The Fall Classic 2014 Preview (October 10-12) live from Raleigh, North Carolina and a whole bunch of post-EVO news!
By FLStyle 28 Comments
Welcome back to the world of fighting games!
It's been quite some time since EVO happened, we're at the half way point between EVO and the Capcom Cup so I figured it was time to showcase another major event on the fighting game tournament calendar, The Fall Classic!
As far as tournament organisers go, The Fall Classic has a 4 man all-star group of East Coast TOs running this event:
- Larry “Shin Blanka” Dixon is the founder Final Round. Based out of Atlanta.
- Eric “Big E” Small is the founder of Northeast Championships (NEC 15 is this upcoming December 5-7), Winter Brawl and Summer Jam. Based out of Philadelphia.
- Joe “LI Joe” Ciaramelli and John “SweetJohnnyCage” Gallagher are the co-founders of East Coast Throwdown. Based out of New Jersey.
Streams and schedule
http://tfctournament.com/ for more details!
http://www.twitch.tv/teamsp00ky
http://www.twitch.tv/capcomfighters
http://www.twitch.tv/kombatnetwork
http://www.twitch.tv/clashtournaments
I'm looking forward to this, I haven't sat down and enjoyed a good fighting game event since EVO, should be good!
News items! All the news items*!
*not guaranteed to feature all the news items
Is this the 1st 4K (2160p) fighting game video?
Iron Galaxy have been continuing to hype season 2 of Killer Instinct, and Maximilian in turn uploaded the new Maya trailer in 4K (the game itself doesn't run in 4K).
1st of all, Maya looks amazing. Her look, her gameplay, great job Iron Galaxy! What do you think of 4K quality?
Street Fighter V? Is it secretly on?
Ono-san tweeted at the beginning of September that a recruitment drive was taking place to join Capcom and Dimps to work on a fighting game. I doubt Street Fighter X Tekken will ever be revisited again, Capcom don't have the Marvel license anymore so Marvel vs. Capcom 4 isn't happening and Darkstalkers Resurrection worked on by Iron Galaxy sold like shit so a new Darkstalkers game isn't happening either.
We are recruiting colleagues to work together with us at Dimps studio for new FG. http://t.co/VHLIEUBnIa
— Yoshinori Ono (@Yoshi_OnoChin) September 1, 2014
It's got to be Street Fighter V right? What else could it be?
Mortal Kombat X dated and Goro confirmed
As covered on Giant Bomb, MKX has a release date of April 14th, 2015. This should theoretically slot it in nicely in time for EVO 2015. Keep in mind that the EVO line-up is normally announced every January, with late additions to be added as the main fighting game tournament season from January to July progresses.
NetherRealm fans might remember EVO 2013 in which MK9 was added officially for a 3rd and final time due to the unknown quantity that was Injustice: Gods Among Us. That game turned out to be just as good a competitively viable game as any and was added later on along side MK9, which finally bowed out officially this year.
The likely scenario again would be that Injustice gets a bonus year on the roster as a back-up to MKX not being viable. Though I could see the EVO gents putting their trust in Ed Boon and NetherRealm on the back of MK9 and Injustice's success at EVO and simply cut Injustice out and announce the unreleased MKX for EVO 2015 straight away (barring any delays to MKX).
Persona 4 Arena Ultimax sells well in Japan and Europe won't have to wait an extra year to play it
Persona 4: The Ultimax Ultra Suplex Hold sold nearly 90,000 copies in its 1st week in Japan, following the tradition of lesser sales to fighting game upgrades, despite still outselling Street Fighter IV. It's another solid entry into the ever expanding Persona brand.
Japan opening week sales
| Persona games | Fighting games |
|---|---|
| Persona 4 Arena Ultimax - 90,000 | Persona 4 Arena Ultimax - 90,000 |
| Persona Q (3DS) - 185,000 | Persona 4 Arena (PS3) - 128,000 |
| Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 (PS2) - 193,000 | Street Fighter IV (PS3) – 86,075 |
| Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 (PS2) - 127,472 | Tekken 6 (PS3) – 103,105 |
Sega has confirmed as the publisher for P4AU in Europe and that will happen this November, avoiding the disaster of P4A's release, P4A still hadn't been released in Europe during its only official tournament at EVO.
Brand new characters unveiled for Tekken 7
The only trailers shown so far for Tekken 7 focus entirely on a final showdown between father and son, Kazuya and Heihachi Mishima, with flashbacks narrated by Heihachi's wife and Kazuya's mother, Kazumi Mishima. What will happen to characters outside of this equation has yet to be seen, maybe Tekken 7 takes the shape of another tournament.
Two characters who may be participating is Catalina and an unnamed Arab gent. Harada-san openly admitted he and his team know very little about Middle Eastern dresswear and culture, so they posted some concept art and asked for feedback. Whatever his final look turns out to be, I hope it looks a little less like a progonist from an Assassin's Creed game. I want to see something unique, something never seen before and the Tekken series certainly has a history with crazy, unique characters.
Catalina on the other hand looks like a typical Tekken female, had I not have known otherwise, I'd say that Catalina is merely a costume update for Christie Monteiro. Hopefully her French fighting style, Savate, is interesting to play as.
Breaking news (Oct 3rd)! Location testing details! Tekken has super combos!
The gent to your right is apparently called Claudio and is another new character set to debut in Tekken 7.
His strange arm can glow with some sort of blue aura? Also confirmed to be returning during the location testing is Lars, Asuka, Lili, Alisa, Paul, Law, Xiaoyu, King, Dragunov, Bryan, Leo, Feng, Steve, and Hwoarang.
Rage Art is the name for the super combo style (technically speaking they function more like ultra combos from the SFIV series), cinematic, high damaging moves that have been seen used when characters are enraged (the red glowing state that they enter when they only have 10% of their health remaining). They seem to be very powerful, doing huge damage, and add even more to Tekken's growing list of comeback mechanics. The bound system also returns.
Pokkén Tournament FAQ
Pokkén Tournament is the non-Smash Brothers Nintendo fighting game I've been waiting for, I can only hope it gets a console release and subsequently a console release outside of Japan. We join Harada-san once again as he drops some info and ideas:
Mega Evolutions?
“When you think about Mega Evolution, there are those [Pokémon] that do Mega Evolve and those that don’t, so you might wonder what happens to the ones that don’t,” says Harada. “We’ve already thought of plenty of things like that since the early planning stage, in order to make it more like a Pokémon game.
How many Pokémon will feature?
“Over the 700 total Pokémon… is what I’d like to say, but the development wouldn’t be done on time by the time we decided,” responds Harada with a laugh. “We expect it to be a little more limited.”
“That said, I believe that the general direction that current fighting games are trending towards having more characters,” adds Hoshino. “I also believe that getting a grasp of how to play as all the characters is a big part of the fun, and as far expanding that goes, we’re thinking of starting with Pokémon that are easy to understand, and with a nice range of movements and ways to play.”
I don't want fighting games with more characters, it's gotten nuts, just have 15-20!
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Thanks for tuning in! I hope to do a few more previews before the end of the year before the road to EVO 2015 begins! Follow me on the Twitter @FLStyle!
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