by
Yeah, it’s pronounced “Ruby.” I don’t know if that’s fun or dumb.
I don’t really know anything about RWBY. After I stopping watching Red vs. Blue about 2 seasons in, I really don’t know much about Rooster Teeth. What I do know is that Rooster Teeth made a comic called RWBY at some point and then released a video game of it on Steam. RWBY feels pretty clean but I have a hard time feeling like I’d ever recommend it to anyone, which unfortunately gives it the trademark of a Tier 3 game. But I’m getting ahead of myself–let’s crack this open and take a look.
If you’re going to play a waifu game, I guess you’ll need to know the waifus, so lets roll them out.
There’s Ruby, the happy sweet one…
…Weiss, the etiquette obsessed reserved one…
…Blake, the dark sexy one…
…and Yang, the boisterous, blusterous loud one.
Their designs are fun, their colors are bright but I credit this more to the comic’s design than I do the game’s. Where the game gets credit is how the characters are portrayed though. Combat moves cleanly, fast and energetic. You’ll zip around, clobbering enemies all over the place as you dash, swing and slash your way through your foes. Every so often characters will spout a line of dialogue which adds to their distinctive personality and energy of combat.
Aside from the fact that the game is multiplayer, I can’t say anything that’s good about it. Everything else just misses the mark. For starters, the voice acting ranges from mediocre to terrible. Most of the girls’ line deliveries are passable, but then you’ve got characters like the scientist in levels 3 and 4 which are just downright awful. Not only are the volume levels regulated terribly as he dips up from being too loud and down to not being able to hear him at all, but his attempts at speaking rushed nearly make him trip over his own words and put inflections in the wrong places making it impossible not to see someone reading off a sheet of paper in your head every time he talks.
The game proper is a mix of an arena fighter’s gameplay and Dynasty Warrior’s mechanics. X+X+X+X with a Y variant thrown in at each step will execute a different special ability. I’m of course referring to button presses–some people prefer instead to use the “combo” annotation, whereupon the letter “c” is used followed by a number, aka “c0” would be pressing the Y button once on its own, “c1” is X then Y, “c2” is X then X then Y and so on. As you can see, this is completely identical to any Warriors game. The only variant is that some characters (excluding Weiss) will continue to chain out into an air combo with repeated presses of X beyond 4, which leads to aerial combos with possible derivatives in the same c manner. The difference is identified in the aerial combo execution–it’s almost universal to require some variation of the use of Y button (or triangle for Play Station users) in order to launch an enemy up into the air, with the most uniform being the standard c1 whereas in RWBY it’s not.
If you got lost in any of that, it’s fine–in layman’s it means that RWBY ‘s aerial combos are much easier to pull off because they are accessible by simply mashing the X button. As mentioned though, unlike the Warriors series it is an arena fighter. You’ll travel from section to section within a level, being blocked off from behind and presented with an exit in front that is only opened after murdering the enemies that pop out. Sometimes it’s even worse, as the game asks you to defend a static object with HP while waves of enemies spawn in. While some of our time’s most popular games are arena fighters (Bayonetta and Devil May Cry are easy examples) they usually rely on deep and complicated combo trees, a large variety of weapons and/or characters to use them and a large supply of enemies that require different strategies and pattern memorizations to be effective against. RWBY has none of these things.
Dynasty Warrior’s mechanics were built for simplicity and repetition, not complexity. Within 5 minutes of playing I had already “mastered” the combo system. I knew which exact combos killed the enemies around me the fastest and I knew how to animation cancel jumps and dashes to fly around from enemy to enemy. Within 15 minutes, I’d “mastered” the game’s combat system–push B when an enemy attacks and you’ll dash over to them and break their guard. Push right bumper when you break their guard for a special move that kills them. After 35 minutes, I’d already figured out which characters were simply more powerful than the others. (I’ll break that down in the next paragraph, but spoilers, Weiss is on top.) After an hour I didn’t want to play anymore.
You gain levels in RWBY but they don’t really matter. Even running a level 1 Yang on some of the later levels left me feeling like there was no difference in difficulty. Ultimately the skills you can unlock from leveling up are not impactful enough to make a large difference in your combat effectiveness and they certainly don’t change your combat strategy. This also aggravates the imbalance of power that Weiss and Yang have. While Blake and Ruby are meant to be faster, more combo oriented fighters, there is no reward for their complexity. They do less damage and take twice as long to kill a single target as they must combo and chain twice as many moves. Weiss, easily the most broken character has a c2 that deals a ton of damage, is area of effect, freezes enemies AND you can damage them while they are frozen. They tried to counterbalance this with the fact that she doesn’t auto-chain into aerials and her combo string is simpler but… does it matter? I can push 6 buttons (the c2 chain twice) and kill everything around me while exposing myself to zero danger because my enemies are frozen. If I c2 twice with Ruby, I might kill 1 target while exposing myself to danger. It just doesn’t add up.
Strategies against all enemies are the same. If it’s an an you can kill in one combo, execute the combo. If not, spam your most damaging moves while dashing out the way as necessary. Guns are a joke–I guess they give you something to do if you are waiting for 5 seconds while your health recharges. If you’ve got a friend to play with (or a couple friends) this isn’t a bad way to waste some time with little to lose, since you don’t need to invest much to play and admittedly things are flashy and lightweight. If you like RWBY, maybe this would be cool too because you can see one of your favorite comics in 3-D form. For me though, judging the game as a game, I can’t recommend it. It’s repetitive and just no good, which is a pity because it looks good.
