Over the past few months, regular visitors to the site will know that I have grown to really love and appreciate fighting games. Doesn’t mean I’m good at them, but I definitely love to watch high level play and I strive to be better at them. When checking through the New York Comic Con schedule, I was happy to find that Capcom had panels dealing with Street Fighter X Tekken and Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3. So I carved some free time out of my schedule and made it a priority to go to both panels, and what follows below is a recap on what you may have missed.

Before I talk about the specific games though, let me first state that I was very surprised and impressed with just how packed these panels were. I showed up an hour early for each panel and I barely got my ass in to either of them. A lot of gaming sites are talking about the resurgence of Fighting Games and how we have entered a new renaissance era for the genre and if these panels were any indication, the future is very bright indeed.

Street Fighter X Tekken

We got a lot more information on how the battle system works with the game nearing it’s release date of March 6th, 2012. Yup same day as Mass Effect 3. The Capcom crew rehashed some of the previous information about how you can link together very simplistic combos like light punch into medium punch into hard punch. This is the same for pretty much every combatant so for casual players this can be a great bonus. If you add another hard punch to the end of the combo though on that fourth hit of the combo, your current character will launch your opponent into the air, and automatically tag in your partner who can then try and continue the juggle. You could of course do the same four hit combo, but the second launch will never result in a juggle. This is to ensure that you can’t just juggle an opponent indefinitely.

To add a little bit of Street Fighter IV into the game, they have a version of focus attacks. Basically you can do any super move in the game but if you hold the attack button it will “charge” the attack up and if you let it go it will have increased armor and damage. EX special moves also make a return in the game by hit two of the same button. So for a typical fireball being quarter circle forward plus punch, just hit two punches and you get the EX.

In addition to that, if you have one bar of super meter you can now hit forward plus medium punch and kick, and that will break an opponents combo. Having played a crap ton of Mortal Kombat, this is definitely a feature that I was hoping would find it’s way into Street Fighter at some point. Mostly because I am terrible at the game, and at least the entry cost of breaking a combo isn’t so steep. It can most certainly swing the tide of battle and is something that you’ll have to get used to. Same principle though applies to offense, as you can hit medium punch and kick during your own combos and it will allow your partner to come in for just a second and continue your hit string. This can really cause players to get really creative and with so many characters it’s giving an interesting Marvel vs Capcom feel to what is otherwise a standard 1v1 game.

Having more super meter can also lead to more opportunities. Have two bars and you can unleash your super attack. These operate exactly as they did in Street Fighter IV, and both casts get access to them. With three bars though you get a lot of interesting options. You can do quarter circle forward plus medium punch and kick and you can unleash Cross Arts which is a super attack that you and your partner will take part in. It deals a crap ton (technical term) of damage and also is damage that can not be healed. Normally you can regain health when they are not being hit, but this Cross Art attack takes away that ability and will severely punish those that wiff on attacks. On the other hand quarter circle back plus medium punch and kick will do Cross Assault and will be something where you AND your partner both come on screen and fight simultaneously. It looks awesome, rewards those who wait with their meter, and gives you the option to pick which one is best for you at the time.

The last two things that I’ll bring up in this discussion of battle system is Pandora and Gems. Pandora has a little bit of the Tekken Rage feel to it, as when your health gets to 25% or lower, you can active Pandora mode. What this does is, sacrifice the teammate that had the low health and give a boost to your partner. That partner’s super meter will constantly recharge so you can use as much EX and super moves as you want. You have a hard time limit on this though as if you don’t win the match in a certain amount of time, you lose. So if your opponent can stay away long enough, they can wait you out and win so be careful!

The last announcement they made was also the most controversial and that would be the Gem system. You can have 5 slots to fill in with gems. Each gem has a different ability attached to it. Some of them will give you boosts to damage, speed, defense, meter management, assist maneuvers and many more things. These gems can be unlocked in game, by pre-ordering at certain retailers, or by ordering the collector’s edition. In fact if you get the collector’s edition of the game, you get gems that are exclusive to you. If you can’t see why this might be dangerous, then you obviously aren’t reading the words that I am typing.

