ASB League Quarter and Semi Final Full Fights

Much faster. Maybe someone put these up early last week and I just never noticed until yesterday, but we now have a Nico video of the fights from today’s stream. [Edit 1: And also two YouTube videos now] This includes the Quarter and Semi final fights meaning that we are now in the finals. The last match will take place a week from today on ASB Launch Day.

I know the AI matches aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but these are actually not bad matches outside a few of the normal hiccups. No one can pass through Star Platinum’s Impenetrable Wall of Fists, and Kakyoin and Johnny continue to shoot like the CPU can’t decide if it wants them on auto-fire, but the exchanges are a lot more active. Dio manages to put the hamper on Kakyoin by warping to him. He’s up against the green stone wall with Kakyoin both shooting and effectively trapping him, but once he turns it around with his Knife Heat, he rallies like a train. That knife super really hurts.

Jotaro vs. Koichi has some decent exchanges, though it takes more than half of Koichi’s life bar to get there. You will hear more ORAORA than you have ever heard before, but once Koichi manages to get in, there’s some decent back and forth. It helps that watching Star Platinum’s grab where he holds the opponent up by the scruff of their neck and then hurls them into the ground is very satisfying.

Dio vs. Caeser was probably the best one, though. The speed, the fuck your projectiles attitude that Dio has, the time stop. It was nice. Dio stoms all over Caeser, but it’s nice to see their close up exchanges early on in the fight. The time stop is a good showing. They handled very well the way that it works with the opponent moving normally as their being hit but freezing after the damage animation is over. Good detailing.

And thus it comes down to the touch of destiny. The finals will be Jotaro vs. Dio for the crown of the JoJo’s Throne. The final match and the game itself run a week from now. You can also look forward to a video of the whole stream officially from NamcoBandai probably somewhere between Friday and Tuesday. I’ve heard there are some more fun host shenanigans.

[Edit 2]

There’s the shenanigans. The beginning part is them using Johnathan to show off Customize Mode, specifically the placing of sound effects. It looks like we won’t be able to make our own clouds. You have a set list of words/sounds you can pick from and can mess with their dimensions however you like. No covering Johnathan in 「ゴゴゴゴゴ」 it would seem, though that one is probably one you can pick form the list.

There are two bonus player “fights.” I say “fights” like that because these are being used for specific demoing of moves and features. Not that that’s a bad thing. You get to see Johnathan’s alternate outfit as inspired by that one manga cover as well as a few combos from him and Part 1 Dio. The big showing, though, is our first look at calling Stairway and C-Moon. The way it works in gameplay is sort of like King Crimson in the Part 5 game seemingly without a time limit. Pucci and Stairway move at normal speed where the opponent moves at something like half speed. They can presumably fight back, but they are offensively gimped. It’s the reward for the difficulty of pulling it off. On top of being a giant target while doing that floating away, you also have to build the Green Baby meter up to call C-Moon in the first place. Pucci does have a move to build it, and C-Moon does persist between matches, so I see it being used for claiming match point if it doesn’t end up being too cumbersome.

ASB League Tournament First Bracket Episode with Bonus Host Fights

The last video of this was of the fights that make up the bracket that was run last week. This is NamcoBandai’s channel with the full ASB League episode. This episode lacked Kendo Kobayashi’s real body, but he did have a cardboard cutout of himself as a replacement flanked by two members of the Idoling!!! idol group also promoting their most recent album at the end.

If you’re just looking for the matches themselves, they start at around 10:10 or you can find them isolated in a video in a post below this one, but this video, on top of being what looks like better quality, also contains some on the spot real matches. The two guest hosts play one as Jotaro and Johnathan, and then one of the standard hosts and one of the idols play as Jotaro and JoJolion Josuke. Watching two real people play makes a world of difference for the game’s speed. When the AI would play, matches felt sluggish and made the game feel stiff. Watching the two real matches, some turtling aside, felt much faster. It’s still clumsy with a lot of awkward flailing and throwing out attacks with little thought, but it feels better overall. There’s also something very charming about Jotaro getting his Great Heat and one of the girls ORAORA-ing alongside him. Check them out in the last 10 minutes.

