Gespenst Ritter

The mere fact that XBlaze is a visual novel isn't the point. It's the content of the game that I take issue with. There's enough garbage media out there about a guy and his special school full of Gainaxing teenagers. BB doesn't need to be a part of that, especially when it already has enough problems gaining traction as it is. Remix Heart can go play in a minefield, too. XBlaze's existence gives people more ammo against BB in a fight that it's currently losing. As a game, it's more difficult for it to just quietly slip under the radar like Remix Heart did, especially if it ends up being one of those games that Aksys is presenting at E3, because then the FG sites will have to follow up on those speculation articles they posted. There's the possibility of it bringing BB more exposure, but it's not the right kind of exposure, and it's not going to really attract the people who would stay and create some sort of competitive presence. It would just be more anime fans who go through story mode and then never touch anything else. We have way too many of those. EDIT: Mu actually looks so much better when she's in a palette that gives her a bodysuit like Nu and Lambda, and Makoto would be pretty awesome in her snazzy new jacket. But to answer your question, no. But it's not about story quality, anyway. It's about how our game appears to an outside audience.

I never said BB had a good story. Is it entertaining? Maybe. Does it give actual effort in a genre where a passable story is "That blue and red naked man stole my car?" Sure. But is it good? Absolutely not. But there's an amazing fighting game in there that I can invest hundreds of hours in instead. EDIT: I'll also take shonen anime cliches over moeblob schooltime cliches any day of the week.

If XBlaze was just some random visual novel, I'd forget it existed in half a week and just let it wallow in its own mediocrity. But the fact that its associated with BB in some way just pisses me off. BB already gets trivialized for being too weeaboo. XBlaze is definitely not helping.

Honestly, XBlaze can go die in a fire.

Instant Kills can OHKO anyone at any time if they have the meter (and meter's really easy to get in this game), so they "balance" it out by making it so that you will almost never hit anyone with an Instant Kill ever. Which begs the question of why they're even in the game if they're so incredibly useless.

Astrals are just as stylish as IKs--several even more-so--but unlike IKs, you'll actually have a reason to use them once in a while. Personally, I think they're the perfected version of the Instant Kill mechanic.

Why not just make IKs function like Astrals?

Largely to address your perceived notion that people who want to "dumb down the game" (which I think is a completely stupid term that trivializes an incredibly important concept of game design) want to be instant masters of high-level techniques. Which is a lazy and archaic design decision that becomes trivial at higher levels of play. Fortunately, game designers have realized this.

Whenever this type of topic comes up, I always imagine some old man shitting his adult diaper in rage every time someone reminds him that kids these days can just use emails to send letters instead of walking to the post-office. Execution is a balancing factor, but not in terms of its difficulty. A reversal move stipulating that you can't use it from a blocking position? That's a legitimate balancing factor. A quickly-activating move with little recovery requiring a charge period so that it can't be always used on command? that's a legitimate balancing factor. A powerful super requiring a pretzel motion with no input leniency? That's just pointless execution. There is no good reason as to why that move would need such a complex input. That's just a result of poor and lazy design choices. Difficulty for difficulty's sake serves no purpose: GG wouldn't be a better game if the gatling system was replaced with links, now, would it? Contrary to what you might believe, many players just want to be able to use their basic tools and mechanics out of the gate: just a short time after they first start playing. And FRC is in fact a basic mechanic of the game. Sure, you don't need to use it at low-level play, but that's a non-argument since you can say the same thing about supers, or specials, or basic fundamentals. A hold-button system in which the FRC comes out on the first appropriate frame doesn't damage the game at all. And besides, being able to perform a move or technique isn't the same as being able to really make use of it. I can execute all of Carl and Nirvana's attacks, but I sure as hell can't integrate both of them into combos and pressure effectively. That's getting into emergent difficulty, which is what high-level play is really about, and these "dumb down the game" people that you like to talk about actually want and expect emergent difficulty.

That's a strawman argument and you know it. Literally no one has said this here.

Celica in everyone's story now. I hope the green circle thing Terumi does in the start of his trailer section is his Drive attack. Because I swear I'm going to murder something if his Drive is just "Install, but with Heat meter." Now that we have real picture quality, I notice sometimes Kagura's sword sparkles before he does an attack. Could this be his Stance-switching?

Damn, Kagura, don't destroy the world with those hits.

If the Capcom community is able to actively compete in both Street Fighter AND Marvel, I see no reason that the airdashing community shouldn't be able to actively compete in both Guilty Gear AND BlazBlue. This is the time to expand the airdasher's reach, not to spread our resources thin with petty in-fighting.

....I don't think you understood what I was saying.

As awesome as hand-drawn sprites are, they just just aren't a cost-effective business model for this game. People expect every character from AC+R to return, and redrawing them all in HD and adding the inevitable new characters would make ArcSys broke before they finished even half the cast. Stylized cel-shading is the next best thing. It preserves the style of the original while being more cost-effective (and more tolerable to the "OMG luks like a flash gem" audience).

You realize those two wishes are contradictory, right?

I've probably watched this trailer about five times in a row right now, this looks too amazing. I like how the trailer's subbed in English from the get go. I wasn't sure how serious Arc really was about establishing their Western presence, since their NA website was pretty much barebones, but now I know they really mean it.

Airk, as usual, is probably grossly exaggerating. Or said combo actually exists, but there's some important auxiliary information about its requirements that are conveniently absent from the statement. "3K off a 5A" isn't quite as sensational when you mention it requires a counter-hit, a Crush Trigger, Distortions, and/or Overdrive.

I'm liking the new combo system because it means people won't automagically drop out of my combos whenever a stray Stein hits them.

Why do none of these interviews actually tell us how he does this?

Moar Reborn! palletes. Yu as Yamamoto, Yousuke as Gokudera, and Kanji as Hibari.

Do you know how many problems Ragna would avoid if Jubei (and Rachel) would just tell him things instead of playing the trickster mentor game? I've always kind of assumed that he wasn't there for her during the grieving period.

Doesn't she control gravity or something? And she's the only one outside of the Alucard house with teleportation tech. She should have given one of those to Tager. :P

Since the release date is way farther down the road than anyone expected, it's not too far-fetched to think there might be more console characters in the pipeline.

Don't be so dismissive of the possibility. It wouldn't be the first time BB has included character-specific gameplay mechanics that look broken on paper. Tao, Valk, and Hazama being able to reach areas of the screen that are inaccessible to everyone else, magnetism and wind taking away a fraction of control of your character's movement, Spiral pretty much being a big middle finger to blocking, etc, etc. Whether or not Terumi would be broken with a meter-stealing mechanic is all about how his overall toolset is designed.