White Man

There was talk at one point (prior to the release of CP I believe) about the BlazBlue "saga" being comprised of four major installments, with CP being the 3rd. Of course, that could all change at any time. If the franchise continues to be profitable, it's almost certain they'll continue making new games in the series following the next installment.

Another reason it sucks to see +R getting boxed up and put in the attic. Some people made very compelling arguments that the game had a good run (at least in Japan) and all that, and I don't disagree with them at all, but at the same time it's frustrating to see everyone flocking to Xrd and then saying, "Yeah, it's a pretty good game, but it'd be way better if it had [insert features and/or characters from GGXX]." If you're just going to piss all over Xrd because it doesn't have FRCs and your old main, then go play +R. Everybody wants something new, but nobody wants anything different.

People would do well to remember that the vast majority of folks who play video games see them as a means of casual entertainment and don't necessarily enjoy features that require extremely precise inputs and extensive homework to even learn how to utilize them properly. You can think developers have their heads up their asses for trying to make minor alterations to their game to make it more accessible to 90% of the people who pay money to play them, but out there in the real world — that world outside of memorizing frame data and equations for calculating hitstun decay and five-page-long debates on match-up ratios and terabytes of downloaded stream footage and Saturday nights spent in training mode practicing corner mixups — people call that an intelligent business decision.

Ah, that makes sense. Well then, they should have gotten a little more creative with the locations. A parking lot, an intersection, a shopping mall... It's like somebody was wondering around a city after dark just writing down what they saw.

This is a somewhat nitpicky issue, but I hope they update the stages for the console version. This game does a lot of things right as far as its visuals go, but it literally has THE most boring stages I've ever seen in a fighting game. At least throw a couple NPCs in there so we have a tiny bit of background movement or something, man.

Seems like a lot of the interview is Ishiwatari and Pachi talking about how much it sucks trying to come up with new gameplay mechanics for a fanbase that aggressively hates new mechanics. Pretty sure the whole point of +R was to make GGXX relevant again. Bring the game onto new hardware, give it a rebalance, add a couple modern genre conventions, make it "new" enough that old players come back and new players have sufficient motivation to check it out. Maybe the game served that purpose well enough and can now be put out to pasture. All I'm saying is that I would've liked to have seen its popularity last a little longer. And thanks to BBCP and Xrd, +R was practically swept under the rug within a couple months. I wouldn't have expected it to happen any other way, I just wish +R had come out a year earlier or Xrd had come out a year later. It was unfortunate timing.

It's a very short list of characters that won't result in someone getting pissed off and calling you a scrub (or a racial epithet). Basically, if someone has ever lost to a certain character or encountered a spammer online, God help you if you pick that character and fail to play them flawlessly. Time loops are real. It's the summer of 2009 all over again.

I'm not at all surprised to see Xrd take the place of +R in the lineup, but it still makes me a little sad. GGXX players have been hoping their game would be relevant again ever since shortly after AC came out, then they finally get their wish only to have their new game get steamrolled by a next-gen iteration in less than a year. I like Xrd and all, but in a lot of ways it feels like +R didn't get to be the game it could have been because Arc was so focused on all their other titles at the time it was being worked on. Now it's officially getting kicked to the curb so it doesn't steal any thunder from the new GG on the block... Kind of a depressing end for one of the most iconic and enduring 2D fighting series this side of Street Fighter 2. Popular or not, GGXX will always be the series that keeps calling me back time and again. Rock Stars Never Die.

Hey, cool. If ASW is handling the port, that'd be great news. I'm not what you'd call an Arcana Heart fan, but it looks like they did an amazing job with the port of AH3. So... What are the odds of this actually getting localized outside Japan?

Every time I see somebody pick stylish mode, this invariably pops into my head: "The game's playing itself, Jon! The game's playing itself!"

They will never make a Smash Bros. without Jigglypuff. I think what they're doing with the online play is pretty smart. Having two separate modes is a great way to preserve the original intention of the game while also giving the hardcore crowd what they want. (Fifty bucks says they still mod the game anyway.)

What a diplomatic way of saying ASW thought Americans would be too stupid to comprehend anything slightly outside the confines of their own culture. "Meat buns? No, no, nonono... No slack-jawed gun-toting Yankee pig farmer is going to know what the hell a meat bun is. Have Taokaka eating a bunch of cheeseburgers instead. Yeah, no, keep the sprite, just call it a cheeseburger. In fact, have Taokaka say 'I can has cheeseburger?!' Nerds love that shit. Throw in a few puns involving the word pussy and we're golden."

