Posting on behalf of Silfer
Disclaimer: I'm porting this thread over from another forum. Not the one that most of this community frequented but rather the one where you go to while you wait forever to be accepted but you'd rather not be there because it's not all that inclusive and there are a lot of rude and disrespectful people and...yeah, you can guess which I'm talking about. (God I'm glad about how quick I approved here)
Persona 5 came out a year ago in Japan and we are now starting to see spin-offs with P5 Dancing Star Night and PQ2 (along with P3 Dancing Moon Night which is benefiting from the increased awareness in the Persona brand). This was expected considering that P4 saw similar spin-offs using its characters and P5 is the best-selling entry in the franchise, which now has a larger foothold in the west than ever before to accompany is huge popularity in Japan. Another P4 spin-off is P4 Arena and and it's a fairly safe bet that this will happen for P5.
In addition to the good sales of P5, the Director of P4 Arena has expressed a desire to make a fighting game for P5 and Atlus has registered domain names for P5 spin-offs, including one which is probably for P5 Arena. All this points to P5A happening sometime in the foreseeable future so I wanted to talk about and its various potential aspects.
First of all, to me the most interesting subject of discussion is the Visual Direction it might take. P4 Arena has an "HD Sprite" visual style, similar to Arc System Works' BlazBlue series from the PS360-gen and looks very good, as expected from the people behind BlazBlue.
It would be a safe assumption that P5A would take on a similar style, if not for what ASW has done recently. Starting with Guilty Gear Xrd SIGN (PS4,PS3 - 2014), ASW has pioneered a new style of 2D fighting game with 3D, cel-shaded character models made to give the illusion of 2D sprites when in gameplay while allowing for dynamic sequences in certain attacks and in character intros/outros.
Here's an example of how it looks in combat in Guilty Gear Xrd Sign:
AWS has since refined this style in further iterations of GGXrd (Revelator in 2016 and Revelator 2 in 2017) as well as in their upcoming 2018 game, Dragon Ball FighterZ.
Here are more recent examples of this visual style:
GGXrd Rev Character Intro, Outro and Super:
DBFZ Character Intro, Outro and Supers:
(I like Gohan)
You can probably see why I think that the visual direction of the game is the most interesting subject right now. The recent style of visuals is breathtaking and I think it's likely that a P5A would have a similar style.
HD Sprites, like are seen in BB and P4A, take a lot of time and are seemingly on the way out when it comes to big fighting games (even SNK has moved on to 3D, to less impressive results). I'm sure a P5A would look good in that style but at this point I prefer what ASW has going on right now. It looks great during gameplay and allows for some spectacular stuff when control is briefly taken away from the player. I've been playing GGXrd Rev2 on PC at 4K lately and it's breathtaking. (not related to the thread but GGXrd is surprisingly not all that demanding as I can run it at 1800p60 with just a GTX 960. If you have an even better GPU, I recommend checking out the PC version as it is simply stunning)
In a GDC 2015 Panel, Technical Artist Junya C Motomura talked about how, at first characters in GGXrd would take 4 months to complete from a visual standpoint (which seemed like a lot to me) but they've gotten better and faster as they've done more. And with the move to UE4 since DBFZ, they're probably even faster now so it's safe to expect this style out of ASW going forward.
In addition, I think that ASW could do some seriously impressive stuff with this visual style and the Persona 5 aesthetic. The P4A style, while great, isn't perfect in my opinion and in combat it doesn't capture the characters as well as it could, especially when it comes to the eyes. Whereas ASW has shown that they can adapt other artists' styles to their engine well with how well they've translated Akira Toriyama's art to UE4. It would also fit Persona 5 since it's the first "HD" game in the mainline series. The style of the 3D models of Persona 5 could be adapted well to ASW's engine by their artists in a way that would capture the original characters really well.
(Also, imagine getting finishers that end with a transition to 2D art similarly to how the various All-Out attacks work in this game)
Another aspect that's interesting to talk about is obviously the Roster. This is interesting because I believe it's size will most likely be tied to the visual style they pick.
If they pick the HD Sprite style of P4A then we'll probably see all of those characters just ported over, just like with the BlazBlue games, regardless of story relevance with the addition of the P5 cast.
If they go for their recent cel-shaded style, then they'll most likely be a little more picky. GGXrd Sign, their first cel-shaded fighting game, had a total of 15 characters when it came out on consoles, with 2 who came later as DLC. As of the latest release, Rev 2, there are 25 characters in total. So it's safe to expect around 15 characters at launch but we could potentially get more. As I said before, they've gotten better at making characters and one character does not take them as much time as it did before. As of now, there are 17 characters that are revealed for Dragon Ball FighterZ with "many more coming" (according to the producer on the TGS stream).
So 15 characters is a safe expectation but we could get more. With that said, let's talk about the characters themselves.
