Fight Crab 2 is the crustaceous Monster Rancher game we need

thesixthaxis.com:

The original Fight Crab answered a question I never even knew I needed the answer to: what if someone made an an anime arena fighter with hilariously unreliable individual-limb controls, and also every character was a crab? It’s a ridiculously stupid combo, but in the best kind of way – it’s the sort of irreverent, dumb fun that throws every rule of video games out the window for the sake of making you grin from ear to ear. Fight Crab 2 ups the ante with not only with a wider variety of selectable shelled warriors and ridiculous weaponry, but also a new kind of campaign mode that answers an even sillier question: what if it was also like Monster Rancher too?

In the first game, the campaign consisted of just over 40 individual battle stages, grouped together within a handful of common themes and settings. There wasn’t any connective tissue beyond picking a stage from a list, though. Fight Crab 2 crafts a much more evolved and immersive single player experience this time around by putting you in charge of raising the crab of your dreams. In these dreams, naturally, your crab is meant to battle and defeat other crustaceans and become the most powerful crab of all. Or lobster. Or mantis shrimp.

Once you pick your ideal crab, you’ll spend time on a training farm alongside crab-farmer anime girl Maki Shione as you select different activities for your crab to participate in. There are event battles, exhibition battles, and ladder-climbing ranked battles, but you’ve also got side activities to participate in to beef up your crustacean’s stats.

What I love about Fight Crab 2 is that every aspect of its presentation has a perfect blend of ridiculousness and sincerity. The game is absurd enough to show you an animation of your crab’s claws flailing dumbbells around aimlessly when you decide to give it strength training, but plays that entire interaction so straight and serious that you can’t help but laugh even harder. The absolute foolishness of the combat elevates it all even