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 further – just like the first game, Fight Crab 2 tasks you with controlling the individual movement and rotation of each of your crabs limbs in order to navigate arenas, battle rival crabs, and flip them over for a count-out defeat. If you ever played the flailing track-runner flash game QWOP, it’s a lot like that… except with crabs. And also dozens of different weapons, from claymores and baseball bats to literal lightsabers.
Spicing things up in this sequel is the fact that crabs now have human companions riding them into battle – by default these are multicolored knights, but if you’re really creative you can use the game’s Vroid 3D avatar support to upload any vtuber-style character of your dreams into the game to play as instead. The human companions add an interesting layer to combat – they can recover weapons for you, and perform idol girl dances while your crab is busy taking care of business. There are a lot of other new kinds of elements in the game that shake up combat in interesting ways – vehicles can be found and ridden in the maps, and you can use special cards to activate spell attacks, buffs, modifiers, and more.
There’s a lot of fun to be had with Fight Crab 2, but as an Early Access offering, it’s not without faults. For example, while Career mode can be played with two players, the 2nd player currently has no options for customising their crab. Additionally, while there are some really amazing side-challenge modes like the Mad Max: Fury Road inspired Immortan Takashi Battle, it’s a short list of challenges. Seeing those expanded on as the game continues to evolve with be a delight. Until then, Fight Crab 2 is still an incredible experience and a definite improvement on the wildest and silliest ideas from the first game. I can’t wait to see what else is in store for the game as the crustaceous content updates continue to roll in.
