Urban Reign

Just beat Story Mode.

Missions 89 and 90 were a nightmare. These were the ones where you're supposed to fend off armed grunts alone. No help from partner. Good grief. Also, the mission where you're supposed to protect Shun Ying is too skewed in favor of the opposition - if I'm playing on Very Hard and enemies are harder, Shun Ying should have that same AI. Not just stand there and get hit. I kept changing from her to Brad and vice versa, and it was hell. Non-stop onslaught of running kicks and the offensive power up let me score a lucky win.

On the other side of things, Shinkai falls for running slide + head regional, just like everybody else. But in his case, thankfully. That magical input reading of his turns any attempt at fighting "regularly" into "let's dodge nearly every attack to gain special bar, then use it to spam auto-win grab special of doom".

So yeah, here's my highlights

Kadonashi on mission 15 (still learning the ropes)
Low kick spamming enemies in mission 65
Golem on mission 78 (not enough room to escape, seemingly magical dash grabs - felt sweet when I won giving him a taste of his own medicine)
Nightmarish missions 89 and 90 (to me, by far the toughest, at least on this setting )
Shinkai

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"You can plainly see why I'm a Boss character, and not some thug" - Kanon

Yeah. And the fact that I struggled big time with missions 89 and 90 shows it. These are probably missions no one else struggled with, yet the enemy aggressiveness paired with the range of their weapons drove me insane.

Honestly, I didn't struggle with Golem in the other encounters. You always faced him in larger areas than that first bout. Whenever I saw him activating his special, I just happily ran around the stage. After that, some lock-on jump kicks always won over his axe swings (they gave him an axe so many times after the first encounter, which I reckon was supposed to make him tougher, but only made him easier), which was all he tried to do whenever he saw me approach. Unlike other bosses (Shinkai), he never bothers to roll away from/dodge lock-on running kicks. He was tougher when paired with Shun Ying's brother, though.

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"You can plainly see why I'm a Boss character, and not some thug" - Kanon