Category: Entertainment & Lifestyle

Character will be playable on March 24 – frame data and ranked match updates announced

As promised, before top 8 of the Guilty Gear Strive portion of the Arc World Tour 2024 Finals, we got to see the Venom gameplay trailer for Guilty Gear Strive, which you can check out below.

Venom will be released tomorrow, March 24, 2025. He was initially delayed to secure enough time to provide the best game experience possible to the players, the developers previously stated.

Venom places his billiard balls on the screen, and uses his weapon as a pool cue to position the balls on screen, so he can bounce them all over the screen for setups.

He appears to have parts of Robo-Ky’s moveset, who was previously a playable character in the Guilty Gear franchise.

Venom has a bit of a different look this time around, since he’s now wearing a shirt, as well as a looser fit on his pants and jacket.

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Guilty Gear Strive producer, Ken Miyauchi, also relayed that frame data will be available in training mode in the game, in May 2025. The developers are also planning to gradually implement additional features to training mode after this update.

There will also be a ranked match update that takes place around June to August this year, where players can match make without going through the online lobby. Ranks are rated on a per character basis — not the individual player — and will change based on the points earned from playing ranked. There will be a total of seven ranks.

After Venom, there’s a new original character, Unika, coming in May, as well as Cyberpunk Edgerunners’ Lucy scheduled for the summer of 2025 for Season 4 of Guilty Gear Strive.

Unika will be exclusively playable at Evo Japan 2025 as an early trial, May 9th through the 11th.

As part of the Arc World Tour 2024 Finals, the developers for Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising showed brief footage of the latest DLC character, Galleon.

Tetsuya Fukuhara, the creative director for the series, took the stage to show off Galleon, who will be the second character to come in the new season along with her dragon ready to tame her opponents with earth magic.

Galleon is set for a spring 2025 release, and will be followed by Wilnas in the summer, Meg in the fall and Ilsa in early part of 2026.

The video is just a bit over 20 seconds long, so it’s a very quick look at Galleon.

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It was mentioned earlier today that Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising will be part of the Arc World Tour 2025-2026, which is something that Motohiro Okubo, CyGames’ American CEO, reiterated before the Galleon teaser video was shown.

Sandalphon, the first DLC character for Season 2 was released on February 26, 2025.

You can scope out the previously released Character Pass 2 Teaser for Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising along with more details here.

During the Arc World Tour 2024 Finals the Under Night In-Birth series director, Kamone Serizawa, offered up a look at Izumi, a DLC character who’s scheduled to join Under Night In-Birth 2 in August of 2025.

This is the first time the developers of the game have shown Izumi’s official artwork for the game.

Izumi is a character who uses water powers, and because of this she has quite a bit of range.

One of the slides (fourth image below) showed Izumi’s crouching C attack, which is her sweep, which reaches really far.

Serizawa noted that the scarf Izumi wears transforms depending on the moves that you do, and can also transform into a fish.

The sixth image in the gallery below shows the creative process the developers of Under Night In-Birth 2 went through when designing Izumi, from changing her hair and clothing styles to showing her with birds instead of fish.

The seventh image below shows the final version of Izumi’s character artwork. Serizawa noted that the team is working on her pixel art and balancing currently, ahead of her release this summer.

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You can view more about Ogre who was released last month, or see more about the bone witch Uzuki, who was the first DLC character added to the game.

The Arc World Tour 2024 Finals has been playing out over the course of this weekend. Players have been competing in Guilty Gear Strive, Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising and Under Night In-Birth 2 [Sys:celes] for grand prizes ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 for first place.

As all of the games have reached the top 8 portions of their respective brackets, Arc System Works took this as an opportunity to make a major announcement. The Arc World Tour 2025-2026 circuit has been officially confirmed.

Indeed, the first qualifying event of the Arc World Tour 2025-206 is set to take place at Evo Japan 2025. This tournament will be taking place at the Tokyo Big Sight Hall 2 and 3 starting on May 9, 2025 and lasting until May 11, 2025.

Games that will be participating in the Arc World Tour 2025-2026 will include Guilty Gear Strive, Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising, and Under Night In-Birth 2 [Sys:celes]. Of course, this is the same lineup as the currently ongoing Arc World Tour.

