Inuyasha Demon Tournament

Based on some animated series I have no interest in watching (but my impression is that it's American-created anime manque), Inuyasha Demon Fighter is and also is not a Streetfighter-style game.

It is, in the sense that the character animations make it look as if it is; character leaps, makes attack, impressive animation of somethingorother happens (wolves run across the screen through your opponent!), opponent takes damage, winner is last-man standing.

The actual gameplay, however, is quite different. You are not bashing up-up-up-spacebar or something to trigger a combo attack. Indeed, this is a turn-based game, not an action game at all. Instead, you have a suite of cards, each corresponding either to to a movement within the four-by-three square grid of the playing area, to an attack, or to some other action. "Other actions" are blocks or power-ups; each attack affects some (but rarely all) of the squares around you, and actions have to be stacked in threes.

Or to put it another way, you and your opponent each select three cards, and they are resolved in the order chosen, with no changes allowed until all three have completed, at which point you choose your next three.

Different cards have different energy costs (you use the powerups to regain energy), and deliver different amounts of damage. So the game is partly a matter of guessing where your opponent will go and what he will do, and partly a game of resource management, since the more powerful attacks (and the ones that do damage in larger patterns) are more expensive in terms of energy.

A complete game is a "tournament" of several battles against different opponents; each time you win a battle, you get a new card to use, so there's a bit of character advancement as well.

Pop's usual metier is games that, like Bible Fight or Viva Caligula!, are very conventional in gameplay terms, but interestingly transgressive in terms of subject matter; here, the subject matter is utterly conventional (they were commissioned to do a promotional game for some crap TV show), but thought was clearly given to, you know, actual game design. Oh, it's pretty fun, too.