okay i picked out another fighting game since the fate stay night one was like the only good game i’ve found so far.


despite sounding like a new melty blood update, act cadenza strife is actually a tales of fan game. apparently it was developed by the ACT Tails Stuoid, Limited. presumably they limited their use of spell check


at first i wasn’t gonna even post the title screen because it’s so ugly and boring but i decided to parade it out like one of those fucked up pictures where someone writes “I’M A STUPID ASS DOG AND I PISS ON THE FLOOR” and tapes it to their dog. please don’t tape dumbass posters to your dog he can’t even fucking read let alone write.
anyways the big transgression here is no training mode. how the fuck do you release a fighting game and not have a training mode? making a training mode is literally the easiest possible thing you can do, you just make a regular ass level but make the computer not do attacks. jesus christ.


here’s the character select screen. tons of fuckers from all over the place. i actually had to download and install each part of the character select screen individually. it was something like four characters at a time. at first i thought this was a way of customizing your game so you can keep those filthy tales of eternia fuckers out but the game crashed when i didn’t have them all in there so i ended up getting everyone.

my controls weren’t set up properly so i couldn’t pick my dude. luke phone faberge on easy mode will have to do i guess.


i’m up against this fuck who might be from destiny??? i don’t know. his hands are chained together as part of a bdsm experiment gone wrong so he copes by kicking me in the dick.

the HUD is a fucking mishmash. HP and TP are unique assets i think but the overlimit bar at the bottom looks copy pasted from vesperia? the opponent even has his own special meter copy pasted from a different game. dope. also love how the meters take up a full quarter of the screen it’s like i’m really playing a JRPG


this was on easy mode so i spent 90% of the time just swinging my sword vaguely in front of my face and watching angsty kamina walk into it, but i wanted to find some moves. the control scheme in this game is an enigma wrapped in a riddle. it’s a six button game but some of the buttons do the same thing as other buttons and some of them do nothing sometimes. it also has absolutely nothing to do with a standard tales game control scheme. blocking is street fighter style instead of with a button, pressing forward when you attack doesn’t change the attack and there wasn’t an artes button. off to a great start.

eventually after a great struggle i managed to find a single move which was fucking demon fang. it was a quarter circle which i guess makes sense. this was all i really found so i spammed it to victory


stage 2 was against this angry gramma with a shotgun.
i managed to find this rising uppercut type move which is down+attack. why in the name of fuck would you hold down to do a rising attack.
it also appeared to have no invincibility and generally fucking suck but hey it’s the best i had. you can combo into pretty much all your special moves by just mashing attack a bunch and then doing the special. that’s fairly accurate to the normal tales games so props to ACS tails stuoid limited for getting that one right.


next fight i tried the same thing and these feathercapped sheep fucker responded by calling it an orbital satellite strike on me. thanks bitch i’m glad you brought the death star to a sword fight


not ten seconds later that dude disappears and sends out his daughter. you might recognize her outfit from every season of toddlers and tiaras, or your nightmares

she threw a bunch of carnival plastic hammers at me. this one was electric blue raspberry flavor so it inflicted slushee type damage. there was also a green apple one that caused poison


luke was 110% done with this shit so he peaced out and flew into the sun, never to be heard from again. good night, sweet prince


next up is my homeboy assbel. as you can see by actual damage occurring to the opponent i had a much better time with him. he has the CC meter on his side, which basically lets you combo everything together by holding a direction and mashing. this seems kinda stupid in a fighting game setting but it was a lot more fun that trying to take apart the da vinci code to figure out how to do moves with luke.

i actually beat graces, the game this auburn haired cadillac of men hails from, so i knew how to do some combo shit. it’s p. fun just doing the familiar inputs and seeing your favorite moves come out.


throughout the fight this chick kept trying to set me up with her widowed fish but i was having none of it. i decided to take matters into my own hand and whip out my katana, a traditional medieval european weapon.


as you’d expect she got fucking bodied. pulling out the sword also works the same as in graces, where you have a sword button that lets you quickdraw and then changes your moves to sword moves. i could only get like two sword moves to reliably come out though, i guess that’s where the confusing bullshit is for this character.

i decided it would be nice to actually perform some special moves, so i went looking for a movelist and decided to switch characters again.


here’s yuri, a member of the russian mafiya who got a little too pissed off and became anime. i’ve played a bit of vesperia so i sorta know what he should be doing but i’ll be fucked if i could make it come out in this system. my best combo was three fireballs in a row and i’m pretty sure that if i saw that happen in any other game i would pop the disc out immediately and frisbee it into the wall.


