Fighting Games Friday: A Shodown of Locked Hearts That Nobody Knows

In last week’s Fighting Games Friday post (on Thursday), I predicted that there wouldn’t be much news about fighters between now and the Evolution Championship Series 2019 tournament — “Evo” for short. It makes sense for publishers to save their biggest announcements for a fighting game-centric audience. This has been the case for the last two years, and it’s worked well enough for software exposure that they’re bound to maintain this for Evo this year.

Shockingly, my prediction was dead wrong. It was also wrong the last time I made such a prediction, but I gave it another shot with expected results because I never learn.

I also didn’t think SNK would announce all the DLC characters for the recently-released and well-reviewed new Samurai Shodown game yet, despite how they confirmed all the characters for the initial roster early. This was, of course, yet another wrong prediction. The downloadable characters were confirmed this week.

Rimururu was confirmed to be the first DLC character slightly before E3 2019 kicked off, who will release in August. She’ll be followed by Basara, a man with demonic powers full of hatred who entered the franchise with Samurai Shodown III, and Kazuki Kazuma, one of the then-new semi-protagonists introduced in Samurai Shodown IV who wields a flaming Vermillion Sparrow. The final character will be Wan-fu, who’s been part of the franchise since the very beginning.

The characters will come as part of the Season Pass, currently free for everyone on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One until Tuesday, July 2nd, even if you don’t own the game. (It was previously reported that you’d have to buy the game before the end of June to get it.) If you want it, download it now. The characters will arrive in August, October, December, and February in the order above.

Square Enix and developer Team Ninja are still releasing characters for Dissidia: Final Fantasy NT, and the newest character coming is one fans should have predicted given the other Final Fantasy game in the news lately: Final Fantasy VII’s Tifa Lockhart.

Tifa looks similar to her previous iteration from Dissidia 012 in action, though she’ll be adjusted for this game’s three-on-three battles. To no surprise, the real talking point here is her outfit, a slightly adjusted version of her original FFVII one. This has put those who like her old outfit against the audience who prefers the adjusted version for Final Fantasy VII Remake, meaning last week’s Extremely Bad Tifa Discourse continued into this week. She’ll also have alternate versions of her default outfit and her threads from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children as options.

Tifa is already available in the arcade version, but will arrive on PC and PS4 on July 2nd and 3rd, respectively. We’ll find out who will provide English voice in this game soon. Steve Burton and George Newbern reprised the roles of Cloud and Sephiroth, respectively, for perhaps the last time in NT, as both will be replaced by Cody Christian and Tyler Hoechlin for the respective characters in the Remake. We’ll see if Rachael Leigh Cook reprised the role here, who’s voiced Tifa since 2006 and last played her in mobile title Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omina last year, or if we’ll get to hear Britt Baron before FFVII Remake releases on March 3rd next year.

Bandai Namco announced One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows this week, a three-on-three fighting game based on the One-Punch Man manga and anime franchise. This will be the first video game adaptation of the series, whose cel-shaded style will help it resemble the anime to make it visually appealing.  It will star characters like Saitama, Genos, Hellish Blizzard, Speed ‘o Sound Sonic, and Mumen Rider as playable characters, all of which can be seen in action in the first trailer. There’s no indication regarding whether this will be a tag-team fighter, or a basic team title where characters switch between rounds yet; but the cast will have to be robust (with at least 18 characters) for the format to work well without too much repetition, regardless of which one it is.

The game is being developed by Spike Chunsoft, previously responsible for the actually-successful Jump Force for Bandai Namco. But note how much stronger this game’s visuals are, where there was no need to awkwardly blend anime and realistic art styles.

There’s no release date for the game just yet, but Bandai Namco might elaborate on that and the game itself at Anime Expo next weekend.

I’d like to think I’ve learned my lesson this time, which is why I’m ending this post without making any kind of prediction regarding how the rest of the summer will be in terms of fighting game announcements. There are several types of fighting games that those who watch tournaments and attend them aren’t quite into, and other publishers will want to make announcements outside the venue for fear their reveal might get buried among larger reveals. This implies that summer won’t be as dry for the Fighting Games Friday feature as expected, so I’m not complaining.