Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Ultimate

I was a bit on the fence buying this new version... I'm not entirely sure they did a good enough job explaining the various improvements that happened. Some are so-so, some are pretty solid. I really liked the original Battlegrounds, but the gameplay loop was a bit weird. It did the Guardian Heroes thing, because it's a "Treasure-like" - multiple lanes, tons of enemies, and you're handed lots of tools to paste those enemies with wall juggles and supers into supers, buuuut you start with almost nothing and have to work to the satisfying multi-hundred hit combos. To really get decent XP, the key to getting your stats and skills, you had to grind a few times, and you had to lose to distribute your points. You started with practically nothing, no dash attack or anything, but the enemy swarms were pretty nuts. My standard play with a new character usually started with jumping immediately to Hard or Nightmare and farming XP, taking it as a sacrificial run. Usually I'd die somewhere around the third boss, and have enough XP to buy up most skills, plus get a few pips in Strength and Speed. Well, that's still SORT of how it goes, but it seems like XP is massively scaled up. If you jump right into the multiplayer mode you'll have the same "can't upgrade until you die" problem, but Hard mode isn't as bad as it used to be on a fresh save, and you'll probably jump up to level 35. With that you'll be able to unlock all your specials and maybe level 1 supers, plus a few bars of strength. That'll let you clear Hard pretty easily, though if you die again, you'll probably have enough to get the level 2 super, which one-shots (or close to it) most bosses. Clearing Hard once gives you Nightmare, which isn't much harder, you just take more damage. By this time you should've figured out the ways your character can just mow down entire lanes - the ninja girl's stars charge up her meter really fast, and the Super version of it will annihilate most non-blocking mobs. Her leap shreds things in the air as she passes through and lets you disengage, then throw more shurikens from the other side. Easy loop. The story mode keeps the same big XP bump, but you can distribute points between levels and continue as much as you want. This is ideal for getting your head around the game's mechanics and hand-holding folks who thought the multiplayer mode (or original game) was annoying and just wanted to get a character beefed up quick. You do need to beat it in one shot, but it's not terribly long. Some levels are also updated. The original had a maze situation going on in the Demon Realm (second to last level), and it wasn't too crazy, but it did slow the pace just a bit. That's entirely gone now, replaced with more screens. It's straightforward, but in my opinion at this point in the game you're just chewing through everything without an issue, so the maze was a little more interesting. There appear to be alternate versions of some levels as well - on an arcade run I ended up with a demon version of the first level, bringing later game enemies in earlier. No idea what triggered that, but that's the sorta stuff this game brings. Lots of quirks. Anyway, you're overpowered really quick, so the main replay value is in leveling each character up, then doing some score or time attack stuff, maybe messing around with the unlocks ... like playing as a goofy truck, which even at level 1 will just annihilate things. You'll also have some additional item and seeker drops that let you change the default actions or provide little changes to things, which are okay to pursue. In the end, I'm pretty happy with what they've done. I didn't really know what was going on with the story on the original, but the new dialogue helps clear all that up.