Just a reminder we STILL don’t have an official Western pricing for the game and its DLC
But apparently the Western branch of ArcSys is going to clarify that soon
based on theire pricing i would guess the base game will be something around 40-50 and the “full package” 70-80€uro
if the game is priced at 80 euros i’d expect a fully voiced story mode on par (for better or worse) with blazblue/personarena. with a couple of animated cutscenes 
.
Anyway. If think ArcSys got the message that they finally pushed the enveloppe a bit far with those dlc extravaganza. To the point that now people (wrongly) get pissed at the practice no matter what form it may takes (even good dlc are met with initial doubt now thanks to bullshit EA practices and the likes.).
Here’s the thing, it was a self-inflicted PR wound. They should have known up front that announcing something that bold, without mitigating information like “But here’s what this stuff will cost in each market” was going to look absolutely awful. We have been subject to way too many awful, horrible practices by publishers lately that of course our default assumption is going to be “how are they out to fuck us THIS time?!”
They could have gotten us that information at the same time they announced “half the roster is DLC” and it would have gone over a lot better. Instead, they just gave us the bad news with no official announcement about the good parts. You can argue “they listed the Japanese price”, and that’s true, but US and Japanese game prices don’t match up 1 to 1. Even if they did, we shouldn’t have to play Currency Converter Simulator 2018 to figure out good news. They should just have the good news ready to go and share it with us right alongside the DLC announcement.
This is basic marketing, PR, and communication. How they screwed that up is beyond me.
That said, I hope the news is good. I want to enjoy Cross Tag. I’d rather get a game I can support and feel good about, than not get such a thing.
To be fair, it was a Japanese conference for Japanese viewers. For people to expect everything about the North American release and how that would impact it to be explained during a conference/event/etc not about the North American release (if I remember right, it only listed the Japanese release date) seems kind of silly to me. I always kind of figured those things would be explained at a latter time in something directed to North American audiences anyway.
Video for Taipei’s TGS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx541n0MxsM
Movelist from EVO, requires Translations (some of them outside RWBY Cast can be very easy to find in BlazBlue & In-Birth Character Gameplay Wiki pages)
- https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DUi0gouU8AA7F0_.jpg (Hazama, Makoto, v-13, Tager)
- https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DUi0iP2VAAA0n_G.jpg (Es, Azrael, plus Ruby & Weiss)
- https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DUi0jrvVAAAgZJy.jpg (Persona cast)
- https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DUi0lLCVQAE1_II.jpg (Under Night cast)
Under Night Cast finally have their secondary Distortion Drive, one of them were originally from EX version of special moves or EX only moves, such as Hyde’s Pale Bringer Arrows & Gordeau’s Mortal Slide Take/EX. If only all characters got D(2x) too
Only left are the Resonance Blaze emblems for non-BB casts, such as Persona’s Arcana & RWBY’s Team Emblems
We already knew all of that though…
It was, but I seem to recall the ‘available as DLC’ thing was in English. You can say they did it to ‘look cool’ since Japanese marketing does that fairly often, and that’s true… but if you leave English information lying around in the internet age, English viewers will find it and will take note.
Regional boundaries are no longer the huge thing they were in the 1990s. News travels quickly, and it travels far beyond your nation’s borders. This is reality, and international game companies should be on top of that by now. Bare minimum, ArcSys Japan should have sent ArcSys US a note to the effect of “Hey, we’ll be showing off these things at one of our trade shows tomorrow, here’s the key stuff you need to know about in case your segment of the customer-base comes knocking. Also, here’s what you’re allowed to say to them.”
Not a complicated process. I maintain that this was a self-inflicted PR wound, even though I hope Cross Tag manages to recover from it.
Also, let me try my hand at translating Weiss’ movelist. From top-most entry working down… this is really incomplete, but I can at least give a starting point. I’m able to read her specials better than I can anything else.
(Red text) Smart Combos
Smart Combo 1
Smart Combo 2
Smart Combo 3
Smart Combo 4
Smart Combo 5
(In black box) Command List
(In gray box) (I can’t translate this)
Back + Square move is untranslatable for me, my vision’s way too blurry to read that low-res kanji.
Reversal Action I’m not awake enough to translate.
(Green box) Skills
Ice Shoot (or Ice Shot, either translation is acceptable)
The following moves are marked in (1)
(1): Glyph Dash Strike
(1): (Can’t read all of it. It’s either two English words or a compound English word. The second half is definitely ‘Foil’, like a fencing sword, though.)
(1): (Best guess translation) Twisting Air Step. This move has interactions with some other move in her list, but I cannot read the orange text clearly enough to be sure what this interaction is. I speculate it is some kind of ‘pick one of these options after a previous move’, sort of a follow-up choice.
