ASB League Group G Full Fights

Normally Nico, but if someone’s willing to upload to YouTube, who am I to complain? The video’s even nice enough to get straight to the fight.

Group G is made up of all our new characters, PB Dio, Pucci, Kawajiri, and Valentine, and the character brought back in by popularity poll, none other than Noriaki “Cherry Roller” Kakyoin. If anyone was going to be voted back in, I can’t really be surprised at Kakyoin. The downside is that means we are in Projectile City. Only Dio doesn’t have a regular projectile. He does have Space Ripper Stingy Eyes, but that’s only a super. It does seem to be his way of dealing with projectile characters, but only so he can hold them long enough to get into their guard. A lot of what you’ll see in these fights are air ball bombs, pistols, emeralds, and whatever it is that Pucci’s throwing. It’s unfortunate because, as you’ll see, all the characters also do decently without having to resort to that. I was almost surprised at how well Kakyoin did in short range, but he does all right. They just won’t get close except for Dio.

There are lots of little quirks to discuss. Pucci first. He does start fights counting prime numbers and always seems to start at 41. His removal of the stand disc does cause the same twitching that Rohan and Heaven’s Door cause. He does seem to be geared towards close range with a small projectile just to keep his mid-range options open. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see C-Moon or Stairway in these fights, so I’m not sure how they’ll play. It may be that setting them up is hard, but I suspect that the characters wanting to rely on projectiles probably made it less likely.

Valentine next. Again, he’s very reliant on his pistol in these fights, but his main trick is voiding attacks. His primary ultra in this fight is a counter, and he can make himself intangible by hiding in the flag, which also allows him to move around to get out of being hit. It’s an interesting idea, and I expected warping from him. He always seems to introduce himself with his stand’s full name, but he does call it with D4C.

I want to talk about Kawajiri, but he’s pretty much all about the Stray Cat bombs. He does have a counter ultra, which I expect is meant to deal with anyone who gets inside his shield of bombs, but that’s pretty much it outside a token rapid punch. So let’s move onto Dio. He doesn’t have any shots outside Space Ripper Stingy Eyes, so he’s geared towards close range fighting almost entirely. His ultra where he freezes you is actually blockable despite looking like a grab. Other than that, we mostly see him throwing out some normal combos. As this game is a descendent of Heritage for the Future, combos don’t seem to get too long when you’re doing normal hits, but he does get in some good ones.

That’s it for the preliminaries of ASB League. We now have the real tournament in front of us. The channel only lists the date of the game’s release, so we may be waiting until then to see it. Those of us on this side may be using that to tide over our appetites before we get the full game.

ASB League Groups E and F Full Fights

I didn’t pick up on it before, like most of the time with these, but now I know why Hermes seems less geared towards overuse of her stand. It’s not because she’s not going hog wild with it. It’s because unlike a lot of the other stands that have ORAORA that the user fires off, KISS attacks to enhance what Hermes is doing. If she slide kicks, which you’ll see a lot, KISS will too. If she punches, it will and maybe follow up with a short combo. I actually think that works and looks better in general.

I’m a little busy today, so I can’t come in with my full “pretend I know what fighting games are” analysis at the moment, but I wanted to post the video since that’s the important part.

ASB League Groups E and F Highlights Reel

And with this, the tournament is closed. All the results are in and the real tournament can begin unless there’s going to be some last minute entries. I remember hearing something about that.

Group E

Poor Joseph. If this was Part 3 you, you might stand a chance since you’d have Hermit Purple. Unfortunately, stand users are supreme unless you have enough projectiles and your machine gun is a super. And you have to fight freaking Narancia this time. Narancia was one of the characters I was concerned about because of the Part 5 game. In that, Aerosmith was ridiculous because it could stop everyone, except Ghiaccio, in their tracks by flying in a circle and firing bullets. I was worried that Narancia was going to be exactly like that, an impenetrable wall of bombs and bullets.

But it’s not all lost. This group does buck one of the trends.

No one sweeps this time! Everyone suffers at least one loss, and there’s a distinct upset. I mean, other than how upset I am that, even with no sweep, Joseph got completely shut out, or that I’m upset that I was right about Narancia being the harbinger of RC Airplane Death. It’s that Hermes manages to sneak a win against Narancia of all people, being the one blemish on his record.

To that end, Hermes is now one of my favorite picks. Not because she beat Narancia specifically, but because her fighting is geared towards more aggressive and upfront fighting. More specifically, she’s a stand user that doesn’t seem to fight mostly by doing stand shoot and inching closer to do more stand shoots. She even has a nice counter move. It’s refreshing.

