Okay. I bought this game out of curiosity, hoping to find a hidden gem. And, wow. It did not disappoint.

"Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy" has a plot. It is a mashup of "Destroy all Monsters," "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure," and any given episode of "WWE RAW." It's a profoundly weird narrative, but it is coherent.

Soooo...this game is set in a world where giant Godzilla monsters are real. However, all the huge city-stomping monsters signed some sort of treaty-thing agreeing to only battle each other in scheduled, televised, in-ring events to avoid needlessly wiping out humanity. However during a major title match, an evil monster with a box for a head breaks the rules by using a steel chair against his opponent. Then, when he realizes he's going to get disqualified, he summons a giant interdimensional sea slug to transport him back in time so he can alter the time stream continuum to retroactively prevent himself from ever losing of the match...and also become ruler of the world. So, now you must lead a group of benevolent monsters through time in order to set history right and presumably end the original title bout.

You with me?
This game is bananas! As its title implies, the gameplay follows the classic Final Fantasy formula of turn-based battles. And, given my description of the plot, you may be thinking the game's script is nothing but "LOL RANDUMB!!!1!" dialogue. But, no. This is a thoroughly fleshed out universe, with surprisingly three dimensional protagonists. So, the game's humor is genuinely pretty great! It's charming, funny, and character driven, even if all the characters are idiotic meat-heads.

Did I mention its presentation is also pretty darn phenomenal? The OST is full of original chip-tunes that do a more than serviceable job of setting each world's tone. There are enough fast-travel hot spots to prevent the game from ever dragging. And all encounter monsters are visible on the game's overworld, so there's no unwanted random battles. The pixel art in this game is legitimately impressive, and the graphics feature plenty of nods to the SNES Mode 7 eye-candy that defined 16-bit JRPGs.

However, this is not really a nostalgia game. It's its own thing. Despite all the references, "Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy" is its own stupidly crazy thing. This is a shockingly fresh game built on nostalgic mechanics. And that's a good thing. Players will need *something* familiar to keep them grounded in this lunacy. The fact that this is coming from such an obscure freelance Dev is awesome. This could easily have been a cheap RPGMaker project. But, no. The game is seemingly built from the ground up, and that gives it level of polish that really makes this labor of love shine. If this is any indicator of quality, I think we can expect some really amazing stuff from Super Walrus Games.

So, do I recommend "Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy?" Yes. To who? Well, you can't put a game as unique as this into a box. So, I won't. I recommend it to everyone. Everyone, buy this game.

Or, at least try the free demo. Yeah. It even has a free demo, for anyone who's on the fence. This game's great.

Well, I think this JRPG is hilarious, in a good way. I played a lot of different party-based RPGs over the years, but I never played a game that had such a funny approach to its narrative, aesthetic and overall design. Right away, I can clearly tell that developer put his heart and soul into this project, something that only a few games can get across. For example, there is a hero HQ where you can play mini-games, do an interview, change the soundtrack and interact with characters (not exactly a generic game). Even though it has decent RPG elements, the KBB's strength is within its narrative, creative aesthetic, smart-ass characters and a good sense of humor.

I really like all the extras that you get with this game, such as visual palettes, character profiles, side quests, and the ability to change the difficulty after you started. You can go to settings and choose between several visual themes like colorblind, desaturate, monochrome and inverted (in case you want the game to look more retro). As with most JRPGs, you can find several different playable characters with unique abilities. Each character has couple different attacks and most importantly, very unique personalities. So far I am not particularly impressed with its combat depth, it just does a decent job in that regard. However, you can equip different items and gain new abilities, making it somewhat above average when compared to similar games.


+ hilarious narrative IMO
+ competent JRPG gameplay / even some puzzles
+ awesome visual design, creative characters
+ fun extras (color palettes, choosing soundtrack)
+ mini games / side quests
+ you can change the difficulty after you started
+ save almost anywhere
+ decent UI


- I would like to see some features to improve the combat speed. It would be nice to have a "give up" feature so you don't have to finish a losing fight. The animation speed booster would be nice, assuming it could be implemented.
- I don't like the lack of enemy info

My initial Impression: Way above average

It may have generic JRPG gameplay, but the game really shines when it comes to narrative and creative aesthetic. I just love its sense of humor, probably the funniest game that I played this year. It has a very unique character design and many extra features. I honestly don't know what else you could ask for in this genre. Generally speaking, I almost never finish JRPGs because they tend to be very long, but I do want to find the time to get through this one.

