KickBeat, WHY IS NO ONE PLAYING THIS?!

As most of you know, fighting games are my absolute favorite kind of game. In a close second would be both beat-em-ups and oddly enough, rhythm games. When I first heard of KickBeat, a game that combines both beat-em-up and rhythm into one game, I knew right from the start I was going to absolutely love it. Beyond just the genre-mashup there's actually a really good game under the hood as well!
I've been playing the steam edition and I just finished Mei's story and while I was a little upset by the fact that Lee and Mei have to play the same songs for their stories, this is actually the very first game I have ever played where it actually made sense as to why one character would be doing the exact same things as the other (I say other, but there are actually more playable characters, they just don't have stories ). Beyond that, it's one of the only games I've ever played where the girl isn't just some useless damsel in distress that the man has to save. 

Story spoilers will now ensue, so read on at your own discretion.

You play through Lee's story first, as he's The Chosen One. As TCO makes his way through the stages, you notice one of your fellow monks is following you around the world. By the end of the game, she's been captured and Lee actually trades her imprisonment for his own. Here's where things take a turn that I certainly wasn't expecting. You pick up Mei's story after Lee's imprisonment and you play through exactly what he did as Mei. At first this turned me off, but watching her story cutscenes, for the first time ever, redoing an entire game made sense! Mei is not TCO but she can learn exactly what Lee did during the story if she experiences the same things that he did. That seems like such a silly idea, but it actually WORKS. That's all a development team has to say and it makes sense! Most games just ignore the story altogether and let you play as someone else, which I find to be exceptionally lazy.

During Mei's story, you see how upset she is and has been that no one has ever let her walk the path she wants. The game actually brings up Mei's viewpoint when she was younger during a flashback what most players would assume is the reason for this, that she is a woman, and therefore isn't seen as being capable of what men can do. FOR ONCE, THIS AWFUL STEREOTYPE IS COMPLETELY DISMANTLED, RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE PLAYER'S EYES. As a woman, she can do everything her male counterpart can do, she just has to be given the chance. Her grandfather lost her mother and didn't want to lose her too, so he was originally very wary about training her. During her story you get to know Mei a little better, and you can see that being feminine isn't a detriment for once, she's totally capable of doing everything Lee could do, heck she's even better at it than he is in some cases.
On top of the regular gameplay, KickBeat: Steam Edition has a really amazing feature wherein you can add ANY song in your computer's library to the game and then play it out. That feature alone should have been enough to warrant a purchase for most people. I grew up playing Stepmania and while I've always thought it would be amazing to make a simfile, me having absolutely no musical talent or insight has made that exceptionally difficult. With KickBeat however, almost all the work is done for me! The game is limitless, as long as you keep acquiring new music. How is that not a good investment, especially considering most people equate the price of a game to how many hours of enjoyment they'll get out of it nowadays?

I five starred every song included with the game on normal, and then I checked the leaderboards.

To my incredible surprise, I am now ranked #1 in the world in two of the game's songs. I'm in the top five score-wise in almost every single song included with the game. Cumulatively I'm sitting in the top 2k of players as well. That tells me two things; that no one is playing the game, and that no one that owns it is completing the game. I can't fathom why. I'm not saying the game is perfect, heck, it has a glitch that crashes it 100% of the time (If you turn button helpers on while they're off mid-song the game will crash when you unpause every time)! But nothing in life is perfect!
My only real gripes with the game so far are the final boss battle (Yes, the game does have boss battles). For some reason, compared to all the other battles, I CANNOT tell when you're about to be attacked. It's the only stage in the game that I NEED the button helpers to be on. The button helpers are designed for controller play, so they really confused me at the beginning, as I've been playing on keyboard this whole time. The other problem is keyboard-related but I've been working on ways around it. On the harder difficulties you often run into red enemies that come in sets of three at a time. Most computers don't accept three arrow key inputs at the same time because they assume you've made a mistake, so I either have to relearn to play the game with WSAD on my left hand or I'll learn to play with two hands in different spots. Maybe I'll pick up a controller, I dunno... 

IN ANY CASE... Why is no one playing this game?!  

#100

Shoot off some confetti streamers or something, I made it to post #100! I'll admit if I didn't have all these requests I probably would have written a new entry a long time ago, but hey, we're here, we made it!
There will be actual content to this post, I swear. First of all, I want to thank everyone who has been sticking around since day one over here, however sparsely the updates have come. Now that that's out of the way, I want to let you guys in on some things!
I think it's out there now, but I've been working on a patreon campaign for quite some time. I actually had a speech lined up, and I grabbed a bunch of footage from my videos over the years that I intended to use, and then, something strange happened. The goals that I was going to use patreon to work towards suddenly started to be completed, most often not even of my own volition. Like this new monitor I'm writing this entry on, Nox bought a new one, and I got this one. It came at the perfect time too, since I needed to use my monitor to fix someone else's tower!
On a separate front of that same war, I've actually been trying to rebrand my channel with new artwork. My artist has been going through a rough patch, so that's on hold for a while. When I'm ready for the rebrand I think my patreon campaign will go live, whenever that happens to be.
100 posts later, I've also received a bit of validation in a rather strange and roundabout way. For those of you that don't know, Unfair-Y Tales was originally envisioned as a way for Liz (and her family) to get to know me and see what makes me the way I am. While neither of those things really happened, I met a friend of mine's mother for the first time the other day, and she told me she felt like she knew me just from watching Unfair-Y Tales. I'm obviously doing something right, now aren't I?!