JoJolion Josuke is the other exception. He has some nice combos, though he is a little overly reliant on his break dance spin. There are some times where he goes for the ORAORA, notably in his fight with Akira, but he does use some nice combinations of moves that make him look pretty good. We get to see plenty of his ultra where he steals your site, which doesn’t makes as fun use of the game mechanics as I thought, but blanking the screen after that move is used would be more annoying than anything.

Narancia and JoJolion Josuke move on to the final 16.

Group F

I didn’t get the big group shot for this one, so I went with the picture of what ends up being probably the worst fight since Johnny and Hol Horse. This is not a game for projectile users that aren’t Caeser, so most of their fight is them standing on opposite sides of the map taking potshots at each other. I do think that has to do with the AI, for what it’s worth.

The group is Cars, Kakyoin, Mista, Okuyasu, and Diavolo. It’s another grouping of stand users with one non-stand user. I expected the Group E result again since Cars isn’t Caeser, but this is the group for bucking trends even more.

Not only are there no sweeps, there are no shut outs either. Everyone manages to win at least one fight. This is because projectiles are the losers paths and everyone is able to stomp all over Mista except for Kakyoin. Like I said, they spend most of the match taking easy potshots at each other. Kakyoin was able to do ok in his other matches because he can fight at long to mid range, but he let Mista fight at long range the whole time. That’s why he was able to pull out a win and not be this group’s shut out.

Also, Cars kicks some ass without ever going Ultimate Lifeform and defying my expectations by being a finalist with no projectiles or stand. He and Diavolo are on top because they managed to fight the same way of getting in close. Only Kakyoin was able to keep Cars reasonably at bay. Okuyasu sort of fought the same way, but he wasn’t really able to pull anything off because he seemed to keep trying a charge move, like Jotaro and Star Finger, but kept getting interrupted, like Jotaro and Star Finger. He also seems a bit slower than Cars and Diavolo, and that doesn’t help.

Diavolo and Cars move on to the final 16. I’m not sure when it is they’ll be broadcasting the fights from them, but it’s 15 fights in total. We’ll also get to see the return of our top popular competitors Johnathan, DIO, and Josuke. Keep an eye on the UStream.

(Thanks to JoJo F2C for posting. You can also watch the vidoes there if you prefer it to Polsy or if the Polsy links go down.)

ASB League Groups C and D Full Fights

Watching the full fights for this one is making me think and notice a few more things. I didn’t realize until this time that the stage hazard has a zone on the floor where you have to stand to make it start. It takes a little bit of being there too. That’s good because it means that if you’re careful enough, you can probably go the whole match without triggering them. I’m still hoping for an option to just turn them off, but this is something.

I’m also really hoping for an option where you can turn the damage up or the health down and also to make the special gauges rise slower. I’m sure that there will be, I remember it being in other fighting games I’ve played, but these matches are a little long and dry. I think the real problem is that stand characters are overly stand reliant, Echoes looks like an impassable wall and Rohan can pull off his supers way the hell too easily, and I’m not sure if that’s an aspect of the AI players or if the game is geared towards that. I’d like to see if human players would rely on the same tactics of throwing out stand attacks over and over in the hopes that the opponent will fall into them. The worst offender of that is the fight between Jolyne and Koichi that ends in a time up. By contrast, Will and Wham’s fight is more interesting overall because they have to be in each other’s faces, times where Will decides to do ripper cutter spam not withstanding.

To that end, I think this game would benefit if they took further cues from the Capcom JoJo’s game and brought back the stand meter and stand breaks. I’m not saying it has to go full on P4 Arena where stands are only used for special attacks and can’t just generally be out, but cutting down on how much the characters can use them might help bring the fighters closer together instead of that back and forth stand shoot stuff.

Anyway, now you can actually see why Giorno lost his match with Gyro. It looks like a bad move on the AI’s part because he jumped back and did the tree thing instead of just hitting him. The more I watch these, the more I wish we were watching human players play. Maybe after this tournament thing is all over.

The final groups, E and F, will stream next week on Wednesday.

ASB League Groups C and D Highlights Reel

The Nico recording highlights are up, and I’m starting to sense a trend in these fights.

Group C

Group C was another grouping of stand vs. non-stand. Rohan was  of particular interest to me because when this game was being announced, Rohan was someone I was sure wouldn’t make it into the roster. Heaven’s Door is cool and all, but it didn’t seem like it would be suited to a fighting game.

As before, if you’re waiting for the full stream to see who won, be aware I’m posting the results table below the link to the fight.

Turns out I was totally wrong because Rohan is the taker of today’s first blowout victory. His ability to seal away parts of or all of your attack just destroyed the opposition. Part of that is probably that the CPU doesn’t take into account that they can’t do any moves, so after getting hit with the seal, they’d just sit there twitching while Rohan hits them in the face. That let him get strong rallies where he might have otherwise lost.

