TAI-X

Time to find a new subtitle!

Pretty obvious that they went out of their way to avoid showing what it actually plays like. First time I've seen Nex Entertainment's logo displayed so prominently, BTW. Like TOSE and Now Production, they're usually one of those shadowy mercenary devs who'll take on jobs for practically any publisher, have few to zero original IPs to their name and don't care about getting recognition from people outside the industry. Maybe they're trying to break away from that image? Let's not forget that they were responsible for the legendarily bad PS3 port of Bayonetta though.

You're kidding yourself if you think it's going to look any different at release, though. Keep in mind that this started development on PS3/360, so it's still reflective of those standards to an extent. Hopefully they won't pull another Maximum Impact and ignore the arcade crowd. There's no better audience to test your fighting game for balance issues and programming oversights. The arcade release of XIII launched with numerous crippling bugs, which were all identified very quickly and resolved soon after.

It was announced at Sony's conference, there could be an XBO version they haven't been allowed to mention yet. I'm not counting on it anymore though, even though the open job listings on SNKP's careers page indicated that an Xbox version was originally planned and in development at some point. I never believed the "KOF is dead" doubters and knew that XIV was going to be revealed when the time was right. Looks pretty good with what little they've shown, but it's sad that they've had to completely abandon the tremendous amount of work put into XII and XIII's sprites. I hope that tag battles will somehow return again; XI is still my favorite of the series. I am concerned that this could be another unpolished, bare-bones "prototype" without a storyline like NeoWave and XII were, since they're moving to new hardware standards yet again. SNK has never been good with transitions. Even most of their early Neo-Geo games ranged from mediocre to terrible, while 1989's Prehistoric Isle remains one of their best non-fighting game works, despite having been made for much weaker hardware. If XIV turns out to be another undercooked flop like XII, though, I don't think they'll be getting any more second chances this time at bringing the series back outside of pachinko and smartphones. Note that Leona is confirmed despite not being in the trailer; a picture of her finished model was posted to SNKP's careers page.

Riot Games does this all the time, lol. Haven't played Slash, but wouldn't he have been scarier there since he had his hyper armor Force Break as a meterless special?

Nex Entertainment is a shovelware house with no real accomplishments to their name, and there's no way that this will be anything other than a cheap and sleazy Naruto Storm-style free roaming arena button masher. Never even heard of this manga, so the budget's going to be shoestring-level.

Didn't Round 1 somehow get exclusive rights to operate NESiCA in the US? Kinda sucks for everyone else, as does the fact that they're seriously restricting the game library - would love to try Rumble Fish 2 or Daemon Bride.

Expected that Sonico's assist would be a passive stage-wide effect, like the White Album idols in AP.

Dunno. I never expected Dengeki to get localized, but there was real incentive for them to push through the licensing issues, because many of the series represented have significant popularity and sizable fanbases outside Japan (at least in anime form). But no one in the West gives a crap at all about any Shining games made after Shining Force III.

Get real. Pokemon is and has always been one of the simplest JRPGs out there, even compared to SNES-era Dragon Quests. The only real mechanical advancement in the series was the introduction of 2 vs. 2 battles (in an era where virtually every other JRPG allowed for standard parties of three, often more members at a time), and the ability cap for individual Pokemon has yet to be raised above four. People who try to turn it into Magic the Gathering with inane sets of restrictions and competitive house rules are unrepentant manchildren with their heads far up their asses, who haven't moved on to deeper and better games just because they can't let go of their rose-tinted 1990s childhoods. I don't care how many new moves and types the latest Pokemon games have crammed in, because you never have more than a small handful of abilities open to you at any given time in battle (and usually just one target), which seriously limits your options for strategy and suffocates any "deck-building" depth the series might have had. By the way, Weavile's ice platform drop attack at 1:07 here seems to have been inspired by one of Rimururu's specials in SamSho. Despite some obvious (and justified) concessions to casuals and noobs of the fighting genre, this easily appears to be the best-playing and best-looking Pokemon game ever made. I'm impressed that Harada's team has been able to take such creative liberties with the franchise and characters, because The Pokemon Company has been known to impose some very controlling oversight on the portrayal of their IP in official media these days - it's why you almost never see Pikachu etc. represented alongside other Nintendo icons like Mario and Link, outside of Smash Bros.

It's going to be fun to see Seth Killian go ballistic when he finds out that no one wants to play his shitty League of Legends robot fighter, and blames everyone other than himself for the game's failure. I'm totally confident in dismissing the game offhand without having played it, based on the "Smash Bros. meets MOBAs" control setup alone. It definitely could have worked in a 3D arena brawler like Anarchy Reigns or One Must Fall: Battlegrounds, but Seth had to make it 2D because it's literally all he knows. S-Kill might consider himself TEH HARDCOREST THEORY FIGHTER EXPERT out there, and thinks he has all the answers for designing the mythical perfect fighting game, but anyone with a genuine appreciation for the genre who hasn't merely latched onto it for narcissistic e-peen extending purposes can immediately see how idiotic any of his ideas are. Seth tries to market himself as the Steve Jobs of fighting games or some shit, but he's not even close to being a visionary like Ishiwatari, Okamoto, Funamizu or even Mori - he's just another obsessive message board-dwelling autist with more free time than sense. Capcom didn't even deem his glorified romhack of Super Turbo worthy of a Japanese release, lol.

