Fighting Games Friday: It’s a News Catch-Up Post

The lack of Evo and other conventions have thrown wrenches into the plans of some fighting game developers and publishers who intended to make announcements over the summer. Physical events, as you’re likely aware, have been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, because not everyone is suicidal.

Several announcements were made during the fighting game roundtable nearly two weeks ago, with news for games like Guilty Gear -Strive- (where two characters were revealed) and Soulcalibur VI (where Setsuka was revealed and eventually released). But other announcements couldn’t be made because they either weren’t ready due to development delays from the pandemic (like in Tekken 7’s case), or because others were or will be featured in their own shows, like they were for Street Fighter V and will be for Dragon Ball FighterZ in two days.

Meanwhile, other developers made their announcements directly to the internet, though there’s no guarantee that these were ever planned for conventions or events like Evo. I’m focusing on those for this post.

It’s been a few months since the downloadable content for the first season of Granblue Fantasy: Versus released, so it was time for them to start promoting the second season. It was already known that villain Belial would be the first character coming, given his presence in the story mode and, well, the fact that Cygames flat-out said he’d be coming. The first dedicated trailer showing him in action was provided at the Granblue Fantasy Summer 2020 Special livestream, and he looks fabulous. Sure, he has a stereotypical fantasy anime villain look about him, but is that a problem when he looks so good in action? No, it is not.

The details say he’ll have a deceptively simple move set, but I can’t parse what that means until he’s demonstrated. That should happen sometime before he arrives on September 24th, alongside balance adjustments for all characters (i.e. your favorite high-tier characters might get nerfed), a lobby avatar, support icon, new quests, and, interestingly, Belial-style outfits for the main characters in the mobile Granblue Fantasy game.

As the trailer teased, Cagliostro will be the second character coming after Belial in season two, who will come with a number of technical abilities to fight in the ground and air. Again, it’s tough to tell exactly what this means before seeing the character demonstrated. She’ll arrive in late-October. The other characters will arrive in late December, early 2021, spring 2021, and early summer 2021, the identities for whom will be revealed in due time.

Notably, Belial and Cagliostro will release with only Japanese voiceovers, due to English dubbing being delayed thanks to, you guessed it, the pandemic. The voices should come as part of a later patch.

The next character coming to Jump Force as part of its second season will be Meruem, the most powerful offspring of the Chimera Ant Queen from Hunter x Hunter. Meruem is an ant with a humanoid build that makes it easier for him to take on the main characters. He’ll be the sixth character from HxH coming to this game, making this one of the best-represented franchises here. The character will arrive this fall for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC versions, but Switch owners will have to wait until 2021 thanks to that version coming later.

There are still three more characters coming as part of Jump Force’s second season, who will be from Yu Yu Hakusho, Bleach, and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Feel free to make some guesses.

Shanty was revealed for the My Little Pony-ish Them’s Fightin’ Herds through a teaser at the end of the Grand Stampede tournament, which served as a replacement for the Evo Online bouts. This new pony hoofed creature (I’ll never make that blasphemous mistake again) was previously hinted at as part of a stretch goal when the game was being crowdfunded through IndieGoGo. The developers at Mane6 said she’d be revealed and released free for backers after the full game released (which arrived in May), and they’re living up to that promise. She’ll come with a pirate-themed stage with music that sounds like a Jimmy Hart-style legal-enough remix of the Gang-Plank Galleon theme from Donkey Kong Country. This is apparently intentional.

Fiercer than she looks, bravest in the cosmos, she is ANNIE OF THE STARS and she is joining the cast of Skullgirls Mobile later this year, and Skullgirls 2nd Encore in 2021!

Read all about her here: https://t.co/MbRQ9n6kSB#skullgirls #WhensAnnie pic.twitter.com/h3WoAMe8Qa

— Skullgirls Mobile (@sgmobile) August 14, 2020

Annie of the Stars, who appears as a legendary character in various in-universe works within Skullgirls’ world and who appeared in Indivisible, will be the next playable character coming to the Skullgirls games. She’ll release for Skullgirls Mobile by the end of the year, and for Skullgirls 2nd Encore (the latest version of the original Skullgirls) in 2021.

This should catch everyone up on the fighting game news from a little more than the last week, but the fun isn’t ending anytime soon. As hinted above, Bandai Namco will hold a stream for Dragon Ball FighterZ at 2PM ET Sunday, where they’ll reveal future content coming as part of the third season. Expect them to show at least one new character, but they’ll undoubtedly reveal more. There wouldn’t be much point to holding a livestream otherwise. They might as well reveal the rest of the content coming as part of the season before everything leaks.