Tbh, they kind of shoehorned it in with Endless Frontier so meh. But regardless, it's not an SRW style game or brand. NxC wasn't even close and from what I'm reading PxZ, it's probably more of the same. Might be fun but it'll probably take alot more work to be as good as an actual SRW.
In that case the shoehorning was pretty complete: in the 1st game Haken and Aschen tie into SRW OG plot, and on the 2nd they include Axel Almer, Alfimi and Fighter Roar; now PXZ tosses in Sanger, and all of them get Reiji, Xiaomu and Saya.
Between the crossovers all of those have been in plus aditional ones the characters in those tie to (ex.. Virtual On in SRW, Ryu in lots of other games), the shared cast of these Monolith Soft game might qualify for a Kevin Bacon-ish 6-degrees factor among video game casts.
Not that their own stories are particularly good - the referenced games tend to have decent ones and the writers find clever ways to make them work together, but at the end of the day they really really want us to love their original guys and force their plots down our throats to the very end of the game. And to make things worse, get get new sets of originals for every game, so the cycle starts anew every time.
I'd see no problem with Haken and Aschen or Kaguya starring in EF Exceed, or Reiji and Xiaomu starring in PXZ - I wonder what new relevant things the new characters bring in each case.
I wouldn't be surprised if references to the retarded plot had more to do with the new guys and the inevitable original enemy/final boss, since the interaction between everyone else tends to be the lifeblood of these games.
