SoWL

Oh, hey, this ping thingie works! Sure, I can try working on that tomorrow (a bit too sick for mental work right now). I can see why people would switch from Bullet to Izanami: they have this brutal female thing in common, but Izanami has better chances of winning tournaments. Hell, I was thinking of subbing her in CF, myself.

It was said a few times on the stream, if nothing else.

As people are pointing out, Sylvie's face is yet another reference to Kyari Pamyu Pamyu. Not saying that it was not surprising, but it was rather reasonable to expect something like that. And yeah, I'm officially hyped for this game now. That DLC list looks too good to be true (especially Whip, Yamazaki and Raiden), but then again, the whole game feels that way. I sure hope I can get myself a PS4 by September.

It's about time someone added Castlevania references to a vampire character. Carmine is not the character I thought of first, but she does look like him a lot. Maybe not as lockdown-focused, but the general idea is there. And honestly, the blood-casting themes have been used even before Carmine, it's tough to implement it in some other way.

Let me just say that I'm glad to see KOTOKO back as the BBCF OP performer. Now that Kawada Mami has finished her career, she's going to be like a breath of fresh air. And we still get a Faylan song for her fans!

KI really is not the most pad-friendly game around, mostly because it has so many multi-button commands (and six normal buttons before that). The Xbox pad doesn't make it any better, either. At least the game is not too strict about the inputs.

Believe it or not, I've actually designed a game character that is almost exactly like Kukri. Down to him being voiced by Shinichiro Miki (if my ears don't fail me). I guess SNK knows exactly how to get my attention.

I believe Saya, Anna and Sonico are the most complex characters in the game. Anna is lower on the tier list, so part of her being difficult to master comes from her being difficult to win with. Both Saya and Sonico are pretty high; I'm not quite sure about Sonico's complexity (didn't research any of the console chars too deeply), but Saya is supposed to be the same kind of "High barrier of entry for good reward" character that Zato and Carl are. It would be much easier to recommend a character if N+B had a puppet character, but alas...

Guess we can trust the leaks now.

Koihime Enbu is the name of the fighting game; Shin Koihime Musou is the visual novel that it is based on.

Huh, I expected Vice to go to her old design from that leaked picture, but it looks more like a mix of the old and the new. I'm fine with that. The game gets more and more hype with each trailer, they really feel like they're improving from their initial reveal. Or maybe I'm just happy to see Vice in action again.

Decent anti-air (like pretty much every single one of Faust's normals), decent combo starter if you call them mashing... Oh, and I've learn on a recent event that it's a great option at the round start in a Faust mirror, since it counters most of our good debut moves like 2P and j.2K.

Ahem. I am blind and don't know a thing about X-Box exclusives, disregard me.

Well, since that's a leak and nothing is confirmed at this point, I wouldn't trust it so easily. If only because I wouldn't want having Sadira 2.0 as the only proper newcomer of the season, as well as getting the second Halo guest character.

We got Arbiter and Tusk stuff shown: Surprisingly, Tusk does not have too much in common with Hakumen, even though I really expected him to use that sword for some 4C action. He does, however, have something very similar to Mugen. Among other news, we also got a PC release date: March 29th! Season 3 releases on the same day with the four characters revealed so far. http://www.ultra-combo.com/killer-instinct-season-3-details/

I wouldn't say that 3 songs out of 15 is too many.

1. You are grossly overestimating GG's difficulty. 2. Most casuals don't even care about getting good, playing the arcade mode once or twice and looking at the cool specials is usually enough for them. And GG has both, unlike, say, SFV.

Nah, GG is not completely different from the other fighters. You might say that about Smash, but even then, I wouldn't be so sure about it. It all comes down to the fact that people had more time to get used to the feel and game flow of SF with its long arcade history (just like Smash has been a crowd favorite even outside of tournaments). Unfortunately, GG has to fight SF on its home turf, and it can't really win this fight without even attempting to become a presence.

"Normal" people do not make hasty assumptions based on a single match. Or character designs, for that matter. Rather than blaming GG devs for what they've been doing from the very beginning, why not try fighting that attitude? Do show people an Elphelt vs May fight. In Japanese. And then point out how Elphelt's playstyle is basically an FPS in a fighting game. Or that May is a rare case of a heavyweight female character. And don't act like it's impossible, most local players around here picked GG as their first fighting game back in the late 90s, and a lot of them never even watched anime. As for "Going overboard" on Xrd, they took out Bridget and Dizzy before adding Elphelt and whatever other characters offend you. The fanservice ratio is almost exactly the same, it's just that you don't want to admit it because you are used to the old fanservice. What exactly is going on with this "Girls are icky" attitude, anyways? I thought it's a bit too late for most gamers to care about social stigmas. We are already considered to be irredeemable nerds by the general public, why bother putting on airs before other nerds?

The arcade patch notes are up: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s454/sh/773f6401-7cf5-44df-901e-cb9dce173381/a09ec3a48dbafa420db5053b076d9cf3 Surprised that Muramasa got no buffs (other than Kageaki style points, of course), but I suppose that nerfing the top tiers is both easier and more important right now.

I've been discussing that with them back in Summer, and you basically had to order the game through their Japanese website (that doesn't ship overseas) to get it - and input the code before the game was out on Marvelous's website. No idea how it's distributed for the NA version.

Her personality is a mix of Kageaki and Ichijou, and her fighting style is yet another fencer. I would rather have Ichijou, thank you very much.

Obligatory "Make Imperial Code the universal NOL theme" comment goes here. I consider VS themes to be similar to unique intros: just a little cute detail that adds some story to random matches. In a perfect world, I would have the entire roster connected through VS themes, if only because it always confuses me how only one of the two players get to listen to his character's theme. On the other hand, I do love me some character themes, and they might still have their place in that perfect world of mine. Like, say, in arcade mode.

Are you playing on a pad? Since a lot of commands here are actually button combinations, I found that calling assists with simultaneous button presses (one of them being a shoulder button) gives me space for shortcuts that are a bit more difficult to input that way, like A+B super inputs. Just figure out which shortcuts you need more.

Apparently, yeah. But I assume they will come to the console version sooner or later.