Chalgyr's Game Room writes:
Koihime Enbu is a 2D fighting game recently released for PC based on the strategy/visual novel game Koihime Musou. The “Koihime series” is based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is a historical piece of literature dealing with the unification of ancient China. This isn’t supposed to be a Chinese history course, so I won’t go into a history lesson, but if you’ve ever played the Dynasty Warriors games, it’s the same base material. Koihime Enbu, however has two very evident differences from the classic historical text. First is that, being Japanese made, all of the historical names are replaced with the Japanese equivalents. As an example, the original Lu Bu is replaced by Ryofu Housen. The other, and most prominent, difference is that all the characters are female. Yes, that’s correct, almost all those big burly men are now, for the most part, decently “endowed” women.
Roger Ebert once said "Of each thing, ask, who is it for?" He was of course
talking about the medium of film, but it's a useful metric for criticism in
general. For instance, critiquing a racy visual novel on the quantity of
fanservice is kind of useless, since that's exactly why people are playing
it. Similarly, critiquing a fighting game for average fighting game things
isn't really intuitive to the people who want to know if a fighting game's
any good, regardless of whether or not the reviewer is actually any good at
fighting games. So with this in mind, I decided to figure out whether or not Koihime Enbu, the 2D fighting game based on the Koihime Musou visual novel series, is a
good fighting game, regardless of whether or not I like fighting games all
that much.
Koihime Enbu appears to be just a generic anime fighter. And in some ways, it is – its source material is a rather obscure set of visual novels, Koihime Musou, and the whole roster of characters is girls. Who hasn't heard of an all girl anime fighting game cast? These days, it seems more rare to find a guy in games like this. Despite that, under the hood there seems to be a pretty solid fighting experience.
Evan from Bit Cultures reviews Koihime Enbu, a Japanese anime fighter with tight controls and unique fatal counter system.
"I’m still enjoying my time with Koihime Enbu. Becoming adequate enough at the single player is an enjoyable and trying task, but I still hope to find a multiplayer match or two. The game is good enough to stand on its own without multiplayer, but the lack of any accessible games or rooms really damages the value (especially at the $40 price tag). Still, veterans and newbies (as well as Three Kingdoms fans) alike will find much to love in Koihime Enbu, and the solid mechanics and Fatal Counter system do the game justice."
