The Fight Rages On As PQube Brings BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle To The EU This Summer

Shame half the roster is locked behind a tall paywall.. don't think I'll bite.

Chompity chomp chomp.

I've never played BlazBlue. I'm getting back into fighting games. Currently playing King of Fighters '98. Already keeping an eye on Blade Strangers, Street Fighter Collection and SNK Heroines. I'll add this one to the list. Most likely not buying all of them, though.

Great news... another perfect series for the Switch. Hopefully gets new ones moving forward

Cant wait for this one

To Europe or just to the EU?

Also the Facebook tagline for this is very sloppy. Currently reads 'The new Blazblue is Switch is coming to the EU...'

Wait, Chie is in this?
/adds to the growing list of carts to buy.

Want But if they do keep stuff behind a paywall will wait till it's half price. Just when are companies gonna learn these practises are not acceptable. It killed the likes of SFV and Destiny 2. A good example of how to do this kind of thing is Injustice, a few secret characters every few month. Although even that games season pass is overpriced, but at least it would seem, though I could be mistaken, the dlc character were created after the game came out.(Gotta admit, Turtles, genius).

This interests me but only because of the Persona 4 Arena characters, so I'll pass.

...the fact that most if not all characters are reused should lower the games price anyway. Asking someone to buy a recycled game and then spend extra on DLC characters which aren't new is ridiculous.

Dammit, DLC ruins yet another promising game. I had my eye on this until I heard about the paywall characters.

This was high on my list of upcoming games as the chance to play as RWBY characters is a dream come true but not heard about characters locked behind dlc. What characters do you have to buy?

Arc System Works already lost my respect so my interest for this game is all but shattered now. I may still pick it up if an Extended Edition version exist but that would be it. No way am I paying $80 for this half baked game.

@Late you should definitely look also into Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 given the chance, if you have a PS4 that is. That being the case BlazBlue: Central Fiction is currently available via Base.com for £12.99 - hell of a deal!

@Pazuzu666 Thank you for the tip. I don't have a PS4, though. I have to limit the amount of money I spend on games somehow.

Can't wait.

If the devs stay true to their promise of the game having a cheaper retail price to make up for half the game being DLC I might consider it, even though I really don't like the decision of making the game that way.

Both Blazblue and the Persona fighting game were very solid fighting games so gameplay wise I expect the game to deliver at least.

@Late ahh, ok.

Cool! Love me some fighting games. Blazblue used to kick my butt at the arcades.

I wonder if more accessible control schemes are paving the way for single JC support in this version's multiplayer as well. The game is definitely on my wishlist and I'm not as spoiled as to view a whole damn 20 characters as "half the roster". Even SSB4 hasn't spoiled me that much yet. XD

Others are welcome to wait for a definitive edition several years down the road. Vote with your wallets, folks, not with what your inner fanships and consumer greed make you say and write in public. More effect, more dignity.

@XenoShaun @Lumine @Dualmask

The game is being sold for $10 less, and the entire season pass is only $19.99

So the full game plus all DLC is only $9.99 more than a base game normally costs.

And, the first DLC pack (3 characters) is free after launch.

So, maybe it's not perfect, but I hardly see that as ruining the game or being outrageous or anything. Compare $70 for full game and all DLC to any other fighter, like SF with multiple $30 passes that only give 6 characters each (most of which have been in past games too). $70 for game + 20 characters vs paying $120 for game + 12 characters.

I hope someday Switch will get a mainline BlazBlue entry, as it’s a series that intrigues me a lot but I’ve yet to try it. I’d be down with a port of any BB game, to be honest, though I’d like it to be CentralFiction.

@XenoShaun 20 characters is a really solid base roster though, more than you get in a lot of games

I would've gotten it if it was Guilty Gear instead of rwby

I don't know if I'll bite on this one or Gal Fighters. I'm not huge into fighting games so just one of them will do it for me. They both look beautiful though.

@Mogster They Actually mean the continent of Europe, unfortunately its also historically shortened to EU usually - this only becomes relevant as of 2019/2020 anyway.

Guessing we'll have to change the acronym to CE instead.

Pre-ordered a month ago, Definitely down for any new 2D fighters.

I have never been a fan of this series. It looks nice and all but it has never been the type of game I wanted to play often.

"...publishing the title in the UK and Europe..."

Umm... The UK is in Europe...

