Omen of Sorrow Review (unijorse)
kind of bad...
my first issue is that it feels like the developers are scared to make the player press more than 1 button at once. ex moves have their own button, as do throws. kof figured out this kind of stuff years ago...
another gripe i have is that special cancelling some normals costs fortune meter (called a bold cancel). i can understand needing resources for guard cancels and special>special it gets frustrating when you can't even cancel a st.hp on some characters without meter. fortune is an easy come easy go meter, but you also get the third bar (needed to activate the maxmode mechanic) taken away for sitting on it for too long, and the rest of the bar gradually depletes over time.
when you lose fortune you gain fate (kind of like the guard balance in calamity trigger where losing one gains the other by the same amount). when you're full on fate, you enter a state called impending doom, which leads to my next issue...
doomed is the stupidest fucking mechanic ever designed. whoever thought locking characters out of their specials just for losing too much is stupid. i play some snowball-y games but this is on another level and i'm genuinely annoyed that it even exists. imagine if street fighter locked you out of using a fireball just because somebody routed into a knockdown. i don't care if it goes away faster if you get hit or you can spend sigil meter to get out of it.
on that note, sigils feel like a "bubblegum fix" mechanic that have other mechanics moved onto it to increase it's importance. what i imagine happened is that someone mentioned how doomed is the stupidest mechanic to ever exist, so the developers added an additional meter to help you escape it. but since having a mechanic that only exists to trump another mechanic is dumb (and antithetical to fighting games), actions like "blessed" (think of blood moon or heat in type lumina or maxmode in kof) or using super moves can use the sigil meter instead of the bars they affect. it feels like they tried to put more weight on it to justify its existence instead of removing the mechanic it was originally intended to "solve"
lastly is a general lack of "final polish". i don't really like to gripe about this because the mechanics are the meat of fighting games, but there's a few nitpicks i have. for 1, the meters are too small on screen for how many resources you have to keep track of, especially with how much screen space is wasted. on that note, there's far too much vertical camera movement on jumps, especially with how little of the screen characters take up. i don't think the game would be negatively affected at all if the camera's vertical movement was locked.
on the good side:
the ability to cancel specials into each other a la kof maxmode (even outside of the dedicated maxmode mechanic) using the fortune meter is pretty fun however the aforementioned issues really prevent me from fully enjoying this game