(1): Piercing Air Step. This move has the same ‘interacts with another attack’ notes Twisting Air Step does.
(1): Pirouette (Translator’s note: this is the act of spinning on one foot, with the other foot raised and usually but not always bracing to support the knee of the spinning foot. Thus, likely some kind of special movement option.)
The ‘(1)’ markings end there. Moving on…
Ice Pillar is her down, down + attack.
The green box lists a set of moves that require 1 meter to do. They are…
EX Ice Shoot
Glyph Dash Drift Strike (Best guess! The katakana after ‘Glyph Dash’ renders out to ‘Dorifurusutoraiku’ or something close to that. Vision’s blurry, I could have a few letters wrong.)
(Can’t translate first word) Storm. this is the QCB + Square move.
(Can’t read most of this) Parry. This is the down, down square move.
The pink/light-red box has moves that require 2 meter. They are…
Glacier Torrent (best guess. I’m confident on ‘Glacier’, but the second word has multiple valid translations that aren’t entirely similar to one another. This would be her ‘tons of ice projectiles move as a wave toward the enemy’ Super)
(Can’t read the second one, but this would be her ‘Maximum Weissker’ super I believe)
The last box mentions that Glacier Torrent can be further improved under certain conditions, I suspect it’s the move that gains power if she’s the one to cash in her team’s ‘my partner is dead’ option.
Sorry I can’t be more help, my Japanese is… not great. Hope this was of some use,t hough!
So Blake and Yang will be coming as free DLC.
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I expected was going to be the case. They’ve done this with Blazblue, Persona, and Guilty Gear a lot of times in the past, so it seemed obvious to me they would do the same here.
Examples? I don’t remember a point with Persona or BB at least where they decided to DLC a character with money into it’s free due to backlash.
Well, I thought they might be “rushing” the game to be available for EVO but I did not expect to be a main game. I can’t say I’m not happy with Yang being free. She was the RWBY girl that I was more interested because of her design.
Adachi and Marie in P4U. Elphet, Dizzy and Kum in Xrd SIGN/Revelator. Terumi and Es in Blazblue CP/CF.
Also, here is the trailer
Arc Sys’ crew walking in the desert is killing me.
It should also be pointed out that with those ones they were pretty much announced as free before anybody really said anything (I think Mai might have been included as free DLC with CF? I actually forget somehow). It was more just that people assumed the worst on the Blake/Yang thing when history showed they didn’t need to.
Mai was time-limited free. I had to shell out $7 to get her separately when I bought Centralfiction because I was late to the party.
Anyway, announcing Blake and Yang will be free is exactly how you pull out of a PR nose dive like this. I have removed my Cornette Face avatar accordingly.
A note: For those complaining the other asset-reuse characters should be free… this argument only possibly holds true for the Blazblue DLC cast. Hear me out.
The character assets may already exist, but ArcSys did have to re-license them. When Cross Tag was put in production, I guarantee you SEGA/Atlus’ response was “Where’s our piece of the action?” Then French Bread said “Where’s our piece of the action?” too. Re-licensing them was not free. Charging a few dollars to cover the license costs is entirely reasonable.
The effort involved in getting those asset re-uses is also not trivial. It’s light work, yes, but it’s not ‘no work.’ Someone had to program them in. Someone had to make sure the changes to their simplified movelists all work properly. Someone had to either do up a few new sprites for their universal overhead and/or reversal attack, or else figure out how to repurpose existing sprites for it. All of this is a mere fraction of the work going into a whole new character, but it’s not zero work.
At this point, ArcSys has done the right thing. Blake, Yang, Weiss, and Ruby are the only heavy work involved in the game, and I damn well expected my $40-$60 base game fee to cover the work involved in them. The vast majority of the money you spend on any copy of Cross Tag is going to offset their development costs and licensing fees to Rooster Teeth. That’s how it should be. The asset re-uses being sold to you for another $20 afterward is not ideal, but it IS ‘business realistic’ without going too far into scummy practices; remember the licensing costs.
I’ll be preordering Cross Tag, because the core gameplay looks good and they’ve done what they should have regarding the DLC situation.
Eh, I’ll still wait for the prices but so far I’m more excited than before.
Mai wasn`t free. Same as Kokonoe(CP), Jubei(CF), Leo(XrdS), Margareth(P4U), Raven(XrdR), Baiken&Answer(XrdR2) and the BBCS trio.
I stand corrected, then.
BBCS was before they did the whole thing anyway, but hey. There’s also the bit on release timing to look at as well and take into consideration when you think of those. But hell, I remember Adachi having a story mode that came with him that was also free at the time in Ultimax and that being kinda dope.