Gave it a 4.
I wanted to post a link to the RotD review I wrote and wanted to send to Bobak to put it in the ng.com review section but can't find it anymore... damn...
EDIT: Found it -
click here.
Anyway... to make a long story short, RotD is an okay game that is fun at first but gets incredibly boring as soon as you have learned its ins and outs which includes the bigger team combos, linking into and out of CD strings and wall breaks.
It's easy to get into, looks decent (I kinda like the chara design) and the music is really excellent (and undoubtedly the best part of the game), other than that, it failed to impress me gameplay-wise.
Matches by skilled players tend to be repetitive due to unbalanced damage of normal attacks and small combos and the more flashy stuff - you simply have to try to land one of the bigger wall breaks + CD string + DM in order to dish out considerable damage, and since this isn't really challenging after a short while of practice, it's not as rewarding to use all that stuff as, say, landing a nice super-cancel in KoF.
There's more esoteric gameplay stuff (including combo cheapness and balance issues) to be said about RotD but I spare you guys my usual litany this time... let's just say the game could have been so much more in this regard.
Sure, RotD may be nice for casual players and fooling around with some buddies but it's nothing that could hold a more serious player's interest for longer than a few days, if at all. I give credit to the dev'ers for trying to come up with something new, it was a brave decision to release a game like that when the Neo world was still shocked by SNK's demise.
So, I bought the homecart on release but regretted it after a while when I realized that RotD would never make it to my personal lists of classics. Now it sits on the shelf and gets played about once a year, if at all... but hey, at least the RotD purchase got me a nice blue t-shirt (size M... "JPN M" that is...) which I gave to the wife, she still wears it so I couldn't even sell a complete RotD because she would never give it back to me...
Matrimelee which came out after RotD was much, much better, and it's my #1 recommendation for those who want a newer fun-fighter with some depth and overall good presentation. On the other hand, the Neo already has some of the better fun-fighters like Waku Waku 7 or World Heroes Perfect, personally I would get these first before spending lots of money on half-assed stuff like RotD.
