Inuyasha - Feudal Combat

Anime tie-in fighters of the sixth generation usually arrived with one of two ideas: copy Budokai, or copy nothing and hope the licence carried it. This one picked a third path, building its exchanges around deflection. Attacks can be turned aside rather than simply blocked, and a well-timed counter flips the initiative instantly, so the rhythm of a match is less about memorising strings than about guessing when the other player will commit. It gives fights a stop-start pulse that some will read as tension and others as hesitation.

The roster covers the cast the show's audience came for, split between demon-blooded bruisers and characters who fight at range, and the arenas are open circular spaces you can circle-strafe around rather than the two-dimensional lanes older licensed brawlers used. Movement matters. Backing off to reset spacing is a real option, and it changes how ranged characters like Kagome function against anyone carrying a very large sword.

Where it thins out is content. Feudal Combat is a fighting game with a fighting game's shelf life, and the single-player structure around the matches is functional at best, retelling story beats for people who already know them and offering little to anyone who does not. Presentation is competent cel-shading of the era, clean enough, never distinctive. Load times and menu flow feel like a game finished on schedule rather than one finished when it was ready.

Against a second player it holds up better than its reputation suggests, mostly because the counter system creates genuine mind games between two people who understand it. Against the computer it collapses fairly quickly once you learn which openings the AI cannot resist. That is the honest ceiling here: a licensed brawler with one real idea, executed well enough that the idea is still legible twenty years on, sitting inside a package that never bothered to build much around it.