I’ll admit to not having high expectations. To start, I always thought the first Night Slashers X was overrated. Yes it's good, but I think a lot of the praise it got came from doing what should be the minimum when most other projects didn't bother. Second, modifications and remakes of other fan works are almost always laughably bad.
Instead, Night Slashers X Rebalance is a pleasant surprise. The character additions are a bit random, but don’t clash nearly as much as you’d think. Widescreen is something the game always needed. Four player support isn’t quite as important, but it’s still a nice touch. So far as I can tell, there aren’t any game breaking technical issues, and running on more recent OpenBOR versions adds a lot of future possibilities. They even brought back Hong Hua Zhao. Replacing her with Kurokishi from Denjin Maki 2 was an especially dumb move by the first Night Slashers X, so this was a very welcome addition.
Unfortunately, there are some issues that drag it down. One of the most annoying is the lack of weapon use for extra characters. Imagine walking up to a fallen barrel as Ortega and discovering that unlike the primary cast members, he can’t lift it… yeah. Even Hong Hua got left out, and her sprites already have some item use frames. If you are going to add a character, man up and do it all the way.
Controls need a serious rework. Counting the “Manual” key, there are six action buttons in play. This isn’t Street Fighter. Three keys are plenty for everything you can do. Example: Combine Block/Dodge and Special to a single key, with “Special” attack mapped to Forward + Block. Map dodge action to Up, Up and Down, Down.
Lastly, there are some minor bugs that need addressing. One is that weapon icons are on the same Z layer as character icons, causing overlap and flicker. Another is that Jake will eventually fly to outer space after his air special unless the player inputs another command.
There’s a lot of potential here and it’s a fun play-through. Fix some of the questionable design choices, iron out the bugs, and this would be five star all the way.