One, if not the best, licensed games I've ever played. Great graphics, great music, rewarding secrets and side quests with plenty of bonus bosses and the like. It's also incredibly funny and just in general a total blast to play, no familiarity with the wrestling promotion the game is based off needed.

Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy is a charming and lighthearted throwback to JRPGs of the past, substituting swords and sorcery with the wonderful world of kaijus and wrestling. Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy is a definite recommendation to any fans of the JRPG genre.

With eight distinct party members, tons of sidequests to do, many enemies and bosses to face and countless NPCs to talk to and plethora of puns, Kaiju Big Battel has a new surprise around every corner. Accompanying the gameplay is an absolutely bopping soundtrack, pleasant pixel graphics and a whimsical tone that really ties everything together. Talking to every NPC and inspecting every nook and cranny is rewarded with funny banter and the later areas in the game have some of the funniest sequences of any game I've played.

A great little RPG for fans of Kaiju Big Battel. The combat in the game is decidedly average and doesn't hold much depth near the end besides just using your party's most powerful moves and the puzzles are pretty simple, but the game makes up for it in its writing, art, and music. A large portion of the Kaiju roster make their appearances in the game as party members, bosses, enemies, and side characters with a lot of on-brand humor in the writing.

If you're a fan of Kaiju Big Battel I definitely recommend the game - those looking for in-depth combat will have to look elsewhere, although people who are fans of comedy RPGs in general can still find some laughs in this game despite not knowing the source material. The ending stretch is probably one of the funniest things I've played in a RPG in a while, especially as a fan of KBB.

The game took me about 9 hours to beat, including the sidestories.

Probably the most fun that I've had with a bog standard RPG in the past decade.

For those that don't know, Kaiju Big Battel is a real wrestling institution where people dress in rubber suits and wrestle it out in the ring. You don't need any knowledge of the league to start here, but it'll give you an idea of what to expect. What if costumed WWE wrestlers went on a time traveling adventure?

With this expectation set: The writing is on point. It's silly, it's punny, and it's just the right level of dumb. This light-hearted theme is consistent across all aspects. It's in the dialog, it's in the battle messages, it's in the storytelling, in the quests and in the graphics style. It was never laugh out loud for me, but it was a constant smile.

While the writing and design are excellent, the gameplay is a strange bag of "It works the way you'd expect". It looks and feels like a simple, inoffensive Japanese Style RPG from the NES era.

The one area worth specific notice is the level design, It's the first JRPG I've played with a successful Souls-like design. The maps are small with visible enemies with a focus on interconnected paths and shortcuts. Use your HP/MP to clear one path a time and lock in your success by unlocking a door or finding a key item to the next path. Everything stays dead until you rest at the centralized save point.

This works great here.

If you're here for combat, put the game on Hard from the start. Despite the souls-like level design, it's not a challenging game. Instead of being "Well-balanced", it's what I call "Balanced for Fun." Nearly all characters/parties/builds are viable, but there are dozens of stupid OP options for you find.

The equipment system offers alot of freedom in building your characters include a "Badge" equipment slot that adds a free skill. Do you want your primary fighter to "Attack Twice"? What if your mage could "Regen MP" for an action? How about giving a free basic heal to your Healer or maybe it'd go better on your high-speed character for early activation? Is it worth equipping a weapon that sacrifices half your HP per normal attack for MASSIVE attack boost... what if we combined that with attack twice?

The freedom here was amazingly fun and led to my constantly switching out equipment and party combinations especially in the mid to late game. I was still experimenting with new ideas at the last boss.

My final party had somehow turned my healer into my main DPS, my fighter into a healer, my blue mage providing support fire and my rage tank into a backup healer with occasional high damage nukes.

So yeah, this is one of my strongest recommendations for a game that I can offer while still saying "It doesn't really bring anything new to the table." It's still ending up on my list of favorites because it's just that well implemented.

The archetype of a hidden gem!

Pro:

• Funy and lighthearted story
  
• Exploration elements, similar to Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass (but less difficult and complex though)
  
• Nice and unique art style. I could watch the "Victory!" screen the whole day!
  
• Well paced difficulty at Normal: encounters are always challenging but you'll rarely die, not much shopping and even less grinding is requried. At the end you might have to restock and rethink your approach, though. But that's a good thing!
  
• 8 unique party members to choose from
  
• It manages to suprise at a regular base (gameplay-wise as well as story-wise), so your playthrough will never get boring.
  
• Achievements have been added very late to the game, so all of them are rare and shiny! Me like shiny!
  
• Stop reading, really. Just give it a try!

Con (nitpicks basically):

• Well ... some of the early levels came with same high-pitched music which was a bit annoying?
  
