Tough Love Arena
is a browser-based Fighting Game. It is currently in beta and has six characters, and offline and online gameplay (including rollback netcode for the online mode).
Both graphically and mechanically, Tough Love Arena is more on the simple side. Each character, who look like differently-colored humanoid blobs, has a basic light and heavy attack, a jumping attack which can close distances quickly, and two unique special moves. Increasing your LOVE meter by dealing and taking damage lets you perform Rapid cancels and Bursts. Inputs are of the "single button and direction" variety, rather than motion-based. This makes it easy to pick up and play, though this means more room for mind games to shine.
Tough Love Arena contains examples of the following tropes:
- Anti-Air: Every character has one or two anti-air moves, though some, like Beef and Pork's jump attack and Rice's neutral special, are more potent than others.
- Combo Breaker: You can use two bars of LOVE to perform a Burst and escape from a combo.
- Counter-Attack:
- Beef's Flex move has them pose, and if they get hit during this time, they retaliate with a devastating punch.
- Onion's Deflect doesn't unleash a counterattack when it blocks a move, but rather it lets you immediately use any of your own attacks while your opponent is recovering from their animation.
- Edible Ammunition: Beef can throw a lemon as a projectile, which rolls along the ground. Noodle can serve a bowl of soup that acts as a stationary hazard that must be dodged around.
- Edible Theme Naming: The characters are named after food: Rice, Noodle, Beef, Pork, Onion, and Garlic. The bosses: Secret Spice and Mystery Meat.
- Flash Step: Garlic's Dash. Light and heavy attacks can be used out of it, making it act like a wavedash, or one can teleport to the other side of the opponent while doing this to perform a cross-up.
- Long-Range Fighter: Rice and Noodle have long arms that let them strike from a longer range than the other characters. Relatedly, Beef has the only projectile in the game.
- Meaningful Name:
- Beef and Pork are big, buff, MEATY characters.
- Noodle has long, noodle-like Rubber-Hose Limbs. Applies less to their Palette Swap Rice.
- Onion's name is a reference to onion skinning,an animation technique that Onion's afterimages resemble. Onion, and garlic, are also ingredients that one adds a "dash" of while cooking.
- Moveset Clone: There are currently three character bases, and three alternate versions. The alternate versions have the same sprites (but Palette Swapped) and basic attacks, though their special moves are different.
- Rubber-Hose Limbs: Noodle and their Palette Swap Rice have long, noodly limbs that let them strike from a greater distance.
- Secret A.I. Moves: Boss character Mystery Meat has a small-jump version of the dropkick that Beef and Pork don't have, and can use their shoulder charge outside of a combo. Secret Spice can cancel his teleport into a grab in a way that Garlic cannot.
- Sheathe Your Sword: Blocking in this game is different from most fighting games: instead of holding a button to block, or holding in the direction opposite one's character is facing, one must instead press no buttons at all.
- Shout-Out: Onion and Garlic are apparently fans of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: When performing a Rapid Cancel, they strike Jonathan's palm-over-face pose, and Onion does Dio's "WRYYY" pose when Deflecting an attack.
- Teleport Spam: Rice and Garlic can do this. Rice's is a keepaway tool, but Garlic can only do so to attack.
