Fighting Games Friday: Strive for the Championship
Street Fighter V producer Yoshinori Ono wasn’t kidding when he claimed Capcom would announce more characters for the game by the year’s end. The pace at which characters are being announced and released for it slowed this year, after its fourth season started with Kage (not-Evil Ryu) last December, and more characters (E. Honda, Poison, and Lucia) didn’t arrive until Evo. Fortunately for Ono and the team that prepared the newest announcement, this one didn’t leak ahead of time. It would be demoralizing if that happened two times in a row.
The newest character coming is Gill, a familiar face for anyone who enjoyed the Street Fighter III series and SFV. He was the final boss in all three of the former games, and made for one of the cheapest bosses in Capcom fighting game history. (Gill and Capcom’s other bosses have nothing on SNK’s, notably.) He’s also shown at the end of SFV’s A Shadow Falls story mode, which released nearly three-and-a-half years ago as free DLC. It’s a surprise that he took this long to arrive, but the development team felt now was a good time to implement him in the game.
Gill is coming alongside the new Street Fighter V: Champion Edition, another new version that will include almost all the previously-released content for a cheaper price. All characters from the first four seasons will be included (including Gill and another character yet to be revealed), and most of the stages and outfits. The Capcom Pro Tour stages and outfits won’t be included, along with the brand collaborations (i.e. the Red Bull outfits) and the Fighting Chance outfits (which require spending Fight Money on challenges to obtain them). Nevertheless, this it’s a lot of content for $24.99 for anyone who already owns SFV, or $29.99 for anyone who buys the full package. The newest update will also have balance changes, and include a second V-Skill for each character.
Gill retains many of his normal and special attacks from the SFIII games, including his attacks having fire or ice properties depending on whether he’s facing left or right. His first V-Skill is the Divine Comet, which will summon an ice or fire-based projectile that includes several functions. The fire attack will slowly reduce gray health if it hits, while the ice attack will freeze the stun gauge. His second V-Skill is Blocking, actually the parrying mechanic from SFIII — similar to Ryu’s first V-Skill. His first V-Trigger is the Primal Fire, which powers up Gill’s fire attacks and gives him two more. His V-Trigger II is the Ice of Doom, which provides the same buffs for the ice attacks.
Interestingly, Gill’s music theme is a remix of his Street Fighter III: 2nd Impact theme, contrary to how several other characters have returned with their 3rd Strike themes — like Alex and Ibuki in this game, for example. I personally like his 2nd Impact theme more, so I approve of this decision.
Gill will arrive sometime in December, along with the new update. The Champion Edition update is available now for anyone who owns SFV now, while the retail package will arrive on February 14th.
The upcoming Guilty Gear game will be known as Guilty Gear -Strive-. Get it? If not, highlight the “I” and “V” in “Strive,” which indicates how this is the fourth game in the series. They settled on a good name.
Fans went hands-on with the game at the ArcRevo World Tour 2019 finals last weekend, and despite concerns about how the team is dumbing this installment down for a wider audience, several of them came away impressed. Many gameplay fundamentals have been retained from previous games despite combo execution being altered, while some slightly derided features like Danger Time are gone. The concerns still haven’t gone away, especially with creator, director, composer, and character designer Daisuke Ishiwatari’s comments about wanting the game to be easier to watch. His comments about the game potentially not using rollback netplay weren’t encouraging either. Hopefully they’ll end up impressing most fans.
Guilty Gear Strive is due for a release on PlayStation 4 (and possibly other platforms) in late 2020. It’s still around a year off, so they’ll have plenty of time to polish it.
Samurai Shodown added Kazuki Kazama to its ranks as a DLC character this week. He was previously one of the new protagonists introduced in Samurai Shodown IV. Sougetsu Kazama, Kazumi’s brother and fellow new protagonist from Samsho IV, will appear as a DLC character in the second season. The Switch version of the game was also given a first quarter 2020 timeframe for western territories, which will follow the December 12th date for Japan. The Stadia version also released this week, though good luck playing an online-driven game with already-iffy (yet typical SNK) netplay through the cloud. The Steam version is still MIA, despite SNK previously announcing plans to release it in “winter 2019.”
The canonical Broly from Dragon Ball Super: Broly was shown in action in Dragon Ball FighterZ. He’s due to arrive very soon, maybe even next week, given how Bandai Namco is promoting him. Madara Uchiha and Toshiro HItsugaya from Naruto and Bleach, respectively, arrived in Jump Force this week. The last two characters of this current season, Trafalgar Law and Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez from One Piece and Bleach, respectively, will arrive sometime by the end of this year.
There aren’t many fighting game releases these days, but there’s more than enough downloadable content to keep genre fans busy. That is, until 2020, when several new games will arrive. Good luck keeping up with all of them.
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Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
