Fantasy Strike

This is easily one of the worst fighting games I've played. The combat feels extremely limited, there's no crouching, matches are over in about a minute, and the damage system is poorly designed. Character balance is all over the place, with only a few fighters having real combo potential. The player base is tiny, mostly consisting of complete beginners or veterans who dominate every match. Save yourself the frustration and play literally any other fighting game instead.

Fantasy Strike is a fighting game developed and published by Sirlin Games that challenges many of the conventions that have defined the genre for decades. While most competitive fighters expect players to memorize lengthy command inputs, practice difficult combos, and spend countless hours mastering execution, Fantasy Strike approaches the genre from a completely different angle. Its design philosophy revolves around making fighting games easier to learn without removing the strategic depth that makes them compelling. The result is a title that feels refreshingly approachable while still offering enough complexity to satisfy serious competitors. From the moment players enter their first match, it becomes clear that accessibility is the game's primary goal. Special attacks are executed with simple button presses rather than complicated directional motions, and each character possesses a streamlined set of moves that can be understood quickly. This dramatically reduces the learning curve that often discourages newcomers from trying traditional fighting games. Instead of spending hours practicing inputs, players can immediately focus on understanding spacing, timing, prediction, and …

Fantasy Strike is one of those fighting games that people saw, it gave them hope that more fighting games will adopt the free to play stlyle, and then completely fumbled. This game came out in 2019, and only in 2025 did they think "hey maybe, we shouldn't restrict friends from playing". I'm not even making this up btw, this is literally the third paragraph of their last update in 2025: "Starting today, we’re lifting this restriction; the free-to-play version of Fantasy Strike will allow you to play not just online as part of the casual and ranked queues, but in Direct Challenges (Friend Matches), as well." I think this title could've genuinely shaken things up for fighting games if they just made a regular fighting game and found better ways to monetize it. They could've added a pass, and start working on new characters, making characters purchasable through said pass, and so on. The exact same strategy other fighting games use, but it would be even better for this game because it costs nothing. In most other fighting games I hate that you have to pay for chars, there's no way to unlock them, and usually if you don't pay for the char, you can't practice against it yourself. So…

nice shish

It was a nice game...

I have never played a fighting game that is so legitimately bad. The number of moves you can do are severely limited and you can't crouch. There's no health bar. You have a bar with 6 units that go with every hit you take. Every attack deals 1 unit, regardless of how heavy/strong the attack looks or feels, but other characters can just deal 2 units of damage with using your super move. The balancing of characters feels pretty bad with only certain characters feel like they have any real combos and matches are over in 60 seconds. Player base feels like 20 people and the ones left are either newbies just trying the game or veterans who won't let you play the game. If you value your sanity and time, just... don't. Play literally ANY other game.