Month: August 2016

During the course of a gargantuan seven hour livestream, Square Enix have revealed three new fighters that are making their way to the latest update of Dissidia Final Fantasy Arcade. The first is the protagonist from Final Fantasy Type-0, Ace who is classified as a ‘Shoot’ type fighter. He fights using a deck of magical playing cards, firing bolts of energy to deal Brave damage and using a blast of flame to deal a HP attack. The other two characters are making their first appearance in Dissidia Final Fantasy Arcade, seemingly acting as the replacements of Cosmos and Chaos from the previous games.

Materia is the female goddess, wielding a staff and wearing a dress which looks like it’s made of potato waffles. The male god is Spiritus, who wields a giant sword and has flame powers. There was no actual in game footage of these two gods during the stream, fans only got to see Ace in action. The rest of the livestream was dedicated to a special Dissidia tournament, with 16 teams facing off in 3v3 battles to determine the best Dissidia team. The matches are a feast for the eyes but there is so much visual clutter during fights that it’s very difficult to actually determine who is winning or losing. Matches are four minutes long and quite a few of them go to timeout so I don’t expect Dissidia to make the snappiest tournament viewing once it comes to PS4 in the not too distant future. You can find the reveals of Ace, Spiritus and Materia below, thanks to the people over at Nova Crystallis, as well as the full livestream on Square Enix’s YouTube channel.

Sources: Square Enix Japan; Nova Crystallis

 

When Tekken 7 was first announced, one of the more interesting details to come out was the fact that it was being made not on a bespoke engine, but on Unreal Engine 4. This put it on the growing list of Japanese-developed fighting games using iterations of Epic’s engine. UK news outlet Metro recently caught up with Bandai Namco’s Katsuhiro Harada at Gamescom, where they talked about Tekken 7’s use of said engine.

According to Harada, while Japan had the lead in 3D game development in the 1990s, Western developers started to catch up during the turn of the millennium as they started to focus on development with the PC–using engines like Unreal whereas Japanese developers continued to focus on using engines built for specific consoles. As such, Western development became very strong in the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era.

Harada continues by stating Japanese developers are now only just catching up with using middleware and engines like Unity and UE4. Off hand, he mentions only a few teams, such as the Final Fantasy team at Square Enix, some teams at Capcom, as well as Konami’s old Metal Gear team (which had at least one former Tekken developer) as being able compete with Western development.

Of course, that’s not just the only thing that they discuss. Harada and senior game designer Michael Murray also address a lot of other things, including whether or not Tekken has the longest running story in games at the moment, comparisons to Blizzard’s Overwatch, and more. You can read all of this in the full interview over at Metro.

Source: Metro