Fighting Games Friday: Your Granblue Fantasy: Versus Starting Lineup

The roster counts for first iterations of Arc System Works fighting games tend to be low by modern genre standards, specifically in the teens, for good reasons. The team values polish in their sprite work and cel-shaded art styles more than other developers, which requires several resources to craft and polish. That’s in addition to creating different characters with at least semi-complicated designs. This is why titles like Blazblue: Calamity Trigger, Battle Fantasia, and Persona 4 Arena had initial casts that totaled between 12 and 15 — not including DLC.

Considering that, there was bound to be heartbreak with Granblue Fantasy: Versus’ initial roster, the fighting game adaptation of the extremely popular mobile game. It will have a mere eleven characters to start; that’s fine for the first version of a game given the above explanation, but it’s tiny compared to the gigantic amount of characters introduced in the Granblue Fantasy mobile game over the years. Plenty of favorites were going to be left out, and there was going to be serious heartbreak. Now that the entire initial cast is known, that’s exactly what happened — yes, me included.

Central characters Gran and Katalina were bound to be included, considering they’re two of the franchise’s main faces. As previously confirmed, they’ll be joined by Charlotta, Lancelot, Ferry, Percival, Ladiva, Lowain, and Metera. The final two characters in the initial roster were confirmed to be Zeta and Vaseraga this week. Zeta is a hunter for the Society, an organization that partakes in missions to hunt primal beasts. Vaseraga happens to be her partner, which explains why they were revealed together. Again, this means several popular faces will be missing in action initially, despite how they could have been centerpieces among the initial roster.

I was rooting for Vira and Feather to be the last two additions. Vira shares several traits with Jin Kisaragi from ASW’s own Blazblue series, specifically with how she’s obsessed with Katalina like Jin was with Blazblue protagonist Ragna the Bloodedge. Feather couldn’t be a more blatant clone of Rock Howard from SNK’s Garou: Mark of the Wolves and several other fighting games. Other popular characters fans were hoping for include Narmaya, Aliza, Sturm, Siegfried and Appolonia — yes, of course they’re nearly all female characters.

But there’s hope for them… as DLC. Both ASW and Cygames know fans will be willing to shell out extra cash for characters they really want, and the success of the mobile game shows how the latter company knows how to dig into fans’ wallets. The first Season Pass will include five DLC characters, and it would be a surprise if at least two of the characters mentioned above weren’t among them. Hopefully they’re the ones I want to see.

Not to say the base game will be content-deprived. In addition to including offline and online modes like other fighting games, this title will have an RPG mode with brawling elements that looks reminiscent of Vanillaware’s Dragon’s Crown from the trailer. This should offer enough content to keep most players occupied for hours.

Granblue Fantasy: Versus will release in Japan on February 6th next year for PlayStation 4. It’s due for a western release at an unspecified time in 2020; since most fighting games these days are worldwide releases, hopefully the release gap between regions will short, if nonexistent. Don’t be surprised if some DLC characters are announced before the main game releases.

A new trailer for the upcoming and still-unnamed Guilty Gear game was shown at the SEA Major 2019 in Singapore this week, which showed the returning Axl-Low in action. The game still looks great in motion. Unlike previous trailers, this one didn’t end with a tease for the next character, though more reveals are still coming. The next trailer will be shown during the Arc Live/Arc Nama Live stream on November 3rd at 9PM ET. The playable demo featured at the Arc Revo Finals in Irvine, California on November 16th and 17th will feature six characters, meaning two more will be revealed in the next month. One might include the mysterious man featured in the reveal trailer.

Riot Games provided a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it look at their upcoming fighting game from the Rising Thunder development team, codenamed “Project L.” It’s tough to get a good impression here, but the short clips shown resembled Street Fighter V in terms of the speed and hit stun. One stage shown also bares a strong resemblance to the Training Stage from the same game. Whether the final version will fully resemble this preview is unknown, because it’s extremely early in development. Its release might be a couple of years away at least.

Under Night In-Birth EXE:Late[cl-r] will release in North America on February 20th for PS4 and Switch, courtesy of Aksys Games. As previously announced at Evo 2019, the game will feature at least one new character, Londrekia, and include extensive balance upgrades and new techniques for the returning cast. It will arrive with a $39.99 standard edition, and a $59.99 limited edition that includes an artbook, compilation soundtrack, and a three-inch keychain. Absolutely expect more previews over the next few months, because I’d be surprised if only one new character was featured.

In fact, expect previews for all the games above in the near future, outside Project L from Riot — unless they plan to be very transparent with its development. The fighting game news never stops, and wouldn’t prefer it any other way.