General Overview
BREAK!! is an anime flavoured RPG written by a friend of mine that for years was, in many ways, the Duke Nukem Forever of RPGs. Something that people were eager for that we kind of assumed would never appear. Well we were wrong, and unlike Duke Nukem Forever it is really well done. While I am very much not an Anime afficionado, I am a system wonk and this has a lot of neat bits. I will say I have not finished doing as thorough of a read through as I'd like as this is a very large book. I should not have scheduled this review during one of my busiest months.
A Mechanic that works really well
Colossal Combat leans into this being based on JRPGs. A lot of BREAK!! mechanics are heavily inspired by OSR mechanics with some rebranding to fit theme, but this is pure JRPG and its delightful. Colossal monsters are functionally puzzles and mechanically work as a group of targets that can be targeted separately.
It allows this to happen.
This is one of the areas where BREAK!! truly shines.
A detail that lifts above its weight
I am going to cheat and list two.
1: Having HD be replaced "Hearts" does a lot to set expectations with very little words and simplifying individual HP to what are basically HD (assuming average rolls on damage dice and hit dice) allows the removal of all non-d20 dice and speeds up combat. Its a pretty good trade off mechanically. The time saved can be spent adding complications elsewhere, like weird combat stunts.
2: The Law of Diminishing returns for combat stunts means that doing the same thing a second or third time rapidly ceases to work. This means a GM has to worry far less about making a poor ruling and having a simple trick be overpowered. If its too powerful, it is auto-nerfed going forward and can't easily be repeated.
Constructive Feedback
This is a personal opinion, but the defend action in combat mirrors too strongly old OSR views of pure defense actions where you get +2 AC. Ok, fine, that is ok. But it also is what is used to protect someone else (and give them +2 AC). This is a flaw to me, because BREAK!! uses a more abstract positioning (which I am a fan of to be clear) and in doing so it has removed one of the core means of protection in OSR games, using positioning to block access to the squishy wizard with fighters. I think this is a case where the defend action could lean on the way NGR does it by making the person being defended in BREAK!! being unable to be directly targeted until their defender is taken out (or perhaps TOPPLED as one of the hindrances in BREAK!! combat)