy a fighting game where my best option in 99% of situations is to grab, I usually play fighting games (the genre about movement and reading opponent's decisions) to grab people endlessly and use my 2-3 disjoints to avoid being grabbed. Did I mention how much I enjoy grabbing? If not, let it be known, you sure can grab your opponent in Rivals of Aether II.

As a fighting game player and Casual Smash player, this game really pick my interest on competitive Smash like. I really love the focus on this sequel, the first game it's really a unique thing and I really appreciate it that i idea, it's something that I always say it's a really cool and deep concept BUT the sad thing is after I know that the first game has some cool ideas and unique things It doesn't tickles me like this sequel, it's really engaging and I think it truly innovates and understands what's cool about all of this genre and put it on this labor of love. For me keep it up and put a huge roster, oh that's important! Compared to Smash, I tested out all the characters here and something I really loved compared it's that on Rivals 2 every characters looks really deep and full of mechanics that are really fun for me on casual eye! So if you put more characters I prefer to maintain this quality and don't add characters just to have more, that's something on Smash really drives...

If you've got a lot of time to play it's fun. Otherwise there are better fighting games with a less toxic community.

This game tries to be the competitive king while also trying so hard to hang onto dumb mechanics from Melee. If you have been playing since then, I'm sure you'll love it. I think it's a lot of pedantic garbage that makes it less fun to play. Instead of pushing the genre forward, this feels like a step in the wrong direction. More exclusionary, more sweats, less enjoyment.

Lore is really good. The game is almost 2 years old and is still basically in beta. No full tutorial. No Single Player mode, Balance patches have been all over the place while leaving some characters in the dust. About half of the characters get disproportionately more than the rest off of universal mechanics like parrying and spot dodging. While a fun platform fighter undoubtedly, like many others, its integrity crumbles at top level, even in tournament results. Doesn't help that it attracts a certain "crowd" and the balance team tends to listen to said crowd complain on their reddit page for "official" advice.

Every live service game has some tension between how the devs imagine a game should be played and how the player base actually plays it. Good devs lean into what the players like while adding their own flair. These devs are apparently not good devs. These devs have shown a tendency to completely rework characters because they aren't being played in the devs ideal vision well after the characters release. It's a complete fuck you to players who have spent 100s of hours learning a character