Nov 2016:
This is now publicly announced and shown:
SRK news post: http://shoryuken.com/2016/11/14/fantasy-strike-is-coming-to-playstation-4-and-is-playable-at-the-playstation-experience/
Official website: http://www.fantasystrike.com/
^ Their official site will have much more up to date news and information than this original post which I’ll leave below to make sense of this discussion thread 
I thought I’d start this thread as this game seems to be a bit under the radar for many people at this point and I think it’s well worth knowing about. I hope that’s cool in this bit of the forum.
http://www.sirlin.net/fantasystrike
Sep 2015 - ^ This page has just been posted with some basic information about the game (most of which I’ve repeated here though!)
Full disclosure: I became a patreon backer of the devs because I really liked the sound of this game, that’s also how I’ve been able to play on super-early pre-Alpha builds.
I thought it would be great for more people to know about this game even though it’s really early
It’s only started development recently in mid-2015 so it’s incredibly early days yet so a lot of things might change over time. It’s intended to be a ‘simple to execute’ fighting game. So it only uses simple button or double-button presses plus directional inputs to do all of the moves. Note that graphics are all placeholders and unfinished so I’m not allowed to post any screens or videos until more of that gets finished as obviously it doesn’t look like much at all at the moment! (it’s better than the stickmen I was expecting tho, haha). Here’s the characters though:
Immediately you can compare it to Rising Thunder or Divekick in the general design space of making something easier to play than most fighting games, but still difficult to master.
Like everything else the control scheme is subject to change but currently has just 6 buttons so it’s incredibly nice to play on keyboard, joystick or any kind of controller you want to use:
Left
Right
Jump
Attack
Special 1
Special 2
Pressing away from your opponent blocks. There’s no dashing or crouching or up/down even.
Most buttons are modified by pressing Left or Right, so Jump changes from a neutral jump to an away/towards jump, Attack becomes a different ‘side’ attack when a direction is held too, and the effects of the Special buttons maybe modified depending on the character if a direction is held vs neutral Special.
Attack and Specials can also be performed mid-jump of course and this changes their effect from their ground versions.
Currently some moves can be ‘charged’ by holding and releasing a button too.
Throws are just a direction and Attack button when close (like SF2).
There’s a super meter which is gained by hitting your opponent with attacks whether they are blocked or actually land damage.
Super’s are executed by pressing Attack+Special together and like other moves have different effects in the air or on the ground.
Playing it currently feels a LOT like Street Fighter 2, with an even easier control scheme, but still all the emphasis on pokes, zoning and mindgames. There’s currently only two characters built though so it’s hard to tell how this might change as more different styles of play come into the game, but I really enjoy it even with just two characters already. Even with the simple moveset you can do some pretty diverse stuff, as the special moves are really well designed. For example one of the characters, Grave, has an air-hurricane kick style move as his air Special 1. Like in ST, this will follow the arc of the jump depending on when and where it’s pressed in the momentum of a jump so there’s a huge array of movement and attacking options, especially when he can also do his air attack which is a kind of Divekick-style divekick.
Fighting game skills really shine already. When I was playing against a much less experienced friend, and I was immediately winning the majority of matches due to the fact I had an edge with blocking, zoning, meter management, spacing, timing, combos, yomi etc. from my experience at other fighting games. But the important thing my friend liked was that he could immediately actually do all the moves! He commented when he was getting frustrated losing it was more with himself, rather than feeling like he was losing because he couldn’t get out a dragon punch or an Ultra or whatever which he feels a lot when he tries to play SF4 for example.
Combos are definitely possible and are actually really easy not long jabby-jab type of things found in most FGs these days - they really feel more like SF2, so Jump Attack, ground Attack, ground Special 1 is a combo that’s possible, however you need to land the jump attack deep enough to be able to combo into the ground attack, much like in many SF2 combos.
The health bar is currently actually 6 Hit Points. So rounds can go really fast - that 3 hit combo above is actually 50% of your health… but honestly it’s surprisingly impractical to even land that vs a good opponent. Some supers can do 2 hits of damage if they fully connect. Tick damage is handled by your current HP of health beginning to flash if you block moves a lot in a short space of time, and if you continue to block you will be hit anyway and lose that HP. If you don’t block moves for a while, the HP will bar will return to normal.
It definitely won’t be a game for everyone, especially if you really like all the complex inputs and combos of modern fighting games, but I think this will appeal to people who:
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Enjoy Divekick but want something that feels a bit more like a “normal” fighting game. This has health and fireballs, and blocking, throwing and all of that stuff, on top of a control scheme that is not that much more complex than Divekick. Oh it also still has divekicks though!
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Like the idea of Rising Thunder but maybe some of it’s features aren’t to their taste, like the robot character designs, the cooldowns on specials, the online-only play, the 8-button layout which isn’t friendly to 6 button joysticks, forced grind (? probably?) to access loadout options, or it’s lengthy combo strings that require a lot of memorisation or 1P training mode time to learn what’s best to do.
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Would like to get into fighting games but want something really accessible to them and are put off by the amount of “uncontested” skills you need to practice first before you can really feel like you’re playing the real game, like motion commands and long combo strings. Fantasy Strike just seems like it will be so much fun to learn for newbies since you can literally just “learn-by-playing” almost everything in the game.
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Folks like me that love SF2 and are missing a fighting game that really focuses on the fundamentals I find much more fun than the hit-confirm long combo strings emphasis of almost all modern fighting games. (I got some hopes for SFV though too!)
I believe it will be following a similar sales model to Rising Thunder eventually with online play and be free-to-play, but I also know that no grinding will be required at all to unlock options.
The designer’s other online board games actually have amazing matchmaking and ranking & leaderboard systems so I fully expect that to be done really well here eventually too.
Extra information (links):
A New Era of Fighting Games article about it from the designer
Posts on my website related to Fantasy Strike
TL;DR - this game feels a bit like Divekick and SF2 had a baby - if that sounds like your kinda thing, then this is definitely worth keeping an eye on!
The control scheme sounds a bit weird, but at least it’s not 8 buttons like Rising Thunder. I hope it will still play well on a joystick, even though it may be designed for people who would use a keyboard or gamepad, I’m sure there will still be a lot of fighting game folks who would want to try it out.