Well, with you talking about it Gomess, I popped my copy of Star Gladiator in for the first time in ages. The results were....meh. There really is no sense of inertia to the combos in this game, you just kinda attempt yours (with less 'precise timing of hits' and more 'mash out the correct button input as quickly as possible'), and it either hits, whiffs, or gets blocked, then your opponent gets a turn. There are SoulCalibur-style parries/guard impacts, but they're so clumsy to do and come out so slow and are so telegraphed that there's no way you're getting the awesome reflex-reverse stuff you can pull off in SC. I picked Zelkin since he actually looks kinda cool and bird-people are an oddly rare commodity in fighting games, and pretty quickly discovered that his 'swoop down and grab into a spinning drop' move was abusable EX-bullshit. I proceeded to steamroll through his whole Arcade mode with pretty much just that move (It's not perfect though, the hit detection on it can be pretty iffy, like the hit detection for EVERY OTHER MOVE IN THE GAME!). Even the fight with final boss Bilstein was over pretty quickly, and he only beat me in one round because the attack whiffed and he hit me with a boss-damage-infinite-combo.
Gomess, you were wrong about this game being cheesecake-free. The intro video spends a solid ten seconds trying to convince us that June is sexy (she's also prominently featured in the case under the disc, for whatever that's supposed to be worth.) The graphics are...eh, maybe Rival Schools level, maybe a little better actually (the stages actually look pretty good). The music sounds like a hold music composer who wanted to go for a 'space' theme, but didn't make it too prominent in case his employer didn't like that sort of thing. The cast is a mash-up of pretty much every character a 'unique' fighting game had to have back in the '90's. Regular guy, outrageous guy, robot, old guru with staff, dinosaur, 'hot' chick, you get the drift. Zelkin and Bilstein's designs are actually kind of cool though, but there's nowhere near the sense of personality you get from Capcom's other fighting game characters. The whole thing feels pretty phoned in; you can just hear Capcom going "Okay, we'll get on board with the popularity of 3D fighters and SoulCalibur, but we aren't going to LIKE it!".
Anyway, an addendum, as I have sinned greatly, by completely forgetting RAN HIBIKI on my previous list!
I don't know how this happened, Ran is easily my favorite Rival Schools character, period. It could be that I think of her less in terms of 'favorite female fighting game characters' and more as one of my favorite video game characters ever, up there with Leo from Lunar 2. Anyway, Ran is awesome. She's in Rival Schools, she's an unrelenting newshound for the Taiyo school newspaper, and she fights with a camera! I don't know how it does damage, but it's awesome. And she can also interview her opponent for Massive Damage. And her story has her teaming up with lethal joke character Linchou and under-appreciated Pacific High character Boman, making them the only mixed-school team. And she might be Dan Hibiki's sister. And she's entertaining, and boisterous, and has a cool design, and I love playing as her, and I effing love Ran, and am still shocked that I forgot about her when we were making lists. That is all.
As long as we're talking about GOOD Capcom games now, I'm waist-deep in Ghost Trick at the moment. It's like Ace Attorney- WITH GAMEPLAY. Oh, and the animation in this game is just fucking outstanding. It's smooth and beautiful, and I'm still not one-hundred percent sure if it's sprites or tiny, tiny 3D models. But they did a great job all-around. Music's nice too.
