Last year I played the fortissimo series, and my personal feelings about it were complicated. Content-wise, the fortissimo series has a super melodramatic plot. Basically the world gets destroyed, the guy destroying it might be your dad, your dad destroys the world because he’s despairing, so you as the protagonist go fuck up your dad, and after a bunch of cheat-code clashes you successfully fuck up dad and build a new world. No big twists—just cheat vs cheat, yelling matches, forced hot-bloodedness, justice always wins. And one big feature of this game is that fight mode and non-fight mode are two different worlds. In daily life a bunch of people joke around like a normal game, but once a fight starts it’s kill or be killed. Totally inconsistent… Still, as an experience, the fortissimo series is a blast, because there are tons of battle scenes, and the atmosphere during fights is genuinely great. Especially that feeling of “shouting each other’s names then activating cheats and unleashing a finisher”—it’s really hot-blooded, really hype, really satisfying. So for the previous fortissimo games, I think they’re ultimately not bad. I mean, after all… once you’re hyped, you don’t sweat the details.