Jitsu Squad review

Aggressive opponents aren’t the only adversity you’ll encounter in Jitsu Squad. From fits of slowdown, intermittent crashes, and an excessive initial load time, you might want to think twice before picking this fight.

Real-life street brawls are messy affairs, filled with floundering punches, clumsy grabs, and kicks that infrequently land. Tanuki Creative Studio’s Jitsu Squad envisions combat as chaotic and cartoonish as a quartet of characters take on hordes of sentient Daruma dolls, golf club-swinging yakuza, and enraged ice demons.

In this 2.5D brawer, each animal-based combatant has their own unique attack animations. Resident raccoon Hero Yamagiwa carries a katana and can dish out a succession of strikes. Baby O’Hara is a pink bunny who changes forms- rapidly transforming into a ninja, a reaper, and finally, a pirate straddling atop a giant cannon. Jazz Amun is a frog with an afro who can pummel foes with his kemuri pipe, while Aros Helgason is a Nordic boar who uses his fists as well as a hulking broadsword.

Each combatant is well animated with the game flaunting eye-grabbing effects like neon-hued motion blurs whenever an attack is initiated. Everything is rendered in high resolution endowing fighters, foes, and backdrops, with rich detail. At least some of Jitsu Squad’s hectic nature comes from the number of simultaneous on-screen enemies. While most subordinate opponents only demonstrate rudimentary intelligence, their large numbers make appraising threat difficult.

As such, Jitsu Squad feels like a 2D musou game. Save for the boss battles that punctuate each stage, you’ll be less concerned with individual foes than with taming a shifting mob of attackers. By collecting scrolls, you’ll be given supplementary fighting game-like abilities like a rising attack that can juggle foes. Additionally, character-specific capabilities range from a forward-firing fireball strike that puts a succession of enemies into a stun state to a chargeable ground slam. Disappointingly, you’ll have to unlock your arsenal across each playthrough since the game doesn’t save your upgrades.

Arguably, the most important part of your arsenal is your counter. While mastering the move isn’t essential in the first half of the game, advancing in the latter game will be a Sisyphean challenge without getting the timing down. Counters as well as guarding are also vital for the game’s boss fights, where your adversaries favor erratic patterns and periods of invincibility.

Like many brawlers, Jitsu Squad’s first half proves more enjoyable. Across the game’s four difficulty settings, there’s more margin of error in the early hours. Later on, you’re more likely to accumulate damage, and you can get caught without a power-up to restore your health. In the second half, it’s far easier to get caught in a juggle when you’re dispensing with an attack move that includes more complex inputs.

To help balance the difficulty, you’ll find icons around each of the eight stages that can help clear the screen of subordinates. While Yooka-Laylee’s inclusion is relatively innocuous, the presence of a Youtuber feels a bit more obtrusive. Likewise, Jitsu Squad’s referential bits are a bit too on-the-nose. Sure, there’s a copy of the conveyor belt bonus round from Street Fighter II, but the developers did little to modernize it.

But Jitsu Squad’s commits more tangible transgressions. At a two-hour length, the game errors on the side of brevity. That might be fine if it was a more polished experience. But with an opening loading period that exceeds a minute, intermittent moments of slowdown, and even erratic soft crashes that linger after launch window patching. Hopefully, these will be rectified by the time the promised boss rush and survival modes make an appearance.

Undoubtedly, Jitsu Squad is intended for a certain type of player, who adores frantic action and will appreciate all the nods to classic Capcom properties. But before taking the streets as Hero, Baby, Jazz, or Aros, know that the game isn’t either feature complete or polished. Jumping into the fracas right now will require quick reflexes as well as a healthy amount of patience when dealing with sloppy performance.

JItsu Squad was played on Switch with review code provided by the publisher.