Skullgirls’ hand-drawn fighting still holds up, but its small roster caps the ceiling

Skullgirls arrived in 2012 as a downloadable fighting game with a hand-drawn look and a nasty sense of humor, and it did something the genre had mostly stopped doing: it made a case for itself on animation alone.

Developed by Reverge Labs and published by Autumn Games, the game launched digitally on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 before reaching PC, Mac and Linux. It builds its fights around the Skull Heart, an artifact that grants one woman’s wish every seven years. If the wisher’s soul is impure, the wish curdles and she becomes the Skullgirl. That premise gives the roster a reason to exist beyond hitting each other.

Trailer, via GameSpot.

The Canopy Kingdom and the Skull Heart

Skullgirls takes place in the Canopy Kingdom, a country modeled on 1940s postwar America. It is ruled by the Renoir royal family and troubled by the Medici mafia, and it is home to humans, anthropomorphic animals and giants alike. Magic is real here. Parasites and Living Weapons grant their hosts superhuman abilities, and much of the kingdom follows the Trinity — Venus, Aeon and their mysterious Mother.

The Skull Heart is the Trinity’s tool, a sentient artifact with reality-warping power. The Skullgirl and the Heart are devices the Trinity uses to wreak havoc on the world. Humanity has fought back, building agencies to make weapons against them. The most notable is Canopy Kingdom’s Anti-Skullgirl Labs, a black-ops research institution led by the scientist Brain Drain.

Seven years after the Grand War, a slave girl named Marie Korbel has become the newest Skullgirl. She terrorizes the kingdom to take revenge on the Medici. The story mode follows several fighters, each chasing the Heart for their own reasons — to destroy it or to use it. Queen Nancy Renoir nearly ended the world during the Grand War when she tried to wish for peace. That history hangs over everything.

Six Buttons, Tag Teams and Dramatic Tension

The fighting is tag team-based. Players pick one fighter or a team of two or three. A solo character has more health and hits harder. Larger teams are weaker but can recover health when tagged out, and they can call in off-screen teammates for assists, also called ensemble attacks. Custom assists let players tune teams further.

Reverge Labs modeled the system on Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes, borrowing its tag mechanics, assists and control scheme. Six buttons cover light, medium and hard punches and kicks. Chaining them makes simple combos. Special attacks sit above normal moves, and blockbusters are cinematic supers that hit multiple times and cost meter.

That meter is called dramatic tension. It fills as the fight goes on, stores up to five bars, and stronger blockbusters need more of it. Tension also pays for other universal techniques, so the resource is not just for flash.

A match ends when one side’s characters are all knocked out. If time runs out first, whoever has more health left wins.

Hand-Drawn Animation That Carries the Whole Thing

The animation is the reason to play Skullgirls. Every fighter is drawn at high definition by hand, and the frames move with a weight and snap that most fighters of the era could not match. It is the game’s signature, and it holds up.

The roster size is the weak point. Critics at launch praised the animation and the mechanics and knocked the initial roster and the online multiplayer. That split is fair. A fighting game lives on its cast, and Skullgirls shipped thin. The systems were ready before the bench was.

Still, what is here is smart. Ensemble attacks and custom assists give a small roster more room than it looks like it has, and the solo-versus-team tradeoff — more health and damage against recovery and assists — is a real decision at the select screen, not a formality.

A Troubled Release, Then a Long Second Life

The launch was not the end of the story. Skullgirls came out through the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade, then was ported to Windows through Steam. A dispute between Autumn Games and distributor Konami pulled it from the console storefronts. It returned in 2014 as Skullgirls Encore, and a PlayStation 4 port and a Japanese arcade version followed in 2015 under the name Skullgirls 2nd Encore.

More ports came after: PlayStation Vita, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. A mobile spin-off developed by Hidden Variable Studios landed in 2017 for Android and iOS. Development of Skullgirls 2nd Encore continues through downloadable content.

The game’s afterlife is longer than its launch. That is not a small thing for a 2012 download.

What Skullgirls Gets Right and What It Still Owes

The Dark Deco world is the best thing Skullgirls has going. The Canopy Kingdom has a real texture — a postwar country with a royal family, a mafia, a black-ops lab and a goddess cult, all pulling on the same artifact. Marie Korbel’s revenge against the Medici gives the story mode a spine. The premise that every wish can curdle is a clean engine for a fighting roster.

The combat holds up too. Tag teams, assists and dramatic tension give veterans room to work, and the solo option keeps newcomers from being locked out. The game tests skill without demanding a decade of muscle memory first. That balance is harder than it looks.

The complaint about the roster is the one that sticks. A fighter with a small cast runs out of matchups, and Skullgirls ran out early. The online multiplayer drew criticism at launch as well. Those are the two places where the game’s reach exceeded its grip.

But the animation and the systems were never the problem, and the years since have only made that clearer. Skullgirls Encore, 2nd Encore and the ports kept the game alive long after the console storefronts dropped it. The mobile spin-off widened the audience. DLC kept the roster growing.

The verdict here is that Skullgirls is a fighting game worth the time of anyone who cares about the genre, and a near-miss on the one thing it needed most at launch. The mechanics are sharp, the world is built with care, and the hand-drawn animation is the best argument for the game. The thin roster is the reason it is not higher.

Skullgirls scores 7.9 out of 10.

2D animation · fighting games · game review · Skullgirls · Skullgirls 2nd Encore · tag team fighters