It's a Good Time to Love Fighting Games

By Luiggi Cavanna

This year’s EVO’s final day of competition ended up with a series of announcements that blew my mind away, and made me so happy that I love fighting games. For those that don’t know, EVO, or “Evolution Championship Series”, is a yearly E-sport competition that mainly focuses on Fighting games.

It gets really HYPE!!

It’s not rare for video game companies to make announcements at EVO, but this year was great! All of us were caught by surprise.

Yep, it was like that.

Let’s start shall we. Tekken 7 is a beloved franchise from Bandai Namco that has made strong comeback, and with it, Tekken has given the 3D fighter genre it’s life back. Tekken 7 is not a stranger to surprises after all they gave a tremendous surprise when they revealed that Akuma, from Capcom’s Street Fighter series, was going to be in the game. This year people were expecting a new DLC character and the community was making some speculations, but we didn’t see this one coming.

Geese F’ing Howard!!!

Yes, Geese Howard is in Tekken 7! fine, guest characters have become pretty common now days, but Tekken 7 already had a guest character and that was Akuma! Unless it’s a “versus game”, like Marvel vs Capcom for example, you don’t get too many guest characters in your game, let alone from two different companies like Capcom and SNK. You could say this wasn’t “PREDICTABLE”, people is going to hate me for this joke.

Geese will be out later this winter.

Bandai Namco also showed the reveal trailer for Trunks in their new fighting game, Dragon Ball FighterZ, but we already knew he was in the game after a sneak peak in some Japanese magazines but they did surprise us with the announcement for the beta. Originally we were going to be able to signup on July 26th, but due to reception, they didn’t expected so many people to be interested in the game, they are going to expand the capacity of the closed beta to allow more people to join. This means that the closed beta signup time period was move to August 22, we are still hype though, especially since Piccolo and Krillin have been announced as well since then.

Dragon Ball FighterZ will be released on early 2018.

Arc System Works also worked on Dragon Ball FighterZ, as you can see with those graphics, but they also had announcements of their own, but nobody expected what was to come.

BOOM! Jubei is coming to Blazblue this winter!

Jubei is a character that a lot of people have been asking for, but Arc System Works was on the fences about putting Jubei in the game after all, lore wise, Jubei is the strongest character in the story. Here he is anyway and the fanbase went nuts, but they weren’t done yet.

No, you’re not wrong, those are Blazblue characters with

Persona 4 arena and Under Night In-birth Characters.

Yep! Arc Systems is making a tag team vs game called, “Blazblue Cross Tag Battle”. That include characters from the Blazblue series, Persona 4 arena, Under Night In-birth and somebody that came out of nowhere and blew everyone's mind.

Yeah, that’s Ruby Rose.

Ruby Rose is the main character from Rooster Teeth’s animated series RWBY. I don’t have any personal attachment to the series, but watching the hype reaction of the crowd was contagious, also my girlfriend is massive fan of the series, so having another game that we can share together is exciting.

 

Blazblue Cross Tag Battle will be release 2018.

Arika was also at EVO testing their new fighting game, that has no title yet, and everyone was having a blast with it. You might remember Arika as the video game developers that worked with Capcom on the Street Fighter EX series. Oh Street Fighter EX, you might not be the best competitive game but sure you were fun. I mean, the FGC has been asking for some of the characters from the EX series, especially Skullomania, to make a return in any Street Fighter game, but since they don’t have the rights it was impossible. If not in a Street Fighter game maybe in other fighting games, well guess what!

After so many years Skullomania is back baby!!

Alongside another returning character from the EX series, Darun Mister, Skullomania joins the cast of Arika’s new Fighting game. The game is in development for the PS4, and it will have a limited beta test at the end of 2017.

The game will have a simultaneous release in North-America, Europe, and Japan on 2018.

Capcom was also there, and showed things, I guess. Ok fine let’s talk about Capcom! First let me state that I don’t hate Capcom, my favorite fighting game of all times is Street Fighter 3:Third Strike, I’m not a fan of the Marvel vs Capcom series but I’ll play you on MvC 2, but Capcom’s decision lately have shown that they have become complacent, but let’s talk about it later. After the finals of Marvel vs Capcom 3 they showed us, in a somewhat staged way some people argue, a new character for Marvel vs Capcom Infinite, Jedah!

Did he just JoJo pose!!

Jedah, from Darkstalkers, joins as one of the coolest looking character in a somewhat bland roster of characters. Too bad we already knew about him thanks to the leaks, I can’t wait to see Monster Hunter. After the Street Fighter V finals, they had another reveal and it was, well, this.

Yep…

Abigail from the Final Fight series shows up, and we also knew about it. Ok, to be fair he looks way better than the announcement trailer led us to believe, and that’s not saying much because the trailer was awful. I don’t have a problem with Final Fight characters, I love Hugo, but the character design for Street Fighter V doesn’t go very well with him. I mean, the drawn still pictures for cutscenes make all the characters look good, but everytime I see Ken’s banana hair clipping through his shoulder, I die a little inside.

You didn’t notice the change at first didn’t you?

Capcom has ruled over the tag fighting games, with the Marvel vs Capcom series, unchallenged for too long, and like I said before, they have grown complacent. Now that we have strong competition like Dragon Ball FighterZ, that looks damn good and is only 20% done, I hope they get their shit together. I love capcom, I grew up with their fighting games, but it breaks my heart when I hear them talk about “functions” if you know what I mean. I just don’t want them to sleep on the sticks and loose this match.

We all know what happens when you celebrate way too early.

All and all, I gotta say that the future looks bright if you love fighting games. So much goodness coming our way that I just can’t wait. So! Are you excited, are you a hard core fighting game fan or just love to smash those buttons? Let us know. Now I return to the deepest darkest corners of my dwelling. Good-bye for now my friends.