Review: Under Night in Birth II: SYS Celes Polishes an Excellent Fighter

Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes looked eerily similar to the previous game, Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[cl-r] when I first sat down with it. The characters all looked and, at a glance, seemed to play the same. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as Tekken 8 recently showed the fantastic positives that come with being able to carry your skills from the previous games into the new entries. As I dug deeper into this game, I started to see the small tweaks, move changes, and visual details that made this fighter stand out and shine. And it doesn’t hurt that it’s a ton of fun thanks to some interconnected systems that add so much depth to which strike you use next.

Yes, it all looks deceptively similar to the previous title. That said, it feels like all of the visuals in the game have been sharpened and improved. All of the characters have some visual improvements to the already-impressive attack animations. Attacks seem just a little bit snappier or flashier. It’s the sort of thing that felt like a minor difference, but I felt my enjoyment of the game was a little bit higher. This was also aided by the clean user interface. Something about the fonts, win screens, character portrait appearances, and other fine details of the game’s framework looked really nice. It’s not usually something that jumps right out at me, but it was so good that it really improved the game’s presentation.

If you’re new to the series with Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes and you like pixel artwork, you’re going to be impressed. I cannot get over how smooth the movement is in this title and its pixel work. I would just watch Merkava, a monstrous humanoid creature, just breathed as it stood there before the match kicked in. A ton of care went into the ways the characters moved in this game, and I found myself watching replays just so I could appreciate the pixel artwork in motion.

That same care went into animating some new attacks. All of the characters have a few new abilities to add to their kit, adding some neat adjustments to what they can do. I was far from being a high level player of the last game, so it’s a bit beyond me to explain how these moves change the characters and how they play, but I know I enjoyed having some new surprises I could bust out. A lot of them could be used with relative ease, too, as the game’s combo-assist-like strikes allow you to string together some easy beatdowns by mashing your light A attack (the game’s buttons are assigned A B C D). Very easy to jump in with and do cool things, but you’ll eventually have to branch out lest you become predictable.

While each character has a good game plan you’ll want to figure out and implement (a lot of which are extremely satisfying to put to work), the GRD system throws a little chaos into the mix in Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes. The GRD gauge sits in the bottom middle of the screen, and consists of six diamonds on you and your opponent’s side. As you play aggressively and defend well, you will fill your diamonds up with color. Back off or play defensively and those diamonds will drain on your side. Meanwhile, a circle (the TS Gauge) steadily fills as the match progresses. Once it finishes a rotation, whoever have the most filled diamonds gets a 10% buff called a Vorpal state.

However, that’s not all you can use the GRD diamonds for. You can use Force Function to do a special character-specific attack (press B & C) that expends one diamond. If you get ahead on diamonds, you’re free to do some extra cool attacks as your reward for playing consistently and aggressively. You may not want to burn too many of these, though, as you can lose all of your progress to GRD Break, which can happen if you’re thrown or if you try to use a Shield Block (block while holding D) and screw it up. This means people might scramble for throws when you’re building up a stockpile of diamonds, or that your mistakes cost a whole lot more than usual.

Now, you also have your EXS Gauge, which is what fuels your special moves and your extremely powerful Infinite Worth attacks (Supers) in Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes. This builds through play, but during Vorpal state, you can also do a Chain Shift to dump your remaining diamonds into fuel for your EXS bar. The EXS bar persists between rounds and GRD doesn’t, so if the match is about to end, you can funnel that into your EXS bar so you can really slam your opponent during the next round.

What I really enjoy about these systems is that they throw extra things to consider into the mix. While you have a game plan you want to execute, you’ll need to pay attention to the GRD Gauge as you execute it. Did you have to backdash to escape something your foe was doing, and now the TS Gauge is almost finished its rotation? Better do a throw to nullify the opponent’s GRD advantage before that circle is complete. If you have a bunch of diamonds left and you’re in Vorpal state, should you dump those into your EXS bar early so that you have an advantage next round (or just to funnel into an Infinite Worth), or hold onto them this round to keep your current advantage? It made me continually adjust my game plan, resulting in some scramble-y matches (in a game where matches are already pretty wild).

Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes also lets you add further damage by activating Veil Off, which uses your whole EXS Gauge (you need 100% out of 200% minimum to use it, though) but gives you a 20% boost in damage (and this stacks with the 10% from Vorpal if you wanna go wild). This state lets you string together things that don’t normally work together as it lets you use EXS moves so long as you have a little bit of meter in the EXS Gauge instead of needing a whole bar, allowing for some of your nastiest combos while having a huge damage buff.

So, again, there is much to consider within the general ebb and flow of a match besides your character and what they’re capable of. All of these systems feed into one another in ways that can result in massive damage boosts or huge shifts in momentum (a couple of careful Shield Guards can give an opponent on the ropes enough advantage to get the buffs they need to turn the tide). I found myself constantly weighing options and changing strategies based on the GRD Gauge or the state of my opponent, and it resulted in matches that just felt very involved and interesting.

Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes has a solid tutorial to teach you all of this stuff, too. It’s a bit intimidating at first as you find yourself looking at a wall of text, but it is all laid out in very careful steps to help you understand the nuances. You can also try many of these moves out right on the spot. I felt it was set up in such a way that it made the complexities make a lot of sense fairly quickly, and it also offers some practice in the more complex elements of fighting games if you want some lessons on creating frame traps or stringing combos together.

That’s especially helpful with the two new abilities that were added to this game. Creeping Edge is a quick defensive move that lets you shoot forward towards your opponent (or through them), avoiding their attacks while closing distance. It costs GRD Gauge to use, so it’s expensive, but the ability to ignore their strike and start some trouble of your own is very useful. The other ability, Celestial Vorpal, occurs when you turn Vorpal but have all six bars filled. When this happens, you steal all of your opponent’s GRD diamonds, getting twelve diamonds worth of duration on your Vorpal state. It’s a huge, long advantage that makes the battle for GRD diamonds even more intense as they fill up.

With so many systems in play, and with the addition of the new ones, Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes is even more aggressive, yet still extremely complex and thoughtful, than ever. Adding great rollback netcode into the online play also made it feel extremely satisfying to play online. I rarely had many hiccups while duking it out (although I learned that I have a long ways to go to get better at the game). Having a solid online component alone makes this entry worth picking up.

That said, for all of the nice additions, I just kind of wish I liked the way more of the characters looked. This is a deeply personal reason to complain, but something about the character designs just doesn’t impress me. I love seeing them in motion, find their attacks and abilities to be really impressive, but I just don’t care for a lot of the cast and find it limits me on who I want to play as. I almost feel silly bringing it up, but so many of these characters look like lost teenagers on their way to school, or weird monsters and twisted people that are missing a key detail to make them really pop, that I just wish I could like the designs more.

Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes, as a sequel, might also feel like it’s a bit lacking compared to the bigger fighters out there due to a limited number of modes. You get your online ranked, casual matches, room and matches. For single player, you have an Arcade story, Score Attack, Time Attack, Survival, and Combo Missions, but there’s no large story mode to tie it all together. It feels like it’s lacking compared to some of the bigger games, but in the same vein, I also didn’t find I cared. The Arcade story was in-depth enough (although I don’t know the lore well and this game doesn’t do much to help you learn it) and the other modes were good enough to help me figure out the characters. It’s a good amount of depth as you have 24 characters to experience individual stories with, so I don’t feel single player folks will feel it’s missing much.

The one place I wish it had gotten a bit more was with characters. The game added three new playable characters (although more are on the way), and I didn’t much care for any of them, visually. Tsurugi looks like yet another lost high schooler, except he has a big shield. Kaguya has a suite of impressive gunplay attacks and movements that made her the standout of the new characters. Kuon is the big bad, and he has some neat strikes that send him behind the opponent, the ability to fly temporarily, and some nasty screen-filling strikes. They’re fun to play, but again, the character designs just didn’t impress me. It’s a small element that is going to mainly be a really personal problem, but I have to admit that it keeps bugging me in this game.

Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes felt similar to predecessors at first, but the visual cleanups, new attacks and details, nicer user interface, improved online, and a handful of new characters make it feel like the best possible package for this series so far. Whether you’ve played previous titles or are coming in brand new, this feels like the best version of the game to get. If you love complex fighters where the matches can get utterly wild from explosive characters and interwoven systems, you cannot go wrong with this game.

Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes is available now on the PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and Windows PC.