Fancy a kick in the balls?

Sega owns the rights to the Guilty Gear franchise now

So yeah, I guess we know why they made BlazBlue and Battle Fantasia now. Considering that ArcSys’ direct involvement ended with #Reload, it’s amazing that Accent Core turned out the way it did. Then again, as long as ASW gets entrusted with any development of future Guilty Gear games I’m not too worried.

Another nice tidbit from the article that I liked:

The company\’s designer for its new hi-res 2D fighting title BlazBlue, Toshimichi Mori, intriguingly discusses his views of Capcom\’s Street Fighter IV and its accessibility in the interview:
"I\’m not trying to pick a fight with Capcom or anything, but with Street Fighter IV, they made a big deal about how the game was designed to be accessible to people new to the genre.
I remember when I first read that in an interview, I was like, "What? How can they say that?!" I thought maybe I was seeing things. I think they need to take a second look at the list of moves for that game before they make a claim like that.
Sure, people like us who work with games, or fans of fighting games can do a hadouken or a shoryuken without thinking much about it, but for somebody just getting started? Those moves are pretty tough! You can\’t expect new players to just whip those moves out every time.
To fill your game with moves like that and then emphasize how simple it was for beginners to pick up seemed irresponsible to me. Street Fighter IV is not a game geared toward people who\’ve never played fighters before. If they were really interested in making a beginner-friendly game, they should\’ve made included a few impressive moves a player could do with the press of a button."

Mori is pretty much saying the obvious – fighting games that use Street Fighter II as a template cannot get any more accessible than that game ever was (which is something I’ve mentioned before). If you make high-level play more accessible then you’re just dumbing the game down. To make it more accessible to newbies you pretty much have to convert the game to maybe Jump Ultimate Stars or Smash Bros type controls.

Note: before anyone crucifies me for hating on SF4 – I don’t think that the game has necessarily been ‘dumbed down’ – There’s no way that complete neophytes to fighting games are going to be able to pull off stuff like focus cancel combos or hadouken traps on the day they buy the game. And heck, I’m pretty sure at this point that I’m going to be buying the game for my PS3 and/or my PC (along with that potentially awesome Sanwa stick that MadCatz is releasing). My point here is that Yoshinori Ono claimed that SF4 was designed to be accessible to newbies, and beyond superficial appearances (lol SF2 etc) it clearly isn’t (and can’t be).