Kira vs. Wham was a pretty nice fight because the technique is very key. Kira is suited to keeping his enemies away and picking at them with bombs where Wham is a close range brawler. Once Kira was able to get him away and use Sheer Heart Attack to deal with Wham rushing towards him, he had a better command of the fight, but when Wham was in his guard, there wasn’t much he could do.

Will was fine. His moves are pretty good, and I like that he has a good agility. It just didn’t serve him too well in this fight. Rohan and Kira move on to the Top 16.

Group D

Stand users abound and also a horse, which I think is a fair balance. Based on how well Johnny was able to do with Slow Dancer, seeing Gyro fight on horseback was going to be interesting. Giorno was also important because him having GE Requiem was a cause for concern with how ridiculously powerful it is.

Not that it mattered at all. Not even with that he is invincible while transforming could Giorno get away from being the one shut out in this group. That’s the trend I’m noticing. It’s confusing, though, because his fight with Gyro ends with him getting a counter that knocks Gyro off Valkyrie, but then he loses. I don’t get it.

Koichi is this group’s star. His ability to keep his opponents at a distance is what allowed him to completely control every match. The only person who really had a good beat on him was Jolyne, who is suited to barricading herself while hitting the opponent with her longer than normal range stand shoot. She also combos very well into the baseball move. Koichi’s, I guess, zoning is what makes him able to wreck everyone.

Gyro is somewhat lopsided. He does fantastic while on horseback, completely wrecking Giorno’s shit in the first half of their fight, but the moment he fall off, he doesn’t seem to be able to handle himself as well. This is why Jolyne and Koichi were able to handle him so well, and may be why Giorno lost if he did which I’m not sure about. With their longer range moves, they were able to knock him off very effectively which kept his stronger mode largely held down. Koichi and Jolyne move to the Top 16.

Look forward to the full stream video sometime this weekend and the Groups E and F fights next week.

(Thanks to JoJo F2C for posting this. You can also watch the videos there if you prefer them to Polsy.)

Edit:

As a bonus, remember the punchable Friend Frog?

Yeah…

Crossfire Tusk Emperor! ASB League Groups A and B Full Fights

More than just a highlight reel, here are the full fights for all of ASB League Groups A and B. This is a lot more telling about the progression than the highlights reel, and we get to see more of what the characters can do. Group A is, honestly, a little dry because there are three projectile heavy characters. There are long strings of fights where Johnny will pewpew fingernails, and you’ll hear “Crossfire Hurricane” more often than you’ve ever heard it before. And it’s not even particularly to their advantage. Johnny seems way more dangerous at close range than picking away with Tusk, especially considering how hard Slow Dancer’s bucking hits. That’s good because there was a time I was worried about Johnny being an easy spam character. Bruno put up a good show, depending on how well you take to his last stand revival ability. His AI does seem really keen on using that self damaging super, though.

Fights get a lot more interesting in Group B because the one character who could spam, Caesar, didn’t actually do it too much outside a few moments. And that was to his advantage because he also hits really hard. His Bubble Barrier especially did a bunch of damage to anyone it hit. Despite getting totally shut out, ACDC actually does seem decently strong, maybe just unlucky. He’s got a lot of agility where I was expecting him to be more about turtling and getting you with the veins when you got close. Jotaro’s AI isn’t doing him much service because he only seems to do stand shoot. He occasionally tries Star Finger, but it has some really long build up that always seems to get interrupted. I would have liked to have seen a bit more Polnareff.

Also, I didn’t notice until this time, but there are warning zones for some stage hazards. That’s good in general since it’ll make an idea I’m not particularly fond of anyway much less irritating, and certain specific ones that are hard to judge exactly where they hit like the poison frog rain have become much easier to understand. This isn’t true across the board. I didn’t see ones for the Senator’s Limo or Yoshihiro. I also don’t feel like I saw it for Lucy Steel or Joshuu and Yasuho, but I don’t think we got to see what it is they do, so I’ll hold off on that.

One week down, two to go. Groups C and D air next week on Wednesday.

ASB League Groups A and B Fight Highlights and Results

The first two groups of the League have gone. The results are tallied and we have who’s going to the finals. Until the full video of the fights comes out, some Nico guys have come along with a highlights reel with the results tables. There’s one video per group, and I’ve got them both on Polsy. You can view by clicking the group picture.

Group A

Group A was going to be a very telling fight for me. I’ve been wondering how Hol Horse would hold up being that he has a gun. I figured he’d have a really good chance every time to control the pace by picking away with ranged attacks whenever he needed, and I was a bit worried about that. This is also the super popularity duel with Johnny and Bruno being the two closest to winning exempt status during the voting section.

I’ll post the results below this. If you’re waiting to see the full on fights before knowing the results, you’ll just need to skip past this. Results tables are oriented horizontally, so the rows are the character’s results.