As of right now, we’re not sure what kind of prize pool to expect from the upcoming tournament circuit. We’ll likely see grand prize awards similar to the Arc World Tour 2024-2025 circuit.

Later today, an extended look at Venom’s gameplay for Guilty Gear Strive is set to be revealed at the Arc World Tour 2024 Finals. Notably, Venom is the second out of four characters set to be released for Season 4 of Guilty Gear Strive.

After Venom, we’re expecting Unika and Lucy to be showcased during events for the Arc World Tour 2025-2026. From there, we’ll just have to see if Arc System Works is able to continue supporting Guilty Gear Strive with a fifth season of post-launch content.

Some time ago, Atsushi Tomita, designer for Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes, revealed some interesting stories that happened during the development cycle for the fighting games that he worked on. At one point, he started talking about how Jin Saotom from Cyberbots became a playable character.

Apparently, Kinu Nishimura, an illustrator working for Capcom at the time, secretly added some content into Marvel vs. Capcom whilst she was also working on the console version of Cyberbots at the time.

“Also, Miss Kinu Nishimura from the design team was actually working on the home version of Cyberbots at the time and secretly added some scenarios to our game during that time,” said Tomita. “Jin’s general pose and entrance, his win pose and things like this.”

Ultimately, it was Nishimura’s contributions that inspired the Marvel vs. Capcom developers to add Jin as a playable character.

“She also did a sketch of the assist Princess Devilotte for us,” continued Tomita. “Having her support available to us like this was another reason why we chose to go with Jin for the roster.”

Jin’s taunt had him stripping down to a fundoshi (a traditional Japanese undergarment) and doing a towel rubdown on his back. This was apparently inspired by a sketch created by Nishimura.

From there, the character designer made it so that the player can actually control how fast Jin actually rubs himself like this based on how quickly they mash the buttons. Doing this fast enough will actually cause him to catch a fire, which actually has an active hitbox. The developers clearly had fun pushing this joke as far as it could go.

“Speaking of all this, I remember that for Jin’s taunt pose we had him strip down to just a fundoshi and do a towel rubdown on himself, which was from a sketch Miss Kinu Nishimura gave us,” said Tomita.

“Our character designer at the time made it so that if you mash the buttons more, he rubs the towel faster and faster and finally he actually catches fire. Our programmer took it even further and made it so that fire had a hitbox as well. I remember that’s exactly how that particular thing happened.”

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate concluded its DLC run with a roster of 86 characters. Funnily enough, eight of those fighters hail from the Fire Emblem series even though the Fire Emblem franchise isn’t quite as popular as some of the other less represented series.

Surely we don’t need any more Fire Emblem reps added to the character select screen, right? It turns out that Cattail, a modder, thought that a character like the Black Knight would function well as a new challenger. As such, the Beefy Smash Doods have released a video that showcases a mod of the Black Knight in action.

Prior to the release of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, it was noticed that the Black Knight had been removed as a background element in one of the returning stages. This initially made fans think that the Black Knight was set to be a playable character, but he ended up as an Assist Trophy instead.

Looking back now, it’s hard to think that the Black Knight would relevant enough to be a playable character. He was one of the main antagonists in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, games that featured Ike as the main protagonist. Indeed, these games were released back in 2005 and 2007.

Regardless, the Black Knight mod portrays the character to be, unsurprisingly, a tank. To say that he’s slow would be a massive understatement. However, he also boasts a ton of power with his attacks. He even features the “Tough Guy” mechanic that only Bowser and Kazuya normally has access to.

At first, the Beefy Smash Doods seem convinced that the Black Knight might be a little too weak considering the flaws with his mobility. Despite this, the character’s strengths ended up holding up well enough in matches against the original cast.

Check it all out below:

A statistical way to see your problematic matchups

The Fighting Game Community is obsessed with tier lists, so much so that the developers and community themselves look at these lists to help decide which balance changes are implemented or asked for in Street Fighter 6.

We’ve compiled the stats for BST|Daigo Umehara using Akuma in Street Fighter 6. Below, you’ll find how well he plays against each of the game’s characters, giving us his match up tier list, based on his win rates in sets.

There were close to four times the matches played in Phase 6 over the recently started Phase 7, which began in February 2025. Note that the data gathered for Daigo Umehara was collected a few weeks ago.

