fighting ex layer is the newest game in the street fighter EX series... kind of, it's like SFEX with the serial number filed off, it has many of the same characters but without all the street fighter stuff which is fine by me because arika's character designs can rival and even beat capcoms at times so seeing these characters make a comeback was so cool to me to and they play more or less like how they did in that original series, it's billed as a sequel moreso though to fighting layer which was an arcade exclusive game featuring its own roster but with a few EX characters thrown in but since this game is actually a 2D fighter instead of a 3D one and it retains only those two EX characters it doesn't feel a lot like one, it is much more of a sequel to ex... and maybe also to another street fighter.

that inspiration comes in the form of the games gouki system, a card based mechanic similar to the gems from SFXT but much more balanced and well made, it gives you various cool effects like turning off damage animations, giving you invisibility or stat bonuses like speedup or extra meter and you gain these by doing various feats in fights like hits in a row or jumps made, it makes the game feel very unique and when both players have all their cards active it's so fun and kind of crazy, it gives it such a unique vibe to play, but the rest of the game is fairly standard 2D fighter that plays very similarly to a street fighter game i you want a point of comparison, you got your meters and specials and inputs but you do have a different control scheme here as an option involving just directions and not circles but i found it to be very difficult to use and a lot less fun as someone more used to traditonal control shemes, everyone generally plays very similarly mechanically, the movesets are all different but beyond area with her arm that she can send out and shannon with her gun it's more on the normal side, which isn't a bad thing just there's few extra whacky mechanics or movesets so some characters can seem a little basic in playstyle, some characters can have extra dashes or projectiles but they all play like very similarly to a street fighter character ( more specific in some cases like darun for zangief or allan for ryu) so you won't really miss the missing characters that much and you do get all of the arika staples here (with the exception of hokuto who is dlc but the new character shirase basically plays like her anyway), it didn't bother me much at least since a lot of those older EX games tended to focus on street fighters much less interesting male cast from 2 and i've never vibed with many of them, or with street fighter 2 in general, though i do miss sakura, vega and chun li a little. i tended to main those more interesting characters like shannon because of her gun, d dark's fun bomb attacks and really brutal grabs, area with her gauntlet and pullum's fun air attacks (i love the cute effects with area and pullums attacks) but i also really enjoyed blare with her grabs and hayate's sword, hayate i once managed to almost take out a full health bar in one combo with, i do wish there were more whacky movesets though, but it does have skullomania and he does make up for it a lot with his dives and wilder moves.

graphically the game does feel budget though, the backgrounds are amazing and the characters can be well animated but the lighting feels really unreal engine weird, it's hard to explain, like, stock? almost, it makes the game look very cheapish and budget which feels weird to me because it doesn't play like that at all, this is not a janky game, but it's just so lacking in style here especially compared to those old ex games, the OST (by Takahiro Eguchi of tetris 99, tekken tag 2, fate extra and 3D dot game heroes. Fumihisa Tanaka and Kazuhiro Kobayashi who has worked on games like umihara kawase, gotta protectors and bar stella abyss more recently) is really solid, it's not quite on the same level as the older games ost but its still got some great tracks, like D darks theme, sharons theme, overcome fists has some serious street fighter 3 vibes to it, there's tons more good tracks, raven cave, leaked two fists, deck brawl, the ost is one of the best parts of it, it sounds like a 90's game ost and ranks up there with some of the better ones, it may even be my favourite part of the game and it does make up a lot for how otherwise lacking in style the game can feel with its menu and UI and general looks.

this also bleeds into the content here sincethere isn't much of it, at launch it didnt even have an arcade mode, you were stuck with just couch co op and training mode and even the arcade mode doesn't have much since the endings are single screen paragraphs that help nothing, there is the expert mode which is made up of combo challanges but this isn't very fun because it's very user unfriendly, these kind of modes never do much for me, there's also a kind of survival mode here but it's hidden in the training mode and it only gives you that training mode stage, there's no real single player here at all because it was very heavily focused on the online componant which is still fairly active at least when i tried it but i just don't enjoy that kind of thing, it's still worth it for the gameplay and i had fun in arcade mode, but there isn't a lot beyond that. there's also 2 dlc characters with hokuto, who plays very similar to shirase, and terry bogard from KOF who is worth buying, he plays really fun here and he fits right in, he even has his stage from garou in 3D here! it's cool! naturally there's also basically no story here, if you didn't play the EX games you'll be lost on who everyone is, especually since there's no subtitles here either, so if you don't know japanese you're out of luck for the match intros.

i'd not reccomend this to beginners i do have to say, it's very similar to the old games but just with less style and with less stuff to do, you also miss those SF characters and things like EX3's tag team options, plus ace, so it's difficult to reccomend it over those if this is going to be your first EX game, in addition to that this is also digital only outside of japan so if you want that physical copy you'll need to import it and it's on the less common side for ps4 titles, so it's a lot to go through versus just buying EX2 plus on ebay for cheap (region depending), but if you are an EX fan then i do 100% reccomend this if you want more, just don't expect a lot out of it, it is a budget game by a smaller team. there was a single other port but it's one i'm not sure i reccomend since it gets rid of the gouki system and replaces it with some super moves, this is probably better for competitive players and you will get terry for free but it's fully digital only and i prefer the gouki system myself, there's also a sequel in the works that is going to 3D like the original fighting layer did so that's pretty exciting, i'll be hype to give it a try once it comes out. arika have been still making more games even after this, there was the new endless ocean game, chocobo GP which is really good now post removal of MTX and they did some games for nintendo like tetris 99 and mario 35, they even worked on tekken 8 very recently.