Turns out my concerns were completely backwards. Hol Horse goes down in a complete shut out and Johnny sweeps up three wins to secure his spot in the finals. Johnny isn’t reliant only on his nails, though. There’s a good amount of horse that he uses to win. Bruno squeaks by into the finals because of his special get up at the end of the fight ability. He just manages to edge out Abdul, who was kicking some serious ass but was not able to carry it all the way. Bruno and Johnny claim their popularity status with their own hands and head to the finals.

Also, we get to see our first in game situation finish at the Ghost Alley. This one takes Hol Horse when he’s finished by a super. It was weird because the transition was so sudden, but cool all the same.

Group B

This fight was also going to be telling. I’ve been worried about stands being able to totally shut down any non-stand user offense ever since the exhibition match between Johnathan and Dio. Two stands on two non-stands was a good testing ground for that, especially since Jotaro is here with Star Platinum and The World having basically the same standard stand shoot.

And my worries are mixed. Turns out the second row is the unlucky spot of the day as ACDC also suffers a complete lock out, but Caeser comes in and sweeps up a total victory for his spot in the finals. Jotaro was able to hold ACDC down totally with Star Platinum, but Caeser’s bubbles easily got inside everyone’s guard to allow his wins. Jotaro and Polnareff have a pretty even match with Jotaro pulling out a win in the end. He and Caeser will be in the finals.

(Thanks to JoJo F2C for posting these videos. You can also view them there if you prefer it to Polsy.)

ASB League Preliminary Schedule and Scorecards

All Star Battle League is off and ready to go. Again. Turns out we were taking a break last week as you noticed, but this week starts off the tournament in full. The UStream channel has released the full prelim schedule. The fights will take place over the course of the next three weeks all on Wednesday at 8PM JST, or what I remember being 7ish AM where I live. Groups will be done in pairs, A and B, then C and D, finally E and F. That means that each broadcast will contain 24 fights as each character will fight each other character except themselves. And that means that the Groups E and F broadcast will contain a massive 40 fights since those groups have 5 characters instead of 4.

If you’re interested in keeping track of who it is that’s winning and therefore getting into the full on tournament, the official site now has these handy scorecards. Based on this arrangement, I’m guessing that you advance to the final tournament by winning the most overall matches, adjusted for two people. I’m not totally clear on the progression of the matches. They might just pick one character and have all of their matches, like Abdul has all his fights, then Hol Horse has the rest of his fight and so on until the block is done, but that sounds a little dry.

Anyway, we’ll see tomorrow or during the many replays that will show up. I’ll post NamcoBandai channel’s official one when it goes live, not to say I’d be surprised if there was a Nico video too.

ASB League Episode 1 Full Stream and Tournament Roster

That’s Jotaro delivering the character cards to one of the hosts. It’s so satisfying when he says “ORA” while putting the box on the table.

Somebody on Nico was nice enough to record and upload the full first episode of the ASB League Stream. It’s about 45 minutes, and you can view it through Polsy. If it ends up on YouTube, I’ll embed it then. Unlike what I thought, the stream is a full on show where three guys discuss ASB while also playing the fights. That’s part of why it’s so long even though there’s only the two.

The big reveal is all the preliminary groups have been drawn. That’s what our dear Jotaro is carrying in that box. They were drawn at random into 6 groups, A through F. A through D have four fighters, E and F have five fighters. The top two fighters from each group will be taken into the final brackets except for group F. To fully fill out the 16 slots, the top three will be taken from F. Here’s the full list.

Group A
Bruno Buccelatti, Mohammad Abdul, Hol Horse, Johnny Joestar

Group B
Jotaro Kujo, ACDC, Jean-Pierre Polnareff, Caeser A. Zeppeli

Group C
Yoshikage Kira, Wham, Rohan Kishibe, Will A. Zeppeli

Group D
Gyro Zeppeli, Jolyne Kujo,  Giorno Giovana, Koichi Hirose

Group E
Joseph Joestar, JoJolion Josuke, Hermes Costello, Narancia Ghirga, Akira Otoshi

Group F
Okuyasu Nijimura, Noriaki Kakyoin, Diavolo, Cars, Guido Mista

Each group has them discuss someone in the group’s popularity as well as reading a tweet from one of their cheerers. It’s fun to see all this fandom bandied around.

The exhibitions are over. The next streams are going to be determining who has a chance to be the top character of All Star Battle. Our next fighting group will be Group A, so who are you placing bets on? If Hol Horse and Johnny can use their range effectively, I think they’re pretty suited to moving onto the top 16, and Hol Horse more than Johnny. Then again, Bruno has a move that perfectly sets him up to deal with projectiles which sets him up to do well against everyone else. This’ll be fun.

(Thanks for posting the video to JoJoF2C. You can also watch it there if you prefer it to Polsy.)