Dengeki Bunko is a Light Novel publication company (sort of light a novella with manga art thrown in a handful of times a chapter), and while the title of the company alone might not be well known in America, anime fans will know some of the series that have been published by them.  Calling them prolific in the LN market is an understatement as they have put out over 2000 titles.  Now, thankfully, you can take the best of the bunch and pit them against each other.  So you can finally find out if the Black Queen from Accel World is stronger than everyone in Sword Art Online.  Don’t worry, the answer is yes.

It isn’t hard to express joy for any kind of game that does a mishmash of characters from different worlds beating each other as hard as they can.  Doubly so when the characters are some of the most recognizable faces from the most recent anime.  If someone wrote a letter to Capcom asking them create another fighting game, solely because their cool older brother had bought them Street Fighter 3 and a Crunchy Roll subscription, the pitch would be something along the lines of what this game is. It is like a love letter to anyone who has watched any Japanese animation, and it has been signed happily by every signal creator.

It isn’t all sunshine and roses for the fighting game community, though.  If you are someone who counts frames and goes for the most damaging combo with risk vs. reward, you are probably going to find some rather giant flaws in this game. Being half Marvel Vs Capcom levels of complete responsiveness and half of the Super Smash Brothers theorem of throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks, this game lands somewhere in between. You aren’t going to find this game at a fighting game tournament mainstage, but it also doesn’t even feel like it was built with that in mind.

The fact that the game came out in America at all is some kind of modern day miracle, the licensing alone must have been a logistical nightmare for whoever was in charge of it.  As a matter of fact, a friend of mine and I were so sure that this game was not coming state side that he imported the Japanese version of the game.  While I haven’t gone insane and scoured every nook and cranny of either game, it does seem like a rather faithful adaptation of the original, they even left the Japanese in and just translated the battle blurbs via text bubbles.

They call me Champion Cake around these parts

The bottom line comes down to wither or not you are a fan of the anime series that are presented here.  If you aren’t, the game will just seem like an insane, unbalanced fighter with people doing random things and other’s reacting in other random ways.  But when you have seen the series it becomes magical. Watching the Palmtop Tiger kick Shiba Miyuki into a telephone pole and repeatedly beat it/her is like watching every message board argument from your heart play out under your own control.  While the plot doesn’t make any sense, that doesn’t matter when the material is simply a love letter to fans.