And we’re off on a long series of matches. They decided to start everything off with an exhibition between the top 4 characters, 1st vs. 2nd and 3rd vs. 4th. That’s why Johnathan, Dio, and Josuke are fighting despite them being automatically placed into the final 16 because they got so many votes.
Anyway, we’re getting our first look at the gameplay. These are CPU only matches, so the balance and mechanic functionality may change when human players start getting control.
Bruno vs. Josuke was pretty nice. Good exchanges leading to a pretty even match. Bruno’s dash looks like it’ll be hard to use since if your opponent doesn’t jump or recover from an attack that goes over you, they’re in a pretty good position to punish the move. I’m glad that we got to see the stands going at each other. From the looks of it, it seems to last a set time, and whoever has the advantage at the end of that gets the free hit. Bruno’s get up at the end of the match he’s losing did happen, though it happened so fast I almost didn’t notice it at first. It doesn’t look as troubling as I feared, but the amount he gets back is still a little more than I think would be ideal.
Johnathan vs. Dio is a little more telling. Johnathan at the end managed to get a small rally, but it looked like, without a stand, he was getting pretty stomped. Dio was able to keep him at bay pretty well by just attacking with The World. It also didn’t look like it was particularly difficult to land the Road Roller skill, though that could be due to CPU not having to do difficult button inputs. I’m hoping that it’s a fluke and that stand user vs. non-stand user won’t typically create that problem. It doesn’t affect the majority of characters, but it would be kinda lame.
This is just the first match. They haven’t announced when the next one will be, so keep an eye on the UStream channel for the most up to date matches and Nico, YouTube, and here for the match recordings.
Edit:
There’s also a short video of Okuyasu and Rohan demoing together that was part of an ASB livestream. I think it speak for itself.
