The actual gameplay of Battle Fantasia is carried out on a 2D plane, with 3D fighters who do a pretty good job of resembling sprite work without actually being sprites. The characters themselves have a wide range of design, and according to your taste in anime influenced art, they actually look pretty good for the most part. A couple of them are a little generic and would seem a bit more at home in an RPG (which is part of the style here), like the young magician, rabbit fighter, or the cat girl waitress, but for the most part I liked the design of everyone included.

There's a story mode and an Arcade mode for the single player stuff, with Arcade pitting you up against 8 other fighters at different locations on the fictional map, featuring virtually no story, just the opening and exit dialogues between a match. The story mode, on the other hand, is character specific, so each character has a tale to tell. Most of the stories weave back and forth into each other, so you'll see some scenes repeated with different viewpoints, but for the most part they keep separate and they're worth seeing to the end if you're interested in checking it out. Neither mode will pit you against all 12 fighters at once, the closest you'll get to that is duking it out in Survival mode. Still, running up against 8 fighters or so is a pretty fun diversion, and while it doesn't take up much time it doesn't really drag on either. In Story mode you can actually stop and come back to the game to pick up where you left off, but it looks like in Arcade mode you need to play thru without saving.

The fighting itself is over the top, and doesn't feature the amount of depth of more serious entries like Virtua Fighter or the tournament heavy Street Fighter series, but I think fighting fans will find a little bit of enjoyment from this game regardless. It's not going to be something that you'll see brought out at a tourney outside of something fun to try out in between matches, but it works well enough that some players will be able to pull of some skillful displays anyways. It does run a bit slower than I'm used to, and while there are smaller and quicker characters, even the medium range fighters feel a little too cumbersome compared to how they look. The speed is definitely nowhere in the range of SSF2 Turbo or the Marvel Vs. Capcom titles for instance.

The balancing seems to be pretty good, at least to my average sense of skill, and while there's some noticeable HP differences, (it actually gives you hit points listed under the health bars), everyone has a different strength and power of attack, so for the most part it balances out. The bigger guys are slow, the smaller are fast, and so on, which is pretty much a staple of the fighting game genre at this point. Attacks are easy to pull off outside of the difficulties associated with the 360 controller D-Pad, and there are super moves that can be done after filling up a gauge for a few levels.

Still, while Battle Fantasia's mechanics seem to work well enough, it's also a little barebones for today's fighting market. The visuals are pretty, big, and for the most part the designs are really solid, but it's not a game that'll get heavy replay value from the single player department. There's some unlockable stuff with galleries and music, but nothing that I came across with extra characters, and while going thru each story mode could take a few days or so, once you're done with that you've seen most of what the game has to offer. In the end it'll boil down to whether or not you can find a group to play competitively with, either for a tourney or just for fun like a lot of fighters. Thankfully, there is online support with XBLA, so even if you don't have a local scene for fighters, you can find some players to go against there. If you do, then rest assured Battle Fantasia is quite a bit of fun, just don't go into expecting too much, and it won't disappoint.