Oh goodness, did I seriously reference the Warrior comics with this title? What even is my life at this point?
The annual Evolution fighting game tournament was held this past weekend, and with it naturally came a couple of announcements for those who have the adaptability and motor skills needed to play and enjoy fighting games. Firstly, marking the second crossover character in Tekken 7, Fatal Fury antagonist Geese Howard is joining the fray, in a move that makes me truly curious if the potential dream bout of something like Street Fighter X Tekken X King of Fighters would be a possibility. Probably not, but it would make some people go nuts if that was the case.
It is clearly not the most outlandish crossover concept either, as Arc System Works have announced BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle, a crossover fighter with their popular BlazBlue series along with characters from Persona 4 Arena, Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[st], and RWBY, the latter of which Arc Sys is making a fighter based on. This is ultimately a crossover based around whatever rights to games the developer and publisher has access to and sprites for.
Just imagining the what-if scenario where they also throw in characters from other games developed by Arc Sys friends such as Aquapazza: Aquaplus Dream Match, Dengeki Bunko: Fighting Climax, Arcana Heart 3: Love Max, and Nitroplus Blasterz: Heroines Infinite Duel is enough to wrap me in a warm and cozy feeling as the absurdity and insanity of such a prospect sinks into the recesses of my warped mind.
After being revealed as an April Fools joke earlier this year, developer Akira has shown off more of a game that is under the working title of Fighting EX Layer, a title that will revive and reinvent the developer’s prior fighting games, Fighting Layer and the Street Fighter EX series while using a cast made up of their original characters. Which include the greatest fighting game character of all time, Skullomania. A salaryman who one day decides to take up crime as a skeleton themed Kamen Rider hero, who also happens to be one of the greatest martial artists in the world, and is known to transform other fighters into his super sentai skullo squad. Skullomania is truly overdo for his own AAA action game, and if all is good in the world, it would be a best seller.
For a while now, there has been buzz about Atari, or at least the company who bought Atari’s name and IP, releasing a new console, and they finally showed off this joke of an idea with the creatively named Ataribox, a supposedly modern gaming system (no specs were mentioned) with no disc drive or game cartridge port, yet retains the same wood finish that Atari’s only successful console is known for. Honestly, I have absolutely no trust in this company to do anything but embarrass themselves after their horrible attempted revivals of classic Atari IP with Haunted House: Cryptic Graves, Alone in the Dark: Illumination, and the abandoned Early Access turd Asteroids: Outpost. All of which are no longer available for sale on Steam, on account of how awful they were.
As part of the preamble to ComicCon, Telltale released an overly elaborate trailer detailing their plans for the upcoming year, and before getting into the news, I should address something. As a developer, Telltale has a pretty reliable bar of quality they can consecutively hit, however their games are also incredibly formulaic when you get down to it, and despite all of this fervor about player’s choices matter, the reality of pumping out episodic game after game means that corners need to be cut and stories cannot be as expansive. It is an unfortunate reality that has even besmirched just about every game that applied this formula, including the the origination, The Walking Dead Season One.
Anyways, the games that were announced all happened to be sequels. Telltale’s Batman series is getting a successor that will continue their modern reinterpretation of this series with Batman: The Enemy Within, which will begin this August. The Walking Dead will reach its ultimate conclusion as Clementine’s story comes to an end with an aptly named final season that is apparently centered around finding a baby from season 2, which makes me wonder what the heck the point of season 3 was. While The Wolf Among Us will get a follow-up after the 3 years that have past since the end of the first season, and long after I have almost entirely forgotten everything about that game.
I honestly expected some more news from Comic Con this week, but the video game related announcements were basically nonexistent as far as I could tell, so that is all for now. Seeya next time.