Despite the vast majority of newer 2D fighters using an anime aesthetic and featuring characters with stylized appearances and oversized weapons and all that, the core cast of GG is still very recognizable. The characters continue to inspire knockoffs (or "homages" if you want to be kind) in other games, and not just fighters. So no, I would say GG characters are the opposite of aesthetically dated. As for the gameplay aspect, I don't think more unusual play mechanics automatically make a character more popular. If they did, the usage percentage between Sol/Ky and Bedman would probably be flipped. I think players are excited about Valentine because A) she's a boss, B) she's brand new, and C) a lot of people are pervs who get excited looking at half-naked jailbait.

Trailer. This has apparently been in the works for quite some time now, but I hadn't heard about it until I randomly came across the above gameplay trailer. For a few minutes there, I thought it was an official game. Quality looks nice. (Though I can't figure out why they opted to use English voice samples over Japanese... Ease of accessibility, maybe?) With so many fan games getting slammed with C&D orders in recent years, I hope this one continues to sail under the mainstream's radar for a bit longer. I'd really like to see how far they can get with this. Out of over 9,000 DBZ fighters (lol internet meme) on the market, it would be nice if we got at least one 2D installment that wasn't ass.

Why exactly is Chipp so high up on the tier lists for +R? For being one of the strongest characters in the game, I hardly ever see footage of people using him. For that matter, why are Kliff, I-No, and Sol so low? It was my understanding that those characters were all considered very strong at one point. Heck, Kliff was usually A tier or higher before the patch.

Sadly, most companies just don't care about that kind of thing. I know a few people who studied to become technical writers, and they absolutely cannot find any work in that field. One of them even bought a product catalogue for a company that manufactures farm equipment and compiled a list of all these formatting and syntax errors he found to send in with an application (sort of a "this wouldn't have happened if I worked there" kind of thing). Their response was basically "Thanks, but we don't really pay attention to that stuff." I'm sure ASW does put effort into minimizing text errors, but ultimately, typos and mistranslations aren't a big enough deal that they're going to cost the company any sales. Thus they take the same stance that most companies have today: If it doesn't directly hurt the bottom line, it doesn't matter.

For real though, does the stage selection honestly make any detectable difference in input/display lag? I heard folks talk about this with CS and I never, ever, ever noticed a difference with anyone I played with. It sounds like one of those internet urban legends, to be honest.

I'm afraid it's actually far worse than that. Just for the hell of it, I whipped out the ol' calculator and did a little number crunching. If you were to buy every available piece of DLC currently listed for the game on the US PSN store, the total would come to $92.28. (Note that this price assumes you buy the discounted system voice bundle and don't buy the unlock code for Kagura — in other words, we're looking at the absolute bare minimum* someone can spend if they want to be able to experience 100% of the content on the disc.) If we assume the two upcoming stage/music packs cost the same as the first four ($3.99 each) and the upcoming unlock code for Terumi costs the same as the other DLC-only character ($7.99 for Kokonoe), we can add on $15.97 to the base amount. Total everything up and we have $108.25 as the final cost of DLC for CP (IF they don't release anything else beyond what's already been announced). As the standard edition of CP currently carries a suggested retail price of $49.99, the DLC for the title is likely to eventually total well over 200% of the cost of the game itself. Once the price of the game lowers over time (and if more DLC is announced in the future), we could potentially see that number creeping closer to the neighborhood of 300%. They came pretty close with CS, but at this point I believe ASW has joined the elite ranks of companies most notorious for gouging their customers with post-release microtransactions. In terms of the sheer outrageousness of the cost/content ratio for DLC, I think they're right up there with Valve and Bioware. *I'm counting the unlimited character unlock pack as exclusive DLC because the "legitimate" means for unlocking said content are unreasonably difficult. If you disagree, subtract $2.99 from the totals listed.

