Fighting Games Friday: Season’s Beatings

You thought you wouldn’t see another Fighting Games Friday until the new year with Naughty and Nice running, but it was me — no, not Dio Brando per se, but the return of the feature a little earlier than expected.

I didn’t think there would be much fighting game news in the time between the last entry and our current point, and I’d honestly only planned on using this feature for opinions and special occasions in the near future. This is, it turns out, one of those special occasions, to show just how publishers viciously owned me over the last month. But I’m taking it like a pro.

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I’ve actually missed discussing quite a few character reveals for The King of Fighters XV, a message relayed to me by the resident Goblin on our Discord (which you should join if you haven’t). I haven’t discussed the game here since early September, much later than I remembered. There haven’t been as many reveals thanks to the game’s delay from this fall to February 2022, which slowed down SNK’s schedule.

Several reveals have been for returning characters from The King of Fighters XIV, like Antonov with a glorious new outfit, Kukri, series mainstay K’, Whip (DLC in XIV), Heidern (also previously DLC), and K’’s best friend forever Maxima. Four reveals, however, were for characters returning from games before KOFXIV or are, even better, new faces.

One is Ash Crimson, previously somewhat of a main character from the titular Tales of Ash Saga that ended with The King of Fighters XIII. He supposedly “died” in that game’s main story, but come on, no one’s really gone for good in fighting games. There’s also Krohnen, yet another character designed in the mold of Tetsuo-clone K’9999 from The King of Fighters 2001, following Nameless in The King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match. He might even be him without Nozomu Sasaki reprising, considering the number of older characters who received new voice actors in KOFXIV.

Two brand-new characters have been shown, enough to convince anyone who wondered whether this game would have any new faces after all the reveals early in the year were for returning characters. (It wasn’t just me there.) One is Isla, a Chilean graffiti artist who serves as the main rival to Shun’ei, and matches his modern “cool” style. She pulls it off better than he does. The other new face is Dolores, a revered hermit with psychic capabilities from Mali in the African Hinterlands. It’s about time one of the new faces came from Africa, a continent with reportedly growing interest in video games, with fighters among them. Both characters have teamed up with Heidern, of all people, to form the new Rivals Team.

Only four more characters remain to be revealed for the base roster, which means two things: At least a couple of very popular faces will initially be left out for this installment (notice that Kim Kaphwan and Kula are both no-shows thus far, the former of which has never missed a mainline KOF title). At least a few DLC characters will be revealed before the release too, because they’ll want to sell that Season Pass. SNK will perhaps hold another beta test before the release on February 17th, given how successful the last two were. They’ll want to make sure the servers can handle the load just before the official release.

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Neople revealed a bunch of the roster for the Arc System Works and Eighting-developed DNF Duel at a rapid pace this month. The game resurfaced last month after going MIA for a year following the reveal, and the publisher clearly wanted to overcompensate for months of mystery.

Only the Berserker was fully revealed at the time I made my last Fighting Games Friday post, which means I missed (*breathes*) the valiant Inquisitor, the Grappler, the Striker, and the Ranger. All of these characters were shown in the initial trailer, and I like how they all have easy-to-remember names thanks to being named after the classes from the Dungeon Fighter Online game. The newly revealed faces included the Hitman, who looks like a combination of Joseph Joestar in looks and Dante in the “Gunslinger” style while fighting, the Dragon Knight, the Vanguard, the Kunoichi, and the Crusader.

This led up to the first beta test, which happened last weekend. It was a largely successful one despite early connection issues, which gave players ample time to see how this will one of Arc System Works’ (and Eighting’s) easy to pick up and play titles with rollback netplay. It’s more similar to Granblue Fantasy: Versus rather than Guilty Gear Strive in terms of its fighting system. Neople apparently didn’t feel the connection issues were a big deal since they didn’t extend the testing session to compensate for them.

But it’s fine! It’s not like there won’t be another beta in the near future. The game isn’t planned for release until summer 2022, so they have plenty more time for promotion and testing. Hopefully it doesn’t go dark again.

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Speaking of Granblue Fantasy: Versus: Vira, a long-awaited character, was released. (There’s also Avatar Belial, but whatever.) Vira is, in terms of personality, awfully similar to Jin Kisaragi from Arc System Works’ own Blazblue series, having a creepy crush on Katalina as Jin did on Ragna. The big question is what the hell took them so long to include her. It’s a shame they waited until the game didn’t have much of a community left online, thanks to the game never taking off in a big way because of COVID-19 preventing a tournament scene from thriving (it released in March 2020 — ouch) and the lack of rollback netplay. It also didn’t help that Granblue Fantasy itself hasn’t taken off in as phenomenal a way outside Japan and Asia.

With all the above info and smaller content like Android 21 in a lab coat being announced for Dragon Ball FighterZ, there was more fighting game news in the last month than I anticipated. You might think that I should keep my mouth shut and try not to predict these things, but… no. Never. I’m not confident enough to make any kind of prediction for next month though, but we’ll see what happens after that.