Destiny, New Guys, and Voice Actors! ASB League Final Highlights

The eternal struggle of a man and his surrogate brother/new body’s great great grandson. ASB League’s final match comes down to one of the most iconic struggles in JoJo, and there’s lots of fists and a few knives. AI Dio really doesn’t know how to handle his time stop power. Jotaro starts off all right, but he goes for the heavy ORAORA for a while. It does him all right here and there, but Dio’s pretty good for getting inside the wall of fists, and that’s why he’s the King of JoJo. I’m still hoping for a crowning ceremony.

Just for fun, lets get a few hands on demos going. Iggy and Fugo were announced not even that long ago, so a PV and a demo were in order. This isn’t so much a match as a messing around with the two, but you get to see some of the characters’ moves. To compensate for Iggy’s height, it looks like he just has a hitbox bigger than his body. Fugo’s landing hits in the air above Iggy’s head, but that seems reasonable so you don’t have to crouch during the whole match against him. The Fool makes it a little more obvious, so it may be that the hitbox is based on Iggy with The Fool out since you’re likely to fight with it on anyway.

I finally manage to not guess traps on a character, and he uses them. Fugo gets the ability to put down clouds of his virus. Due to the low quality of the video and that it happens at the very end, I can’t really tell the kind of damage it does. It looks like it turns your health bar purple, and that happened to Fugo and Iggy. Not hurting yourself with that could be an issue.

Finally, let’s have a full on exhibition. Two matches for fun between voice actors, let’s say. These two matches are played by the character’s voice actors, Kazuyuki Okitsu (Johnathan) vs. Wataru Hotano (Josuke), and Hermes vs. Mitsuaki Madono (JoJolion Josuke.) Only Hermes is played by someone else being played by Kendo Kobayashi.

I love seeing these player matches. It’s almost like the game runs at a higher speed when there’s real people playing it. Johnathan vs. Josuke is especially fun. The combos the two pull of, the fluidity of how the combat moves. The combos the pull into their HHA are really satisfying. It’s cool.

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 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…

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.)

All Star Battle League Streaming Channel Now Open

The voting window is closed! All followers for the characters entered into the ASB League are now tallied, and the showcase of the COM fights will begin in two days. So who ended up winning?

I don’t know how I ever doubted him. DIO is the most popular character as is the way of things. He’s followed pretty closely by Johnathan, though, which I legitimately didn’t expect. Josuke was a good lock on third. It was a struggle between the top 5, but the final rankings put Bruno a few hundred behind Josuke and Johnny a few hundred behind him. Then there’s a huge drop to Caeser at sixth before the rankings start to become close again.

The importance of the ranking thing, other than it being a big popularity contest, is the tournament brackets. The easiest way I can think to describe it is like the World Martial Arts Tournament in Dragon Ball. Every character will be put into blocks of four or five for preliminary matches. Those prelim matches will determine who gains a place in the final brackets. In this case there are 16 slots to fill of two on two matches. The top three characters in the supporter race are seeded and don’t have to fight preliminary matches. That leaves 13 slots left for the remaining 26 characters to fight over. That means that half the remaining characters will be lost at the prelim stage.

But the big point of all of this is showcasing the gameplay. It will be COM matches, but they will be real matches instead of just demo moves against what are probably dummy opponents like what we’ve seen in the PVs. Every character will get showcased through tons of battles on the official UStream channel. Streaming starts on Wednesday the 19th at 9PM JST. For me, that’s 7AM, but UStream tends to keep recordings of streams in the channel’s library, so the fights should hopefully be available even after the matches are over.

Get ready for a brawl, everyone. We’re going to get a real taste of just what it is this game can do!