That bar better scroll until I can pick Kagura.
Wait, “etc”? Hold up, there are going to be more than 4 series repped!?
About 10 mins of gameplay. Quality isn’t that great, but it’s something.
Well, I’ll have to reserve final judgement for actually playing it, but I’m not liking that control scheme at first glance. P4U and DBFZ already provide elegant solutions for simpler fighting game controls that still provide avenues for depth. CTB’s approach just seems excessive, and maybe even counterintuitive to easily grasping combo flow.
I dunno, given the controls and the fact that the game is allegedly built towards a Western audience, I can’t help but feel like this is shaping up to be the Mystic Quest of ArcSys fighting games.
They should’ve just had one more attack button to fit every unique mechanic in the game. Drive from BB, light and heavy Personas, what’s-it-called from UNIEL, and then just have tag and assist on top of that. I mean as of now it seems like pads would use three face buttons and two shoulder buttons, with one face button bring completely unused.
I dunno why they went with this weird ass control scheme that seems to do nothing but gimp the characters and have ArcSys completely redo their movelists to accommodate a 3 attack button layout.
Not to mention yet again complete absence of DP motions from the game, just like DBFZ
Fuck casuals
This.
I don’t mind DP motions getting axed, but there’s no need to not use 6 buttons, even for Pad players. 3 normals, lol ghetto Dust, Tag and Assist. ABCD on the main 4 buttons and Tag/Assist on L1/R1.
TBH I reserve judgement until I see it. But in my experience auto combos condone mashing and mashing makes things annoying. Not like I cant beat mashers but it’s not fun to fight someone who just mashes all day. At least for me. I still think both DBZF and BBCTB look good so hopefully ill just get over it
I got to try this out when I was out at NYCC today. There was only two setups and it was a Best-of-one. Some of the information here might be incorrect, but I did the best I could to document the information I collected. I focused primarily on Linne and Hyde. Interesting to note is that the ASW reps said that this is pre-Alpha, so all of this is subject to change.
First Impressions
-
There’s literally no ‘How to play’ or mechanics sheet for the setup. Whack.
-
Character select is separated into groups. BlazBlue/UNIST/P4A/RWBY. There’s an ‘etc’ section for random select, though that leads to further guest potential [doubtful].
-
Seems to be a 5 button game:
A = Light
B = Heavy
C = Crush Assault / Sweep [5C/2C respectfully]
D = Tag
Q / E = Assist -
Crush assault is a universal overhead that leads to a team-attack animation that does ~2000 damage. for BB/P4A characters, it’s their allout/crush trigger moves. For UNIST/RWBY, it’s a jumping overhead akin to 3S [but worse]. Pressing 2C leads to a sweep. jC varies per character. Linne’s jC is her divekick, Hyde’s jC is his j6C[?].
-
Air mobility is consistent for the games the characters come from. P4/BB/RWBY have their air dash, UNIST get their air assault. I think double jumps are universal as well.
-
Pressing A or B in sequence gives autocombos, though the usefulness ranges per character. Linne’s B sequence is her 6C chain~ender, A sequence is 214/Mujin. Ruby seems to get a full fledged combo off one of her sequences, and Jin gets xxx jD ender.
-
You can reverse beat and chain normals.
EX: 2A 4A 2A 5B 5AAA… -
There doesn’t seem to be a form of pushblock available, so I had to sit and wait my turn.
-
You can call in your character at any time while on offense. The assist varies depending if you press 5D/4D/6D. You can use your assist again while they’re still on screen, but they drain your meter.
-
While the assist is in, you can press the tag button to swap characters. The game stops and flashes on the character you switch to to indicate it.
-
Blaze Resonance: Only available when one of your characters is downed. Your meter regenerates and moves from a cap of 4/5? I tried chaining from normals and it didn’t seem to work. Seems to function similarly to an OD activation. Blaze resonance also breaks your bar, but I wasn’t able to test if that means you can’t use EX moves or you’re limited to 3 uses of bar.
-
There seems to be only one distortion per character, 41236B+C. Ruby can combo off of hers, Linne and Hyde cannot. While a distortion drive goes out, you can tag the other character in to do their distortion, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it.
-
Other uses of meter were EX versions of moves, but if I remember right meter continues to regenerate when you’re not attacking/not getting hit. I wish I had more time, since the meter system was strange. You start off at 3, and I think using an EX move either took half a bar or 4 squares from the smaller diamond? I couldn’t make sense of it.
-
When getting hit, you can tag out similar to tag crash from TTT2. I wasn’t sure how to do this, but I saw it happen several times.
My notes are kind of all over the place, but I tried. orz
Close to 20 min of gameplay.
Tag is FAST
You can keep the assist in like a puppet
This is sick.
This is really sick.
This bit worries me a bit. Games with tag/assist usually allow you to create all sorts of extended, and almost busted levels of offensive pressure, so they usually have a defensive mechanic like pushblock (of DBFZ’s 4+S) that allows a defending player a chance to steal their turn.
Without it, they’re going to have to be very careful with their frame data.
This control lay out seem nothing new.
and of course alot of thing are going to be streamlined, their was no possible way they could stick to each game mechanics and make them work out well.
I mean its far too soon to worry about this as I bet not all mechanics have been developed or even discovered. Just because one defining mechanic is not present doesn’t mean there is not another to take its place.
The roster is a placeholder according to the rep.
Burst and universal DP should help there
For a game that’s in pre-alpha, that gameplay is looking mighty fine for now. A few things I personally noticed:
-
There IS pushblock in the game (called “Reject”, happens in the official ArcSys Play Movie at 2:35 [done by Yu in the Jin/Linne vs. Yu/Ruby battle]; resembles MVC’s style of pushblock while looking like Instant Guard from BB.
-
I can sorta see the simplified controls working but I honestly feel like if they were gonna simplify the controls, they should modeled it closer overall to UNIEL; A = Light, B = Medium, C = Heavy/Drive (for BB characters), D = Tag and reserve the bumpers towards the cute stuff. I guess it’s just because I don’t like the tag team super being tied to my C for some reason…
-
The overall new fight system is sweet but it makes me really wonder about certain BB characters and how they’re gonna function if they even get in at all… I don’t play him but Hakumen would have to literally be reworked from the ground up completely since he wouldn’t have access to his personal Heat meter AND doesn’t have a run animation (though I could see them animating one for him if he’s chosen). Same with people that have very unique Drive properties (like Rachel and her wind control).
-
Even with the fairly loose and fast tagging system, that overall damage being so sky high concerns me for now. People who already hate fighting certain high damage character in their source games (i.e. BB’s Iron Tager) are REALLY not gonna like getting hit with a single Distortion in the middle of nowhere and eating like 8K and instantly losing a character over it. I got faith it’ll get normalized as production moves along.
-
I actually hope they keep the UI, Character Select screen and overall presentation. It’s pretty bright and lively IMO.
Twitch will be doing a RWBY marathon starting on October 9th. There’s a chance for us to maybe get interested in the series and see whom we’ld like to see in the roster, besides the 4 main girls
I’ll try and see if I can explore the options I missed. It really doesn’t help the reps won’t explain a thing.
The game is in PRE-ALPHA.
They also stated that there are a lot of stuff on the current build that isn’t final.
I’m confused; is Cross Combo activated by hitting R1 while the assist is active? And then you can either hold it (build gauge) or keep tapping to get more attacks?