Fighting Games Friday: The Demon Rises to Duel
There was a lot of excitement for Ed to release in Street Fighter 6. The character is solid overall and plenty of fun, even if he’s not spectacular compared to the notorious top-tier faces on the roster and some below them. But that doesn’t matter when you’re having a good time, even when it involves a character made for ease of use in the previous game (though he was more on the deceptively easy side) becoming one of the most difficult characters to master now. Quite a change.
Let’s be honest here: A certain subset of SF6 players was excited for Ed’s release because he’d get out of the way of the next character, the final roster addition of the first season: Akuma.
Capcom was fully aware of this. They didn’t waste any time providing a slight tease for the character, mere weeks after Ed’s release. But I can’t emphasize “tease” enough here, because the video didn’t show Akuma in gameplay action. The video was simply to tell fans that “we see you; we hear you” alongside showing his new design to anyone who hadn’t seen the leaked artwork from nearly two years ago.
Akuma, design-wise, is a character of contrasts here. He keeps the puffy hair from the default Street Fighter V design, though he looks less like he has a lion’s head and more like a “classic” Japanese fighting figure whose design has been, uh, anime-ified, for lack of a better term. He comes with the ponytail from his previous designs, though it looks more pronounced this time, and a heavy beard. He looked as if he had even more hair than that at first glance, but the man’s rocking that fur hard around the collar and the waist. He also notably loses his traditional red hair for a grey-haired look, proof that he ages like any other character, assuming anyone needed that. He’ll undoubtedly have his older outfit available through unlocking it in the World Tour mode. The teaser is also enough to show that he’ll come with his own new stage. Good, because the game could use more of those.
Akuma will arrive in SF6 sometime this spring. Something tells me we’ll get a full trailer during Evo Japan. It would be even neater if he released at that time.
Now that Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising has established itself on the market, new characters are arriving in the game at a good pace. So good a pace, in fact, that they’re even including guest characters. The newest character to arrive, and the first guest character in the game, is the omnipresent 2B from NieR: Automata. Beyond this being yet another appearance for a character who’s been a guest star in far too many games at this point (though I’m not complaining here), she fits right into the game’s style. She’s a bit more technical, but clearly fun to play considering the sheer number of online players who’ve flocked to her.
They’re not wasting any time getting around to the other faces for the first GBVSR Character Pass. The next character set to arrive will be axe wielder Vane, a character with long range and perhaps slow-speed, set to arrive in early April. The aggressive and scrappy sword-wielding Beatrix will come afterward in late May. These are fast releases compared to other fighting games these days.
Versus is the newest title showing how Arc System Works has come closer to mastering the implementation of alternate outfits in their style, though they can still only be attached to certain characters. Here, Katalina has received the “Lady Serenity” outfit, available for an in-game or real-money purchase.
With this character release pace, the chance GBVSR getting a second Character Pass is high. I assume the player base is solid too with the addition of rollback netplay, despite the digital-only release.
Arc System Works is also supporting DNF Duel, alongside Eighting, Neople, and Nexon. The newest character that just arrived is the Monk, a bulky guy who uses a dizzying array of hard punches and kicks. This is the fourth of the five DLC characters still arriving as part of the first season, with this game’s roster coming at a far slower speed than the aforementioned GBVSR and still slower than even SF6. But at least they’re coming, and the game appears to be largely maintaining its player base thanks to the combination of the fighting system’s ease of use and the solid online netplay. It shouldn’t take long to see who the next character is, unless they’ve been leaked already and I didn’t see it yet.
There are too many fighting games to support right now, to the point that no one with other priorities can reasonably keep up with more than two of these simultaneously. It shouldn’t take long before further characters are revealed for Tekken 8, with there being so many fake leaks out there that it’s tough to tell which ones are legitimate. Perhaps that was the point, a clever plan to flood the zone from producer Katsuhiro Harada and Bandai Namco. Either way, they’re benefitting. The fans are benefitting from that too, in a way.
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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