Quarter and Semi’s start in a few hours. Who will be the King of JoJo? I hope they come with more of these host matches.

ASB DVD, League Quarter and Semi Final Brackets, JoJo’s Storms the Periodic Table, and Recursive AMVs

Lots of news, mostly ASB, but very scattered. Let’s start at the beginning with the news that isn’t ASB related.

This is in this September’s Issue of Ultra Jump, and it is also the only details we have on it. The Araki-JoJo twitter just mentions JoJonium and this picture with a promise that full on details will come along later. An artbook? An event? We have no idea. It’s just something to spike your curiosity.

News 2: Also in this Ultra Jump is either a packed in or just the announcement of a special ASB DVD containing a billed 100 minutes of footage. There will be:

• Public appearance of the game’s opening movie
• PVs 1 – 5
• ASB League’s Group Lotto drawing episodes as well as the A and B group episode
• Development Staff fight videos

I’m guessing that some people already have this DVD, and that’s why we’ve already gotten videos of the OP.

News 3: Speaking of the OP, how do you feel about it? I’ve seen some shakey comments, noting it being fine but not up to the “four month” development it supposedly took. To that end, someone decided to jazz it up a little as a JoJo OP AMV mash up. The slightly upbeat jazz music has been replaced with both “Sono Chi no Sadame” and “Bloody Stream,” because why not both. One plays after the other, so you can stick to the OP of your choice.

News 4: Finally found a video for the full ASB fights that took place back on the 14th. The day after tomorrow will have both the quarter and semi finals, and the culmination of the league is on launch day. I have no idea what happens when someone wins. I’m really hoping, this being a web show and all, that whoever wins has a cosplayer come on the show that will then be lauded and declared the King of JoJo. If you’re interested, make sure and check out the UStream channel.

[Edit/News 5:]

I’ll just append this one on here since it’s not too big on its own. This is another video from the ASBL show where the hosts are examining the gameplay. I’m not sure if they’re actually watching it on that laptop, but I’d assume these are also probably AI matches. [Edit 2: I would be wrong to do so, though. These are apparently real matches] If you need a few extra fights, there are some here. You’ll also get to see a successful Star Finger and the Situation Finish for the train station. Getting road hauled via a hook in your heart. Pretty rough.

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 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 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.

All Star Battle League Subbed

The new ASB commercial in full HD with the explanation of the rules is here now for you to be able to read in English. The video calls itself “2/2,” though I don’t know what the “1/2” would be, and I can’t find it on the same channel. All the same, you can now hear the rules of ASB League straight from the hosts’ mouths and know what all the characters had to say during their brief intro. I particularly like Johnny’s, being so courteous and grateful to a person he’s going to beat the shit out of, and Hol Horse’s, pontificating on the importance of being cordial to all women equally.

Edit:

Also, this trailer has resulted in maybe my favorite ASB image so far.

Presenting Gyro Zeppeli as voiced by Shinichiro Miki

ASB League YouTube Rerun Channel Now Available

Small update on ASB League: NamcoBandai’s YT channel has opened up their playlist where they’ll be posting all the episodes after the stream is over. The episode was actually uploaded a few days ago, but it had been set to private viewing. Now that it’s open, it’s ready to be posted. Much easier and more convenient than hoping for a Nico video, and having an easily accessible YT video increases the chances it’ll be subbed if there’s anyone out there who’s up for a 45 minute sub task.

This was uploaded on the 21st, two days after the official stream. I’m not sure if the private status will be a constant or if that was just a fluke this time, but that will determine whether or not the episodes will be available the Friday after a stream or the Sunday evening/Monday morning depending on where you are. Regardless, you can follow the YT channel to keep up or wait until I embed them here.

This week starts the real fights for Group A. Johnny and Bruno are in that group, and they were the closest to being in the top 3. The fan reaction to that fight should be fun.