So for a lot of Neo Geo nerds, this was a holy grail of a fan translation project. Many of us had poked at the untranslated game, loved the sprite work, thought the ability to use fighting game motions in combat was cool, and had dreams of what this game could be. Does it live up to that?
No. This is a bizarrely balanced game that feels like it was made by people who never made an RPG before.
It's kind of two RPGs, one to cover the plot of each of the first two games in the series, each of which has to be done independently, but in either order. I played through SS1 with everyone's favorite Mesoamerican catgirl and my SS2 main, Cham Cham. It kind of does a Dragon Age Origins thing where you get a solo bit with your character before you enter the main plot, and for that bit, the difficulty seemed pretty normal. I stocked up on recover items from the starting town, and I gradually used most of them through the opening dungeon, and while I never felt like I was under that much threat of dying, it felt like the kind of difficulty you'd expect. Weirdly, I didn't level up at all during the whole thing, so I assumed it must be a game where leveling was just slow.
So then I got magically teleported to Japan and granted the ability to read Japanese because Quetzalcoatl and Amaterasu are sun god buddies (no really, that's the explanation), and I pick out my two party members, Charlotte and Galford. And when I went out into the world, I was met with a surprise: these battles were now really easy, and at least one character would level up every 2-3 combats. And that kept happening in the next area. And the next. And the next. After that opening section, I literally never used any healing items, never used any TP recovery items, and never stayed at an inn. Your HP and TP recovers every time you level up, and that was happening so frequently that I simply never needed it. I was beating bosses in as few as 3 hits without any intentional grinding. It kind of sort of got harder by the time I got to Amakusa Shirou, but in the sense that now it took up to 3 AoEs to take out regular enemies instead of just one. The only fight in the entire SS1 section that felt like it was actually balanced like a regular ass RPG was an optional one with Wan Fu.
Outside of that, the dungeon designs generally weren't great, and somehow, it was often hard to figure out where to go despite the small map size. Like it highlighted the normally invisible parts of design in other RPGs that make the experience smooth. And a lot of cameos are handled awkwardly. Like you'll start a boss fight, some random guy from the fighting games jumps in, is all like "Oh, I also want to attack this guy for some reason," and after he contributes nothing of value, just fucks off forever once the fight is over. It feels like some higher up either insisted on adding them at the last minute, or the game had to trim a longer part with them (the game had a troubled development with numerous delays, and they ended up scrapping a whole third of the game), and they wanted to make some use of the assets they already made.
And the other day, I started the SS2 section, and it feels like a whole different game by different people. Not more experienced people with a better idea of design, just different ones. This one's fucking hard. I got my ass kicked early on and had to grind. And the grinding took a while because I wasn't leveling nearly as fast as SS1. And there's fewer sword upgrades available than SS1. And the world is connected by these huge, maze-like dungeons that are quite unlike the small ones in the previous half. It basically feels like it has the exact opposite problems now. Currently, I got through a long, annoying dungeon, fought a boss that seemed unusually powerful, and then found that the regular ass enemies took a huge jump in difficulty if I passed into the next dungeon segment. Turns out that I managed to miss an exit to Beijing somewhere in there, and I have to backtrack through this long dungeon with frequent random encounters to figure out where the fuck I missed it if I actually want to progress in this thing. I'm still trying to decide if it's worth doing that.
Despite all of those complaints, I don't hate it. I feel like I overall ended up having fun for at least the SS1 half of the game. And this has some of the best sprite work on the console. But there's a reason this didn't make much of an impact in Japan, a reason why there weren't many people interested in translating it for so long, and it would have been utterly destroyed in reviews if they'd localized it at the time. It's pretty, it has some charming moments, and there's a good chance you'll get something out of it if you're already a fan of the franchise. But for everyone else, this is at best the equivalent of a middling SNES RPG that's unusually pretty.