• I played it with a controller, which was a bit messy at times (looking at you, Party Order menu!)
  
• Comparing stats of items could have been a bit easier, esp. in stores.

As somebody who came into this knowing only cursory amounts of what KBB is all about, but as somebody who plays an obscene amount of JRPG's, I absolutely love this game.

The characters are very easy to get into and their RPG crew niche is easy to figure out. Every member ends up having both a major job and a minor job they can play in battle (IE as you level up, Silver Potato goes from full-on Black Mage to Black Mage-Cleric with healing and M-ATK protection spells, Dusto Bunny the White Mage has a Dragoon-style jump attack to start, etc.), and everybody has a terrain ability that comes in handy, so everyone ends up being useful in their own way, and if you're like me and crave having a team all around the same level, grinding lesser-used crew members is not an issue. The game also implements some form of EXP Share, making leveling that much easier. The inclusion of Blue Mage-type Robox makes backtracking to get every spell there is a priority, and serves to remind you that backtracking is definitely a thing that should be done.

The story is simple, yet engaging, and spoilers aside I found every little side quest to be fun. There are numerous pop culture references (I marked out over the Twin Peaks references, ngl), and references you might not get if you're not a KBB fan, and it never takes itself super serious (which is just the impression I get from the source material, and I like that aspect of it). It's a fun kind of gloomy you get from a Saturday morning cartoon, where the heroes will triumph eventually but it's hardly sunshine and rainbows as you go, and you got jokes and puns galore. The game does encourage you to 100% the side quests, as the rewards you receive are definitely worth whatever you have to do to get them.

The actual RPG element of the game is robust, simple, and has very few hang-ups (more on that). Everyone has their niche, their sub-niche, and a gimmick they lean into hard (as a good wrestler does!) and everybody has times when they are useful and when they are not. The game's difficulty scaling is appreciated (I've been playing in "Danger Mode" which seems to be the Medium setting, for reference, and with a bit of grinding, have not found too many things difficult to traverse without figuring out what the gimmick was that I had to circumnavigate.) The Russia level seems to have a difficulty spike just due to the amount of enemies you encounter that can bop you hard, but the game's "touch the sprite to encounter" style allows you to more or less avoid them as long as you can. I've not finished the game, at the point of this review, but after 8 or so hours I feel like I've gotten pretty far into the story, having done almost all side-bosses save for one up until now.

My only hang-up is, as somebody who is a longtime RPG guy, have a bit of difficulty understanding the ATK and M-ATK differences for characters. It might just be me, but for example, I can't tell if American Beetle's magic attacks run off his ATK or M-ATK, and sometimes I can't tell this about certain enemies either, so I have a hard time deciding at times if I need to drop ATK or M-ATK/DEF or M-DEF for my opponents/raise them for my team. I usually just end up doing everything all-around, but that's sometimes very precious time spent adjusting stats when I should be pummeling.

Also not a knock on the game itself, but there's no guides out there bc it appears this game has a very small community, and that's a shame but it does leave me kinda wandering the wilds trying to assess what I should do or what the optimum strats are for defeating a boss. Sometimes I like having that backup, but this game just has you hanging out there, hanging onto a single video series on YouTube for your life if you honestly have no idea what to do. For example: one of the Egypt puzzles had me completely deadlocked for an hour until I found out from watching this video series that you can pull objects around as well as push them. Again, probably just me being a ding-dong, but yeah. That happened.

And this is a very small but important note: I had a serious problem in the game, and reporting it to the forums got a near-immediate response. The devs pay attention to your comments and will walk you through whatever tech issue you're having, and are extremely friendly! 1000000/10 customer service, I greatly appreciate them! <3

In all, I can't recc this game enough if you want a JRPG experience with a fun, cartoony cast and a joke-riddled superhero storyline about a bunch of kaiju saving the world from a guy with a cube head and his reality-warping slug pet. Please buy this game, tell all your friends, stream it on Twitch/YT/whatever, please get the word out about how lovely this game is!

I never saw myself falling in love with a crew of time traveling wrestlers, but it happened & I regret nothing.

This is the definition of a hidden gem. There's no other turn based RPG in existence quite like this. It has so much charm & love put in it, memorable characters, solid dialogue, good length, well paced, though I didn't want it to end. Some of the most fun I've ever had with a JRPG.

What a hidden gem. This game has some absolutely astonishing music, charming graphics and writing, interesting characters and designs, and although it tends to be pretty standard early on in terms of mechanics, it has a lot of depth in tactical choice. This would have been a frickin' hit on the SNES years back. Definitely worth your money.