The characters in both lists are all sorted by Daigo’s best (top) to worst (bottom) match ups. E.g. in the Phase 6 list, Guile is a better matchup for Daigo than A.K.I.

Match up winning percentages were rounded up or down, accordingly.

After launching Street Fighter 6, open the Menu and go to your Profile.

On the stats page (default page that opens), use the Z and C keys to navigate the sub menu on PC.

From there, navigate to the Matches Per Character sub-menu and you can look through your stats to see your winning percentages in all of the match ups and every phase of the game.

Here’s an example of how that page looks.

Once you’ve identified your problematic match ups, it’s likely a good idea to hit the lab and work on each one of them so that you can improve your win rates in the future.

With Heat System activated, grounded players can recovery about 30% of inflicted damage in the next season

Three of the top people responsible for Tekken 8 recently sat down with some Evo staff members to discuss how the game will look in Season 2, which will put more of a focus back on defensive play.

The game’s Heat system has dialed up the offense, and the developers are looking to achieve a better balance going forward with Tekken 8, between offense and defense in Season 2.

“We aimed to make a fun battle system where it would be more offensive-focused, where Tekken up until this point has been more defensive,” said Kohei ‘Nakatsu’ Ikeda, the director of Tekken 8.

“In regards to making it feel fresh, I think it’s going well, but on one hand, because offensive play is strong, it feels the game nature leans a little too much towards offense,” said Ikeda.

“On that part, I feel there’s still much to be worked on,” he said.

“I gather there are a lot of things to address going into Season 2,” stated Ikeda “we don’t really intend on changing the aggressive nature of the game, where it’s fun to be the aggressor.

“But on the other hand in Season 1, because it was constraining for defensive players, and the Heat System made it easy to make matches pretty one-sided, in terms of strategy, I feel we weren’t able to balance the defensive aspects that well,” said Tekken 8’s director.

“That’s why for Season 2, we’d like to focus on defense in terms of the lateral aspects of a 3D fighting game, and the ease of defending when being attacked,” Ikeda said.

“The Heat System is the starting point and factor in which your attacks can really get explosive, theories get created on how a player or character should win to a certain degree,” he said.

“In order to expand upon this in Season 2, we’re doing a particular thing. When you’re in a Heat state and taking a lot of damage on the ground, we’re adding the ability to recover about 30% health from the actual damage inflicted,” Ikeda noted.

“In doing so, you now have the strategy of fighting while preserving your Heat Gauge,” he added.

“Up until now, the correct action when you activated Heat was either to Heat Smash, or rush down your opponent utilizing the unique individual power up properties of Heat,” Ikeda mentioned.

“By preserving Heat, strategies are expanded upon, allowing you to fight in more advantageous ways in neutral, compared to when not using Heat,” said Tekken 8’s director.

All of this, and quite a bit more is covered in this new video from the Evo staff, make sure you check it all out below.

You can also scope out the most recent patch notes for Tekken 8, and look over Anna Williams’ reveal information, which will coincide with the release of Season 2 of Tekken 8 on March 31, 2025.

Video from EvoFGC.

All of these crossovers could have interesting implications on the stories in Street Fighter, Tekken and Fatal Fury going forward

While crossover games and guest characters have been a thing in fighting games for a long time, these instances often take place in a “What If” scenario that didn’t actually happen according to a fighting game’s canon, but that has started to change in recent times.

Street Fighter, Tekken and Fatal Fury have all brought in characters from other storied fighting game franchises — and made some of these recent appearances part of the official story canon.

Given how lackluster a number of fighting game stories are, you’d assume these appearances would be as cookie cutter and bare bones as possible, having little to no impact on the overall plot.

However, in recent times the developers of Tekken and Street Fighter have done a solid job — in respect to the fighting game genre — of honoring and replicating these characters’ stories and attributes in the other games they appear in.

For example, in Tekken 7 it’s explained that Kazumi saves Akuma’s life at some point, and in return for doing so, she asks him to hunt down and kill both Heihachi and Kazuya.

While Kazuya and Akuma merely fight, the Satsui No Hado user actually manages to Raging Demon Heihachi, but like pretty much everyone else, Heihachi survives the process.

