Halcyone3

Well, Valk is pretty much duty bound to serve the Alucards, and I think Gii and Nago are her familiars (thus bound by magic or whatnot). But tbh, I do think they like her. No matter how duty-bound he may be, Valk's reactions involving Rachel seem pretty damn genuine to me.

All we know is that Mori is still writing the story.

I don't mean I'm disappointed in it's usefulness. It's definitely useful and way better than gold burst. I'm disappointed at the lack of progress in finding great stuff to do with it. We don't really have any too cool tricks with the improved move properties yet really. I just figured with the changed move properties we would be seeing some interesting set-ups and combo paths, but we have very little of that. Meh, guess I just had much larger expectations that I should have :V

Am I the only one that's kinda disappointed at the progress of OD overall? I mean, what have we got so far? 1- Hype hakumen combos 2- Free meter for some resource characters. and that's kinda it. All I see it used other than that is to power up a finishing DD. The couple times I've seen Jin try OD combos the enemy keeps teching in between. :/

Makes sense, you don't really know the value of what you have until you lose it. Jin may care for Tsubaki in his own way, but Hakumen's behavior just shows how much Jin takes her for granted.

You mean aside from the fact that incredible comebacks happen all the time? OD on start is a tactic to give yourself a slight advantage from the get-go, it's not an all powerful move. Sacrificing a round for it is not worth it.

He gets around 4 If I remember right. Same works with Tsubaki who gets like 3 charges by doing instant OD at start.

Lol I don't remember the details, so I went with the more non-committal approach Well..... wasn't Noel tampered? I mean, she is technically complete right? So if it happened before or prior, she definitely went through it. Unless that's a typo and you meant "before or AFTER", in which case, there's a chance Mikazuchi carpet bombed the place between the tampering and the "experimenting". EDIT: you probably meant after, so yea, guess there's a chance she didn't go through it.

Isn't this the stein explosion move? Did the OD loop get taken out?

It is heavily implied they weren't nice to her in the slightest. Might also be part of the reason Nu ended up so fucked up, even if she survived. Noel is lucky to not remember those times

He sorta skids an inch off the ground. It's honestly not that rare a sight in an anime-like setting.

kinky 3-way? Didn't terumi say he transferred the soul back to nu (or explain how it happened) at that scene at the end where he's looking down into the cauldron?

I swear, if kokonoe is not made playable after saying a line like that, Mori will get all of my hatred till the end of time, coy little bastard

Hazama: something something "trinity" something something Plat: "Yuuki Terumi" with trinity's voice and ghost-like figure floating behind her EDIT: fk ninja'd, i even forgot the missile

If I remember right from the discussions before. This is the original Caelica, but she kinda branched off. So even though she traveled to the future, she also remained in the past. So there's 2 versions of her that are not really clones but kinda technically are, and this story really has its head so far up its ass by this point that it can smell its own breath.

So Score Attack is vs a third of the cast now? sweet.

Well, Platinum always shows a pinkish hue in her hair, usually around the shadowed areas. My guess is they had to choose between pink and blonde and went with pink. Dunno, I also think blonde would have fit better, but oh well :V

Weren't Nu and Hakumen locked for story reasons? Or am I remembering wrong?

All I know is that it's also referred to as "The Illusion of Time". My guess is that it's some sort of phenomenon like "Continuum Shift". Don't know for sure.

Say, could it be possible the Izayoi is the one fighting using Tsubaki's body? If I remember right, Bolverk did the same with noel, where she would sort of black out in the middle of a fight and enter a sort of trace (which is what I always figured her drive was). If I AM remembering right, couldn't it be possible the same is happening with Tsubaki? or is that like a nox or bolverk-only thing? Just an impression I'm getting from the fact the character has Izayoi as its name instead of some variation of Tsubaki's.

This is currently my greatest fear. Game comes out, 2 weeks of nothing but super loud announcers repeating random crud and ruining the music for me =,= I'm hoping for some quick vids of just the music with no sound effects or anything As for why leave characters to be released later, there might be several reasons, we can't really say for sure unless ASW confirms anything, which to be honest they have no reason to do. Maybe the changes to Mu and Nu took longer to implement than they thought, and maybe Izayoi was not ready on time. If they did, they can't really just go "oh shit, better delay", sometimes there's a hard deadline that must be met. At least look at the bright side, the characters will get added. Some games end up not having a lot of features that were thought for it because there was no time to implement them Another bright side, release date for those three makes for a perfect excuse to throw a patch if some crazy game breaking thing pops up, like Carl's bloody clap loop in CT.

Balance is pretty much "the" point to loketests. You know, aside from the whole "LOOK AT MY GAME, ITS COOL HUH?!!!" marketing and such.

Bloody hell this game can't come out soon enough. For those that have gone through many more arcade fighting game releases than I, around how much time does it usually take for characters not available on release to be made available? And is there some sort of loketest for them or are they just unleashed to the masses in all of their untested glory?

Couldn't have put it better myself. It always gave a bit of a Castlevania feel that I actually liked, but man, a real organ would sound so badass in that theme

One more week to wait before I can hear the damn new music, I have absolutely no idea how some of you can make up from down with all the noise in those loketests. About all i got from them was a small bit of bang's theme in between rounds. Can't wait for full understandable themes.