Hey everyone!
Do you guys, be honest with me, think that $60.00 is a warranted price for this as a single player game?
I love the idea and concept. Sadly, I don't think many friends or family would like to play videogames with me other than in quick bursts.
Is the single player worth the admission?
I'm going to differ from others here and say that the single-player
might be worth the cost of admission depending on what your perception of value is and just how much you adore the core concept of the gameplay, which may be hard to tell if you didn't play the Testpunch.
For instance, you should be able to answer this from your own experience with other fighting games in the past: Grand Prix (the arcade mode) takes about an hour to run through on a suitable difficulty that mildly challenges you but doesn't put up any hard roadblocks. With a ten-character roster, do you consider that ten hours of content, or one hour of content repeated ten times?
I fall into the first category. I played all but one session of the Testpunch, but since picking up the full retail game, I have yet to step into online multiplayer at all. Between:
(a) clearing GP 4 (the middle difficulty) with the full roster,
(b) moving up to higher difficulties with characters I particularly like,
(c) casual experimentation with the mechanics in Training (admittedly underdeveloped) and the random marathon mode (Arms Test), and
(d) playing the 1-on-100 challenge (again, in my view, worth doing with the whole roster since each character has their own starting stage, which you unlock for everyone by beating it for the first time),
... I would estimate that if I never went online, I would still be on track to get at least 20 hours out of the game. (Maybe by the end of this week.) And to be honest, I don't really find myself craving more single-player modes, just more characters/arms/stages, as planned.
Basically, the amount of single-player content you are looking at is a little more than you would get from a typical Street Fighter, but much less than something like SSB with its tailored challenges, home run contests, and target mini-games. If you were okay paying full price for a Street Fighter II cartridge to play at home back in the early 1990s, definitely jump in. If you thought that was never nearly good enough to begin with, I'd hold back. Like Splatoon (which has a single-player you can take to 100% in 5-10 hours, and which I definitely wouldn't have recommended at full price for single-player alone, as good as it is), Arms is unquestionably a multiplayer-centric experience. But if you think of clearing the standard arcade mode with all characters as non-redundant content—and not everybody will—for the sake of a dollars-per-hour calculation, if you're into that sort of thing, you're looking at 10 hours minimum, plus many more just to learn the basic mechanics and practice.
Also, I think you would be surprised to find how many players in this thread never thought of themselves as people who would ever take a fighting game online, but wound up doing so anyway because they love the mechanics that much.
I'm not going to outright recommend putting down $60 just to play offline—much as I love the game, I would have been very hesitant to do this myself—but this is what you should know to make an informed decision.