Geese Howard also appears as a playable guest character in Tekken 7, tying the Bandai Namco franchise into SNK’s Fatal Fury, although you may wonder how Geese is still alive after dying in 1995 release of Real Bout Fatal Fury. Perhaps he had more scrolls in his possession.

While these characters may share a universe now, the rules that govern their inclusions and abilities often remain a mystery.

Moving onto Street Fighter 6, Terry Bogard remarks that it has been about 20 years since he last saw Ken, and that he’s fought Ryu a number of times previously before.

So while it’s the first time Terry was playable in a mainline Street Fighter game, he’s known these two fighters for a good amount of time.

Throughout Terry’s World Tour dialogue in Street Fighter 6, he openly talks about his past story lines in the Fatal Fury games, from defeating Geese Howard to adopting Rock Howard.

What I’m getting at here is that these are not randomly spawned instances of known characters who have haphazardly been put into a new fighting game franchise — but are generally well thought out and researched inclusions of fighters from other games entering the picture.

While it’s unknown at this time exactly how Street Fighter’s Ken and Chun-Li will be portrayed in the new Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves game, given Capcom and SNK’s very strong relationship in recent years, and how talented and thorough the developers are making this new game, it should match the other major guest appearances we’ve seen not that long ago.

It’s a pretty awesome time to be a fan of fighting games, as for the first time ever, Street Fighter, Tekken and Fatal Fury all share the same universe, which makes these official crossovers possible in mainline games.

The question becomes if we’ll ever see NetherRealm Studios enter the picture, as they’re the developers of a franchise that many fans would like to see included in the mix, Mortal Kombat.

After all, it was back in 2019 that we learned about a proposal of putting a Street Fighter character in Mortal Kombat, but that it was rejected.

Reportedly there were many people at Capcom that felt Mortal Kombat wasn’t a good fit for their characters. Perhaps this proposal may be revisited again in the future considering recent developments.

Justin Wong recently posted that he attended the Capcom exhibit in Osaka, Japan. As such, he shared a number of interesting photos that he took of the exhibit.

Some of these photos depict what is labeled to be Capcom’s “Flagship Series Family Tree.” Directly under this label, we can see a timeline consisting of Monster Hunter games. Off to the side, we can barely see some of the Resident Evil (known as “Biohazard” in Japan) timeline.

In recent years, the Monster Hunter and Resident Evil series have become Capcom’s most successful franchises. It would make sense why they’re the first games to be featured in this way.

A little further, we then get to see the Street Fighter series timeline. Of course, Justin Wong made sure to snap a shot of this considering his own history as a fighting game competitor.

Considering how Final Fight was originally made to be a sequel to the original Street Fighter, it makes sense why Final Fight is part of the Street Fighter universe.

Over the years, we’ve seen a number of characters and influences from the Final Fight franchise present in games like Street Fighter Alpha 2, Street Fighter Alpha 3, Street Fighter 3, Street Fighter 4, Street Fighter 5, and Street Fighter 6. Indeed, the Final Fight franchise has become intertwined with the Street Fighter universe.

We can also observe a branch off to the Rival Schools series, which consists of Rival Schools: United by Fate, Nekketsu Seisyun Nikki 2, and Project Justice. Akira Kazama would make history by being the first Rival Schools character to be playable in the Street Fighter series starting with Street Fighter 5.

However, there’s one more branch off the Street Fighter series that caught our attention. From this, we can see that Capcom seemingly considers the Darkstalkers series as being part of the Street Fighter timeline.

The three games that are part of this branch are Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors, Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge, and Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge (called Vampire: The Night Warriors, Vampire Hunter: Darkstalkers’ Revenge, and Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire in Japan respectively).

As of right now, there’s never been a Darkstalkers rep playable in a mainline Street Fighter game. These days, the Darkstalkers characters are more likely to appear in crossovers than their own series.

Of course, there were a number of characters that had access to Darkstalkers costumes in Street Fighter 5, implying the existing connection but never outright confirming it.

At this point, Capcom has shown a willingness to put guest characters in the mainline Street Fighter series when they added Fatal Fury’s Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui to Street Fighter 6. Could we potentially see a reality where a Darkstalkers character like Morrigan also joins the roster? It’s crazy to think that something like that could happen, but it’s starting to seem like a plausible possibility.

Check it all out below:

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— Justin Wong (@JWonggg) March 21, 2025