Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Street Fighter X Tekken Gets All Purple...




 The TGS reveals for Street Fighter X Tekken keeps on rolling as a new trailer shows off new significant details. There hasn't much information about the storyline other than Street Fighter and Tekken characters beating each other up, but now a twist that is full of purple gets thrown in with the addition of Pandora. As if the game didn't need any sort of comeback mechanic, Pandora mode fills in that void like X-Factor in the MvC3 games. This time your character turns purple and gets a strength boost for a limited time, but it costs all your partner's health in a match. My question is that it should have its own meter like how ultras how used in the Street Fighter IV games, but can be it used once per round or once per match (hopefully the latter). Basically its a slight variant of X-Factor with a color change and different purposes. The instant reaction is oh great, X-Factor now in this game?!?!? However, we'll see whether or not its a big game changer like X-Factor has been in MvC3 when the final game is out.

The trailer also shows off Rolento, Zangief, Lili, and Heihachi in action. Heihachi is not in his Tekken Tag 2 form as he is still rocking the gray hair. Rolento finally makes an appearance in the modern era of fighting games (last seen in Capcom vs. SNK 2), so that's nice to see him back in action on a Street Fighter game. Lili and Zangief are what you expect out of them from their respective games. Scramble mode gets introduced as well allowing the true 2v2 battle to unfold with all four characters on the screen (this is also playable online with four different characters played by four different players).  This is probably not going to be used in tournaments, but I guess its fun to mess around with it seeing what crazy possibilities players come up with. Also finally appearing for the first time is online training mode, which you can enable fight requests like in the SF4 games while messing around in training mode. This is arguably a long time coming for something like that to happen in the genre for a while as hopefully more games implement that.

Street Fighter X Tekken continues to surprise casual and tournament level players with the numerous additions they added in recent months. Hopefully Pandora mode is a worthy comeback mechanic, but as history says, people will find a way to exploit and make others complain how broken it is. Additionally, maybe some pros can get hands-on with it at the show floor and know what the deal is from their view. There's still plenty of character reveals left (half of the roster is there) and some notable Tekken guys that should be in, but not confirmed yet as the game is still on track for a February/March 2012 release.

UPDATE - According to Capcom-Unity, activating Pandora mode does mean a strength boost, but if the time limit ends, you're dead too. Looks like Seth Killian is right about being more of a gamble than a comeback mechanic.

More gameplay footage of the new characters below...