i did figure out a super though. there’s a super button i guess? but you can only press it after doing a special move. that’s kinda similar to how it works in most tales games so i see why they went with that approach.
anyways supers are fucking sick. wow. the animation is super detailed and there’s tons of flair in the particle effects and shit. accuracy to the source material was a major concern here, even if it meant this dude had to painstakingly recreate every frame of a 3d model’s animation in 2d. i guess that means this game is also better than marvel infinite


next up is stahn and he pounded my dick in.

so even though i looked up the movelist for yuri i wasn’t really able to perform much of it. the main problem is that it made no fucking sense. there’s 6 attack buttons, which is like twice as many as you need in a regular tales game. they decided to compensate by assigning moves to button completely at random. sometimes an uppercut with be down+attack. sometimes it will be half-circle back, forward+super. there are at least two buttons that i’m not sure actually do anything. also there’s sometimes special requirements for a move, like you can only do it during a combo, when you’ve activated super mode, with at least 672 meter, on a Tuesday, after saying grace. really not sure what the fuck they were going for with some of these.


but the AI had no trouble pulling amazing combos out of its ass every 5 seconds. here’s stahn’s super where he gets pissed off and calls in dark phoenix from x-men to nuke the whole universe. it does OK damage

the AI is absolutely ruthless on just normal mode. even on easy they could do damage, but at least then they would wait a good 5 seconds between attacking so i could try to figure out the controls. i think yuri spent most of this fight with his ass glued to the east wall and a sword perforating all of his vital organs. even when you block this shit it tends to just go on forever, and then when the AI is really pissed you get guard broken and they start styling on you.


this was a weird ass thing. so in some of these tales games you have a bunch of air moves, and you can pretty much abuse them to stay in the air forever. that’s preserved here, so when stahn felt like playing hard to get he would set himself on fire and start kicking the ceiling for ten minutes. here’s a shot of him getting bored and deciding to give yuri a lobotomy by boot.

look at that dumbass motherfucker. he’s not even facing the right way. turn around moron you’re in a fucking sword fight


yuri died in the hospital so i switched chars again. for some reason cless from phantasia isn’t in this game, so i tried out lloyd from symphonia assuming he was the next best thing. most people seem to think this series starts and ends at symphonia anyway

i found out that there’s air dashes in this game though. there’s actually a bunch of movement options including double jumps, running, super jumps and all that shit. that could be fun to play around with eventually? once you learn how attacking works?


lloyd was pretty fun. i figured out a combo of attack > attack > tiger blade > tempest, which is roughly what you’d be doing in symphonia i think? at the very least i found moves that aren’t fireballs


i’m pretty sure i was playing on easy mode so the first fight wasn’t too hard to deal with. next up is this bitch who might be from phantasia? idk.

anyway he’s a mage/summoner type so he calls a bunch of assholes in to fight his battles for him. here’s a cute mermaid girl drilling through lloyd’s retina with a giant water spear.


i managed to figure out a super with lloyd too. for some fucked up reason his super is a motion but you can do it whenever, unlike yuri who had one button supers but you had to be in a combo. i cannot fathom why the fuck you would make them so different for something this simple.

at least the animation is cool


next up was the maid girl again and she absolutely kicked my ass. here’s a shot of her performing a super kamehameha, which i’m sure is a necessary step to clean the shitter


so at that point i had pretty much given up.

the game seems like it could be fun. there’s definitely a lot of love put into it, porting tales characters over as faithfully as possible and making all those animations for them. but i have no fucking clue how you could even play it when it doesn’t even follow its own rules.

i guess the idea is you pick the character you’re familiar with and just play them exactly like you would in their game, but even that’s kinda fucked up because the inputs for the moves is so bizarre. when you’re playing tales and you want to do a cool move you press like Up+Circle, not double quarter circle forward+who the fuck knows. maybe with more practice i could really like this game but i was not getting into it


i give this game three of the chick from yume nikki out of five

This post was last modified: Nov 26, 2017 at 3:43 AM by Draku.

woah that's actually really fucking cool. i want to try it sometime, a tales fightan sounds like the shit

>i’m up against this fuck who might be from destiny??? i don’t know. his hands are chained together as part of a bdsm experiment gone wrong so he copes by kicking me in the dick.

that's regal you dip