I'm not personally 100% on board with this project (the costs involved just seem way too out there), but I feel compelled to play devil's advocate and point out that a lot of the detractors here have missed one very crucial component of this series: you are not the target audience. If BlazBits is to appeal to newcomers, then taking the route of making the videos relatively short and emphasizing a flashy presentation is actually a really smart way to go. New players who just want to get the basics for the various characters are going to be after just that: the basics. Showing them dozens of different combo routes and going into the most minute aspects of characters' frame data and whatnot will accomplish nothing except for making new players feel hopelessly overwhelmed. Based on what has been shown of BlazBits so far, the series is obviously intended to be edutainment. For a rough comparison, look at televised nature programs such as Planet Earth or the National Geographic specials. From an academic standpoint, such programs are sorely lacking in information — nobody is going to be able to watch a few episodes of these series and have everything they need to be an expert in animal biology or specialized ecosystems. But that's okay, because the point of such programs is to stimulate curiosity as much as it is to inform. You give viewers something that's interesting and entertaining to watch while teaching them about the basics, then leave it up to them whether or not they want to do further research on their own. From my experiences, the #1 reason so few people bothered to complete in the in-game tutorial in CS/EX is because "it was boring." Even with the fully-voiced dialogue and gameplay demonstrations and all that, a lot of players didn't want to be bothered sitting through such a tedious info-dump. If you want to capture people's attention in today's world of total media saturation, you really need to put on a bit of a circus act and keep your points limited to what's absolutely essential. Case in point: How many of you have skimmed over the longer posts in this thread? How many of you began to skip over the larger paragraphs in this post until the unusual formatting of this one caught your eye? If I were to criticize the video creators for anything, it would be that their intentions were never clearly stated. The target audience is somewhat ambiguous at first glance, in part due to how the videos seem to aim for this middle-of-the-road territory by being showy and simple enough to appeal to complete neophytes while still attempting to pile on enough information that someone can learn virtually everything they need to know in order to use a character proficiently inside of ten minutes (a goal anyone who's ever seriously played a fighter knows is impossible). You can't play to both crowds and expect either one to follow you. Either embrace the fact that BlazBits is intended to be eye-catching edutainment meant to draw new players into the fandom and accept that this will reduce support from the hardcore crowd, or make the videos a more in-depth and information-centric tutorial series and accept that you'll likely alienate newcomers who are still trying to get their bearings. Just my $0.02, whatever that might be worth to you.

I feel like I already know the answer to this question, but I have to ask regardless: The PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the +R patch are exactly the same regarding balance and character properties, right? I was all but certain they were both based on the 1.1 arcade patch, but a friend of mine is absolutely convinced that some characters play differently in the PS3 version (to the extent that he's completely dropped the 360 version because "it plays like shit"). He's probably full of it (as is usually the case), but he was so damned adamant about it that I had to seek confirmation.

So the content is already on the disc. I had a feeling... Sigh.

Serious question: What happens when they release a new version of the game with different system mechanics and different combos? Almost ten grand is quite a bit of money to spend on a series of informational videos that will very likely become outdated within two years (assuming CP is "finished" as of the latest patch and doesn't get rebalanced again).

If they had to do another clone character due to budget reasons, so be it. This is already the largest SF ever, and a new balance patch combined with the four imports from SFxT was already more than most people expected. The real problem here—and the reason fans are going to be justified getting annoyed—is that Capcom hyped the ever-loving hell out of this "new" never-before-playable character for months on end prior to the reveal. Their actions ensured there was no possible way this could be received as anything but a colossal letdown. I know it was supposed to be funny, but teasing R. Mika at the beginning of the trailer came off as a major dick move. "Yeah, no, we're totally aware which characters you guys really want in these games. We have a list right here of all the most requested names fans have been begging for since we first announced a 4th SF. And now, after months of waiting, we are proud to present... Something no one in the world asked for or wanted! You're welcome."

While I don't find the sarcasm grating, I thought it was pretty obvious I was referring to every game made after the original GG, since Kliff was still canonically alive in that one. People going "they keep bringing back those two guys even tho they dead lolz" has happened a number of times both here and elsewhere, so I was just pointing out that said characters are regulated to appearances in non-canon installments and as console-exclusive bonuses that have no bearing on the plot, meaning they've yet to retcon their deaths. Not that it would be any kind of fighting game faux pas if they did, but jeez. God forbid developers ever kill anybody off in a game about a bunch of people attempting to kill each other while still trying to appease the fanboys demanding a "full roster" or else.

He's playable in all non-canon games. Sorry to be nitpicky, but I think that's an important distinction to make.