Under Night In-Birth 2 Sys:Celes Review

You may have clicked into this review thinking, “A review of Under Night In-Birth 2 Sys:Celes? In the year of our Lord 2026?!” And you know what, that’s fair. This fighting game came out at the beginning of 2024, and it’s one that builds off a foundation laid by the 2012 original, which we also never reviewed. Well, I’ve decided better late than never, because Under Night In-Birth 2 is quite simply one of the best 2D fighters on the market right now – especially for fighting game fans that pine for the days of fast-paced anime fighters but with all the modern conveniences we’ve come to expect. It’s full of gorgeous pixel art and completely outlandish character designs alongside things like exceptional netcode and the ability to take control of a character during a replay, making its satisfyingly steep learning curve a joy to try and overcome, and its online play a staple of my fighting game rotation well past its initial launch.

For those completely unfamiliar, Under Night In-Birth (or just UNI for short) is the first wholly original series from Japanese developer French Bread, which was previously known mostly for Melty Blood, a 2D fighter based on the world and characters of the visual novel Tsukihime. The UNI games are four-button fighters with light, medium, and heavy attack buttons, as well as the Exs Action button, which has a number of uses ranging from short hops, to defensive shields, to meter management, etc.

What’s really cool about this fighting system at a basic level is that while most fighting games have a linear sort of logic to their combo system, allowing you to chain lights into mediums into heavies, UNI kind of just says “screw it, do what you want, it’ll work.” You can chain heavies into lights and lights into heavies, or convert big combos off of little pokes. Anytime you land any sort of touch in UNI, you can get big damage off of it, which is a very liberating feeling.

You can get big damage off any touch, which is a very liberating feeling. It also makes jumping into the shallow end of a new character very intuitive, even though they’re all so different from each other. I wouldn’t dare take a brand new character into online play and try to get by using simple combos alone, but if all you’re going to do is play through Arcade mode or mash some buttons against a similarly skilled friend, UNI’s flexible fighting system makes it very easy to do so on a casual level without relying solely on auto-combos.

Don’t let any of that fool you into thinking UNI is easy, though. The game speed is lightning fast, its zoning can feel utterly oppressive if you don't know how to deal with it, and the mixups certain characters can do will make you feel like you just got utterly blended. You really need to make use of its many different mechanics to be able to fight on an even playing field, and learning those is going to take some time – and for the more casual fighting game fan, it may even feel a bit like homework.

At the heart of UNI is the GRD system, and there’s really nothing else quite like it in the expansive world of 2D fighters. Basically, imagine it as a tug-of-war-style minigame that runs parallel to the actual fighting, with the winner being granted a pretty massive advantage for a limited amount of time. At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see a meter comprised of six diamonds on either side. You fill your side of the meter by moving forward, landing attacks, blocking, using the riskier (but more rewarding) shield block, and by holding down the Exs Action button to sit still and charge it up like you’re a Dragon Ball Z character raising your power level. You can also lose meter by moving backwards, getting hit, or having your own attacks blocked by the opponent’s shield block.

While this push and pull is happening, a timer will continue to circle around the middle of the meter, and once it’s up, the person with more of that meter filled wins the minigame and will enter the Vorpal State. While in the Vorpal State, you deal 10% more damage and gain the ability to use a technique called Chain Shift, which allows you to cancel the recovery of any move – much like a Roman Cancel in the Guilty Gear series – and also convert some of your diamonds from the GRD meter into your EXS meter, which governs your ability to use super moves and EX special moves.

GRD is unusual, it's complicated, but it's also kind of brilliant. It’s unusual, it’s complicated, but it’s also kind of brilliant. It encourages aggressive play while equally rewarding skillful defense; it’s largely negligible at lower levels of play, so newcomers don’t even have to worry about it, while more skilled fighters must split their focus between attacking the opponent in front of them and consider how their actions affect the GRD meter. It also further encourages careful meter and resource management, which is something every great modern fighting game benefits from.

I love the way fighting games look these days; Arc System Works, in particular, does an incredible job of blending 3D characters in 2D environments and reaping the benefits of both dimensions. But I’m also just a huge sucker for incredible 2D sprite art, and UNI’s characters rank up there among the best. Whether it’s the wild flowing hair and flailing limbs of Minerva, the lightning-fast speed and rapid slashes of Seth, or the hilariously gargantuan arms of Waldstein, the 24 characters (plus three more as paid DLC) of UNI2 absolutely brim with personality and flair.

I’m a big fan of rushdown characters, so Linne was the first one I gravitated towards, and I was initially taken aback by just how “rushdown” she actually was. Her run speed is incredibly fast, allowing her to close the distance from full screen in basically the blink of an eye. Even without learning her big damage combos, it’s a ton of fun to look for that slight opening to get in and then utterly blitzing my opponent with a fairly basic strike/throw gameplan. I’m at the point now where I definitely need to dig a little deeper into her moveset and find better ways to open people up, and fortunately, the teaching tools that UNI2 provides are stellar as well.

There’s a mission mode that gives you a basic overview of how to play each character, along with a wide variety of combos that cover just about every situation you could imagine sorted by difficulty. You’ve got quick, low-hitting combos you can use from point-blank range, overhead combos, combos that come out of your farthest reaching poke, anti-air combos, corner combos, and better versions of previous combos that build upon what you’ve already learned to squeeze out just a bit more damage. Once you get all the way down to the bottom, that’s where you’ll learn the big damage combos that incorporate Chain Shifts, super moves, and other high level techniques. It’s pretty much everything you need to build a full game plan with a character, all packed within the actual game itself, which should be the standard for any modern fighting game.

The unfortunate thing for anyone looking to learn about these characters by playing through their story mode, however, is that you’re going to feel buried under a mountain of jargon and names that won’t mean anything to you if you didn’t play the previous games in the series. The world and lore of Under Night is extensive, and there’s no effort made in this version to catch new players up on what “The Hollow Night” is, what the heck “EXS” is, or even what an “In-Birth” means. You are getting dropped into the supposed final chapter of a story, after all. Still, some sort of index or compendium would have gone a long way toward making these otherwise fairly dry arcade mode stories a bit easier to follow.

In general, UNI2 is lacking in content outside of its central modes. If you’re not a serious fighting game player who wants to grind online play and make use of its fantastic teaching tools to get better, there’s not going to be a ton here to hold your interest. Fortunately, if you are one of those people, UNI2 does have a feature that many AAA fighting games still don’t: Replay Takeover. While watching a replay, you’re able to take control of one of the characters at any point. This allows you to repeat something that gave you trouble in a match and try to find a way to learn from it. Like, for example, an offensive sequence that you got hit with that seemed air tight when you were in the moment – when you run it back, you might be able to find a spot where you could use an invincible reversal attack, or maybe your shield to push the opponent back far enough that their next attack wouldn’t have landed. Just like in Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, and the scant few other fighting games that have this feature, it’s an absolute godsend when it comes to improving your matchup knowledge.