[Review] Jitsu Squad

A genre that has gotten a revival from the independent development scene is the classic arcade beat’em up. One of the latest to come down the pipeline is Tanuki Game Studio’s Jitsu Squad, which looks to combine Final Fight-esque brawler combat with the frantic pace of Marvel vs Capcom.

The game tries to capture the feeling of playing those classic games, but instead feels like a hollow imitation of what the genre is supposed to be. While its art and animation work overtime to leave a great first impression when booted up, those elements are let down by cringy writing, paper-thin story, and gameplay that does not really evolve, becoming boring over the course of the extremely short story campaign.

The brawler’s narrative is straight forward. You are introduced to Hero, Baby, Jazz, and Aros who make up the Jitsu Squad. Your job is to stop the villainous demon Origami as they try to take possession of the Kusanagi Stone, a stone powerful enough for whoever has it to take over the world with the power of a god. That is really all the exposition that the game gives you. It never goes into more detail about the world that the game takes place in, where Origami came from, or why the Jitsu Squad came together.

The four heroes and their master Ramen come across as reskinned versions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but with less personality. There are interesting elements that could have been explored more, like the uniquely different planets that act as the stages for the campaign or the backstory of its heroes, instead the game does not give any focus to those elements. One example is when playing as Hero and you are just introduced to Dash who is someone Hero knows from his past. The game never expands on how they know each other or what event caused them to be enemies besides a few lines of dialogue.

The game’s script writing is thin and more than a little one note, when it comes to humor in video games, it can be extremely hard to pull off, and this game’s demeanor presents it as though it thinks it is way funnier than actually it is. Its jokes have a sophomoric tone to them. One that I feel like never lands like the developers wanted it too. It just made me cringe every time the game attempted comedy.

This also translates to how some of the characters are portrayed, which for most of them is extremely one-note. Most of the enemies come across as caricatures, like at the end of the second stage where you have been fighting Yakuza members and at the end you meet the main boss who is given the stereotypical Italian godfather dialect. I don’t come to side-scrolling brawlers for a deep story, characters, or storytelling, but the tone of the game has completely missed the mark.

The gameplay style that Jitsu Squad strives for combines elements of fighting game combos with traditional side scrolling brawlers. I appreciate the uniqueness of mixing those together, but the execution of the idea was less than stellar. The number of enemies that the game throws at you makes it hard to perform the combos that you unlock via leveling up. The game also introduces you to its parry system in the tutorial at the beginning, but does not push you to learn it till the second half of the campaign, where there is a huge difficulty spike that punishes playing without using the counter move.

If something like countering attacks is going to be important, I would have wanted the game to slowly introduce enemies making you use the ability and have the difficulty naturally build up instead it feels like after stage four, the game flips to where it is the only move that lets you survive. There are also a ton of small quality of life issues that are found within the gameplay, including having the grab action and item pickup being on the same button. There is so much happening on screen at once, it becomes extremely hard to pick up the weapon and item drops. I would have preferred it to work like the game handles gold, by just walking over them. Constantly grabbing enemies by accident and not health or the special weapon to then end up dying was a consistent pain point while playing.

My favorite mechanic is locked till you beat the game for the first time, and it is called tag team mode.

When starting a new game, you can choose to use tag team mode and if you are playing by yourself can select all four characters at one time. Doing that allows you to tag the characters in and out of the game like in Marvel vs Capcom. It adds a slightly faster pace to the combat that I found made me enjoy it way more. The problem with it being unlocked after beating the game is there not being incentive to replay through the campaign. I absolutely had no drive to go through and play those same eight stages again and button through the same dialogue again. This feature is the unique hook this game has, so it is unfortunate that it is buried behind a completed run.

The biggest positive that I have about the game is how great the animation and character models look. Every time I booted up the game and saw how smooth it looked while playing blew me away. All the characters have copious amounts of detail added to them, like when you are using Baby’s main attack, and she transforms between the different versions of herself or the crispness of when Aros does his ground pound jumping attack and slams his weapon down. The fluidness of the design really gives off the feel that only hand drawn animation can. Each stage is different in terms of environment and style. You start off in a basic Asian inspired village, and progress to bigger areas like a giant pirate ship or the inside of an erupting volcano. Capturing all the detail that the art requires on the small 2D plane of the game is an impressive feat.

Jitsu Squad is a beautifully animated and stylistic video game that unfortunately is mediocre in everything else it tries to do. Starting with the outdated and paper-thin characters that feel like they came from an older generation of gaming, to the off-putting humor that did not land throughout my entire play through of the campaign. Add on frustrating gameplay, a non-existent story, and the best feature of the game being locked behind completing it first and that completes a recipe for an extremely underwhelming game experience. I think there is a foundation here with the art style that the developers can build from, but as of right now, this animated brawler is let down from all of its other parts.