Capcom is dressing up this Gem system, as a way for players to adopt and create different styles of gameplay. Trust me, as a Guile player, the idea of getting damage / speed boosts seems wonderful. Yet the Gem system also creates this crazy situation where if your opponent has better gems than you, you might be at a huge disadvantage right from the start. It’s very easy to see that the likelihood of Gems being banned in tournament play is very high. Online though, if there is no easy way to see if gems are being used, or being matched up with a player of similar gem level, it’s easy to see that this system may get out of control.

That being said, the game comes out in March so there is time for them to give us more information and hopefully alleviate some of our fears. This is Capcom however, so anything is possible. Anyway, keep checking in and we’ll give you updates on what can be expected from the battle system and anything else that might be of note.

Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3

Whereas the Street Fighter panel was crazy, the Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 panel was by comparison tame. Similar things were announced about the game, but it was all in how you said it. From the very beginning of UMvC3, we have known what new characters were going to go in as that list got leaked out very early. NYCC though gave the developers a chance to show off an entirely new mode that was the first anyone had heard about and it sounds fun.

First up though, the panel gave us trailers and our “first look” at Nova and Phoenix Wright as playable characters. While those videos had been running around on the net a few days before hand, it was still great to see it and to be with a huge crowd that was excited. Phoenix Wright in particular brought down the house and the people in the panel were exceedingly happy with his inclusion to the game. The game developers made a special point of thanking everyone there for their dedication because with Phoenix Wright, they put him in the game because so many fans has asked for him. When asked about when a new, proper Phoenix Wright game was coming out, they said they would go back to Japan and ask. =P

Some minor things that came up was stuff that we mostly already knew. There will be 48 total characters in the game, 50 if you count Jill and Shuma which were DLC characters from the first. In addition, X-Factor has been revamped and won’t be as overpowered as it was before. They didn’t go into specifics about it, but it seemed like it was mostly a numbers change for X-Factor just to make it less ludicrous. It can still change the course of battle, but it won’t have you banging your head against the wall. It can now also be activated in the air to give you some more options on your play style. This makes Akuma players particularly more dangerous and more viable. Finally, they fixed the “DHC Glitch” once and for all. For those of you who didn’t know, essentially there was a way to do a Hyper Combo, and then Delay Hyper Combo into your next character, who would have a long enough pause as to reset the damage scaling. This essentially meant that certain combinations of characters became best buds and would prove to be fatal if you got hit just once. Now though the DHC Glitch is fixed and so you’ll have to better earn that one combo kill.

The big new announcement during the panel was the new Heroes & Heralds Mode. This is a mode that you can play offline or on, and it essentially determines whether your group of three combatants is fighting to save the earth or destroy it. In this mode, you unlock and gain ability cards by playing and winning. These cards change the basic battle system in new and odd ways. They give you the ability to have three of one character, go invisible, parry attacks, chain and cancel super moves, get projectile invincibility, armor on your assists, and tons of other combinations of things. They all affect different characters in different ways, and the development team said there was over 1 million different combinations that could take place.

Wait a minute? Ability Cards? This sounds just like the Gems?! Why are you excited about this and not the other way around. Mostly because this Heroes and Heralds Mode is a completely separate mode onto itself. It is not the default way to play the game. The online mode also has the ability to support Clans, so you can join up with a group of friends, decide to play the good guys or the bad guys, and fight against other clans. Those results will then help determine if the earth is close to being saved, or to being destroyed. Finally, and this may be the most important part, this will be a free batch of Downloadable Content after the game’s release in November. So while Capcom announced very similar things with both of it’s upcoming fighting games, the way it delivered the Marvel vs Capcom news was way better overall.

In the coming weeks and months I will keep you up to date on what is happening with these games, and when you can expect another g33k Fight Club night to take place for us all to practice. If you have any further questions though about what happened in the panels, please leave a comment below and I’ll answer them as quickly as possible!