Anyway, good to hear that Europe isn't being left out for no reason.

@Sakura7 What do you think about the way "Dead or Alive 5" went with a free-to-play model on Steam? You get the basic modes and online play with 4 major characters for free, but it costs $20 to get the story mode and $4 for each additional playable character a la carte. I think it's an interesting and reasonable way to go. Just don't go wasting your money on those overpriced costume packs.

I'm still interested in this despite the excessive DLC. Besides, it shouldn't cost that much for me to just get the extra RWBY characters and ignore the rest of the DLC.

@clvr There's a BlazBlue game on 3DS.

I'm more interested in SNK Heroines and Blade Strangers, but i think i'll get this one sooner or later too.

@BulbasaurusRex I know, but it’s not on the EU eShop and I can’t find it anywhere physically (at least at a decent price) 😕

I enjoyed BlazBlue on the Vita, but these days I rarely buy fighting games until they release the complete version with all the DLC characters included.

@BulbasaurusRex : I think it's obscene. All it has done is make DoA5 even more expensive. I was looking into buying the "full" version outright but found the F2P version instead and was instantly put off.

It was bad enough that the DLC for the base game was already ridiculously expensive as well. This model would not have bothered me so much if the base game was still available in full, though I would have preferred a slightly more expensive bundle that throws in all of the DLC content as well.

I would still buy the game in a heartbeat if it came to Switch, but I won't indulge Kecmo Toei's monstrously expensive costume DLC (have you seen how expensive the costume DLC for A.O.T 2 is?!).

@BulbasaurusRex DOA5 not the best examle i n my opinion. While the general idea is right they went WAY overboard on the amount of DLC which is overpriced. Don't know about Steam but the PS4 DOA5 dlc section is a mess.

For people who are unaware, the base price of the game is $50, less than the standard of $60, but 1/2 of the cast is DLC at an additional $20. So technically, it's kind of like if you purchased a normal game at $60, and 1/2 of the cast is an additional $10. Not great, but not as bad as the worse case scenario of the base game being $60 and 1/2 of the cast being an additional $20 - $40. If you want to be completely honest about it, AAA fighting games where you get everything for $60 simply don't exist anymore. That's not in defense of BBCTAG, it's just the reality of the fighting game market. Usually, it's more palatable if the extra characters were at least developed after the game has been sent to printing, but more often than not that's just a less than elaborate ruse in the first place, as it's simply cheaper to have everything developed at the same time and have some things sectioned off as DLC to be released at a later date, because people hate the idea of DLC being content that was cut off of the main development to be sold separately.

The first set of DLC characters are free (Platinum, Orie, and Kanji) for the first 2 weeks after launch, however buying each DLC pack separately even with the first set free will cost more than just buying all the DLC in a bundle.

Now, the other complaint about this game basically being a $70 game, is that it's mostly reused assets, which is true, however, most Blazblue games also share much of their assets (and have more DLC or extra versions on top of that), and still deliver enough new content to be worth the money, at least to me, but I really like the Blazblue characters and the visual novel aspect of the game, as Blazblue has been called the "visual novel that comes with a fighting game", so to me what decides if it's worth the value is the visual novel content.

@sillygostly @Sakura7 Well, I was thinking it wasn't that bad as long as you weren't stupid enough to buy any of the costume packs, but then I noticed you can just buy the story mode and all the playable characters as a package for $40, which is less than a third of the price of buying them all separately. Okay, yeah, that model completely sucks when the package deal is completely superior in every way. In that case, the free version should just be treated as a run of the mill demo.

However, such an a la carte system would be promising if you could actually save a significant amount of money by just not choosing to buy your least favorite characters, but at these prices you can't even get the story mode and even a third of the full roster for a cheaper price than the package deal! Throw in those ridiculous costume packages...are we sure this is the same company who handed out the DLC costumes for free in "Dead or Alive: Dimensions"?

@Rubbercookie The problem arises if one wants to play the game online, especially competitively – even if your main is in the base roster, you still need to learn how to fight against all characters, DLC ones included. So you still need to buy them for practice.

I'm not enough of a fighter fan to appreciate BlazBlu outside of the artwork, but I know several people that will be very happy about this.

Ah BlazBlue. Still making us pay for reused assets.

@SmaggTheSmug a good solution would be to unlock every character in training mode - not that I expect that to be the case here