It's a Pookeymanz game, they have to slow things down for any kiddies playing or they'll get too frustrated and quit when they can't keep up with the match flow. Same reason they went with console-style controllers instead of arcade sticks. Because the audience they're trying to attract, even including adults, is not expected to have any experience with "serious" fighting games besides Smash and regards sticks as intimidating. Not really criticizing Pokken, just explaining why it is the way it is.

Dragon's Crown isn't a fighting game, it's a beat-em-up lol. Was this topic really made by Blade?

Ragna vs. Naoto (protagonist fight lol) and Kagura vs. Hibiki (master + servant) will probably get unique themes.

Did Galneryus actually have any involvement with BBCP's soundtrack, or was it just people making assumptions because the guitar playing sounded similar? Blazblue Wiki continues to claim they did, despite them not appearing in the game's credits. It wouldn't be unthinkable, they already did the music for a Hokuto no Ken pachinko machine.

Late reply, but I think Daisuke was referring to the fact that she can be played much more passively than any other character and let her units do much of the work, like you're playing single-plane Overture. I could see her making the most sense to players with a stronger background in RTS/MOBA games than fighters, like how I've seen that BB's Carl clicks unusually well with a certain type of person who might struggle to pick up other advanced characters.

Blaziken was actually one of the first characters confirmed in the reveal teaser, they just chose not to acknowledge him until now lol.

"3D Crystal Art" like you'd see in a dentist's office waiting room? How much more tacky and tasteless can they get?

I already knew that not all epilepsy is photosensitive, but it still seems like a bit big of a risk to take if your condition is classified as "severe." Whatever, it's your life and your decision.

How the hell do you play video games, especially bright flashy ones like AP?! All of this stuff is covered in warnings and disclaimers about epilepsy. I wouldn't even touch vidya if I knew that I could get a seizure from it at any time.

Yep, yet another non-Nitro+ character in a Nitro+ fighting game. And you see why I kept going on about this. They're desperately trying to cast their licensing net as far as possible to catch the attention of every outlying otaku they can, at the expense of conceptual cohesion. Even with all its cut-and-pasted sprites from over five prior years of disparate game releases, MvC2 had a much tighter sense of aesthetics.

Wait till late August, the US release will bring in a flood of noobs.

They're pre-rendered sprites, not realtime 3D. The game's hardly pushing the PS3 hardware.

I get that it's story mode, but it could at least say "Arcade (Story)," because there's NO DISCERNABLE DIFFERENCE between them when you're looking at the menu for the first time. Even putting the second "Arcade" in a different color would be better. It's just plain old bad UI design. That's fine, but why aren't there any changes to the moves' animations or the addition of some special properties, as with many powered-up versions of SDMs in the KOF series? You know, something to give an indication to anyone other than frame-counting spergs that your decision actually meant something? Chaos Code lets you select two extra moves from a pool of four, but the two you didn't select are locked out for the entire match, so it's always a major tradeoff. Here, the tradeoff is so nebulous and marginal that it might as well not exist. It's an illusion of choice that the devs presented for no other reason than "hey, people love SFIII and we should do yet another thing that game already did, but we can't make it work exactly the same or people will cry ripoff." There's a difference between being inspired by something and lazily ripping it off. Blitzkampf is a great example of a fighter inspired by 3S that managed to construct a strong, unique identity of its own. While Yatagarasu has blatant SFIII sprite edits staring you in the face, and there's no cohesive aesthetic or themes tying it together like Blitz's "imperialist Japan dieselpunk" setting. I'm gonna say that this entire Indiegogo campaign was an excuse to make the NESiCA version, and the Yatagarasu dev team didn't really give a shit what the filthy gaijin on Steam ended up with as long as they could get it into JP arcades.

The "final" version's out today, and it completely blows. No way in hell was this ready to come out of closed beta. The secondary HUD elements and menus are possibly the worst I've ever seen in a commercial game - Arcade Mode is listed twice lol. The combo challenges are buried within the training menu, and there's no option for them to be displayed as inputs, instead of the unmemorizable move names. Even though the netcode itself is solid, you probably need to be a ponytailed Linux neckbeard to figure out how all the online options and settings work, and there's no Steam integration. As for the fighting itself, it's okay, but I could never shake the feeling that I'd rather be playing Third Strike or even Blitzkampf. All the characters are just boring, derivative and lame; and there's quite a few sleazy animation swipes that any fighting game veteran will immediately recognize - for instance, Jet has Dudley's 6HP & 2HK, as well as Ralf's Galactica Phantom. Having two parry buttons for high and low is a silly-ass decision, there should have only been one button (or button combination) that you hit while either standing or crouching, similar to in Blitzkampf. The garden stage with the stone dragon has an unlistenable screamo song playing that sounds like some scene kids at karaoke night. I couldn't find any purpose to the "super art selection," you still always have access to both supers with every character, and the move you don't pick doesn't seem to get any weaker. What's the point of giving the player a choice like that when there's no commitment involved? Seems like it was tossed in just to get the Third Strike fanboys frothing at the select screen. Oh, and fuck the canned commentator voices blabbing through every match, they're worse than the announcers in SFA3 and CvS2. At least you can turn them off. Thank God for Steam refunds.