Developed by DreamFactory who’s chairmen is Seiichi Ishii. Ishii is an industry veteran who served as an early designer and director for two legendary fighting game franchises: Virtua Fighter and the ever popular Tekken. With characters being designed by my favorite game artist,Tetsuya Nomura.
The story is your typical fighting game story,there’s a world tournament with a prize(this time a super sword!). So basically fighters from the world over come to participate because that’s what they do. But no one really remembers fighter games stories, so lets get to the gameplay
The game has a 11 original characters, a few of which were designed to be like a few of Tekken’s characters(some even share a few moves and one even shares a last name).The character designs are pretty old-school and anime-esque but are fun over all. None of the characters in this game play like eachother, they are extremely varied.That is asided from the guest charactres. In addition to the 11 original characters there is 6 from Final Fantasy 7,all of which are very fun to play. The thing that surprised me is the guest characters feel oddly right mixed in with the games cast despite playing no real role within the games story. Beyond that they add a good amount of new fighters who fight a bit differently than the other cast members.
How it actually plays-
The combat in Ehrgeiz is much like many 3d fighters just more maneuverable . The closest thing to its combat would be the Naruto Storm series,which are arguably some of the best fighters of the last and current generation.
Beyond that you have your typical two attack buttons,a jump button and a button for ‘Specials’. While the combat isn’t as deep as some modern games it still has a good degree of depth with each character having a rather large amount of moves and variety.
The key difference between it and other fighters is that Ehrgeiz has multiple levels to each stage,but not in your typical way where you get punched into them,but instead it has levels that you can jump onto by your own choice. This actually is pretty interesting as you can take higher ground to try and take an advantage.
On top of your basic fighting modes you also have a bunch of fun Mini-Games.You can watch some of those below. Overall I had a lot of fun with this game.
Beyond the fighter-
On the disc beyond the Ehrgeiz’s fighter there is a Full-featured action Rpg. This side game alone was worth the purchase. In the Rpg dubbed “The Forsaken Dungeon” you Descend into an ever-changing dungeon in search of treasure, ever more powerful weapons, and of course answers to the dungeons mysteries. This Rpg is surprisingly fun and rather deep,it alone is worthy of being picked up and definitely deserving of a glorious HD era reboot.
The fact that this is included as some sort of side game is just amazing. I found myself sinking hours and hours into it just exploring and grinding away through the gorgeous environments. This game is tough and very interesting.
Here is the opening of The Forsaken Dungeon.(it’s more fun then it looks)
On top of just being fun and having some awesome side things Ehrgeiz has completely fantastic music. The music is far more varied than normal games thanks to the odd amount of modes this game has. Some tracks are forgettable while others are completely catchy and awesome.Check out a few tracks below.