What DF Happened: Guilty Gear Anime, Fatal Fury Open Beta, Sandalphon

City of the Wolves Open Beta

Let’s start with something that everyone has been waiting for, an announcement for the Open Beta of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. The test will start on 20th of February and last until 24th. During this time, you will have access to 8 playable characters, 3 online modes that include ranked, casual, and room matches, as well as training mode.

The only concern here is how late they are doing this. The game comes out in less than 2 months after the end of Open Beta. If this beta helps to find some issues, that’s not much time in order to test and implement solutions. Given the disastrous launch of KoFXV, it would be sad to see another excellent fighting game fail to reach its full potential due to the lack of polish. For now, we can only hope that the upcoming test offers a reassuring experience and shows that SNK has learned from their mistakes.

Sandalphon in Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising

Big news for all the Granblue enjoyers in the audience. This week, Cygames uploaded a gameplay trailer that shows the next DLC character, Sandalphon. We knew he was coming from the short peak at the second character pass during the last year’s Evo, but it’s nice to see that he’s coming so soon.

Sandalphon is by far one of the most popular characters in the original game, and he took the first place in all four regions back when Cygames was running a playable character poll. If anything, it’s a surprise that it took until the second season of the second Granblue fighting game for him to appear.

There’s not that much actual gameplay in this gameplay trailer, but it seems like the different elements will play a big role in his fighting style. It’s not clear if there is some stance switching involved, of if it’s different, possibly random buffs, but what matters is that he already looks like a fairly interesting character. And he’s coming in just a month on Febuary 26th.

Guilty Gear Anime Trailer

It feels like for eternity now people have been asking for a Guilty Gear anime, and it’s now so close to actually coming out. A few days ago, Arc System Works uploaded a new trailer for Guilty Gear Dual Rulers. It’s only two minutes but gives you a much better of who’s working on it and what it’s going to be about.

The anime is directed by Shigeru Morikawa, who previously worked on anime like Chrono Crusade and Giant Killing, though he also contributed to many other shows in other roles. Meanwhile, animation is handled by Sanzigen, a studio that is primarily known for producing some of the better 3D animation in the industry.

It seems like the story will be entirely focused on Gears and whether or not they can coexist with humans. The new character Unika in particular is shown to have some strong opinions on the topic, stating that she will eradicate all Gears to save humanity. Judging by the trailer, we’re in for a lot of Guilty Gear action scenes, which is quite a promising offer.