Man,this game is awesome! I really rarely see beat'em up games with such good damage evading system, so this is my third favorite game in this genre after TMNT Shredder Revenge and Star Wars Episode III (GBA/DS). I hope someday every Beat'em up developers understand that parry, recovery and evade fits good not only in Japanese hack & slash games...
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Yeah, just as you imply I pretty much stole the system from soulslikes :P (stamina bar included, heh)
A lot of older scrolling beat 'em ups have basically no mechanics to speak of, you do the same handful of actions all the time (you'd think with 6 total face/shoulder buttons on a SNES controller there'd be more than basic attacks, jumps and the "hurt yourself for dubious benefit" special move button so many of them stuck with) so I felt like I had to expand on it somehow... also I suck at character animation so I wanted to keep the number of attack animations low; the single-frame shield/dash poses were perfect for this.
I feel like soulslikes are basically a combination of scrolling beat-em-ups and metroidvanias so it'd be interesting seeing if more indies realize the potential of backporting mechanics going forward - we've got the River City Ransom reboot and one of the UFO 50 games both adding a couple modest RPG elements to a scrolling beat 'em up, far from a big trend but it's something.