The picks also rely on the story the game'll tell, if any. The P4 spin-offs were all trying to fit inside the canon of the main series (with the exception of PQ where they forget everything at the end) but that may not be the case with the P5 spin-offs if P5D and P3D are any indication since they won't have a story mode. If not having a canon story is a possibility, then I believe it's safe to expect the following:
-Joker
-Skull (Ryuji Sakamoto)
-Panther (Ann Takamaki)
-Mona (Morgana)
-Fox (Yusuke Kitagawa)
-Queen (Makoto Nijima)
-Noir (Haru Okumura)
-Crow (Akechi Goro)
These are the absolute, most obvious picks.
Beyond those, I think we'll probably get more original characters. Labrys and Sho could return and they could make new ones for this.
They could develop the concept of Hifumi being a Phantom Thief and put her in the game, using the material that the main team couldn't implement in P5. Caroline and Justine (or Lavenza) could make an appearance. It would also be cool to see the cast from P4 and P3 grown up. Naoto is a detective and Chie is in the police academy so they could probably work their way into this game.
Roster is one thing I'm not too sure on. Very curious as to what you guys are expecting.
Here's the GDC Panel I mentioned:
It's fasnicating, especially if aesthetics is something you care a lot about. The panel itself is 35 minutes with a Q&A afterwards.
Disclaimer: I'm porting this thread over from another forum. Not the one that most of this community frequented but rather the one where you go to while you wait forever to be accepted but you'd rather not be there because it's not all that inclusive and there are a lot of rude and disrespectful people and...yeah, you can guess which I'm talking about. (God I'm glad about how quick I approved here)
Persona 5 came out a year ago in Japan and we are now starting to see spin-offs with P5 Dancing Star Night and PQ2 (along with P3 Dancing Moon Night which is benefiting from the increased awareness in the Persona brand). This was expected considering that P4 saw similar spin-offs using its characters and P5 is the best-selling entry in the franchise, which now has a larger foothold in the west than ever before to accompany is huge popularity in Japan. Another P4 spin-off is P4 Arena and and it's a fairly safe bet that this will happen for P5.
In addition to the good sales of P5, the Director of P4 Arena has expressed a desire to make a fighting game for P5 and Atlus has registered domain names for P5 spin-offs, including one which is probably for P5 Arena. All this points to P5A happening sometime in the foreseeable future so I wanted to talk about and its various potential aspects.
First of all, to me the most interesting subject of discussion is the Visual Direction it might take. P4 Arena has an "HD Sprite" visual style, similar to Arc System Works' BlazBlue series from the PS360-gen and looks very good, as expected from the people behind BlazBlue.
It would be a safe assumption that P5A would take on a similar style, if not for what ASW has done recently. Starting with Guilty Gear Xrd SIGN (PS4,PS3 - 2014), ASW has pioneered a new style of 2D fighting game with 3D, cel-shaded character models made to give the illusion of 2D sprites when in gameplay while allowing for dynamic sequences in certain attacks and in character intros/outros.
Here's an example of how it looks in combat in Guilty Gear Xrd Sign:
AWS has since refined this style in further iterations of GGXrd (Revelator in 2016 and Revelator 2 in 2017) as well as in their upcoming 2018 game, Dragon Ball FighterZ.
Here are more recent examples of this visual style:
GGXrd Rev Character Intro, Outro and Super:
DBFZ Character Intro, Outro and Supers:
(I like Gohan)
You can probably see why I think that the visual direction of the game is the most interesting subject right now. The recent style of visuals is breathtaking and I think it's likely that a P5A would have a similar style.
HD Sprites, like are seen in BB and P4A, take a lot of time and are seemingly on the way out when it comes to big fighting games (even SNK has moved on to 3D, to less impressive results). I'm sure a P5A would look good in that style but at this point I prefer what ASW has going on right now. It looks great during gameplay and allows for some spectacular stuff when control is briefly taken away from the player. I've been playing GGXrd Rev2 on PC at 4K lately and it's breathtaking. (not related to the thread but GGXrd is surprisingly not all that demanding as I can run it at 1800p60 with just a GTX 960. If you have an even better GPU, I recommend checking out the PC version as it is simply stunning)
In a GDC 2015 Panel, Technical Artist Junya C Motomura talked about how, at first characters in GGXrd would take 4 months to complete from a visual standpoint (which seemed like a lot to me) but they've gotten better and faster as they've done more. And with the move to UE4 since DBFZ, they're probably even faster now so it's safe to expect this style out of ASW going forward.
In addition, I think that ASW could do some seriously impressive stuff with this visual style and the Persona 5 aesthetic. The P4A style, while great, isn't perfect in my opinion and in combat it doesn't capture the characters as well as it could, especially when it comes to the eyes. Whereas ASW has shown that they can adapt other artists' styles to their engine well with how well they've translated Akira Toriyama's art to UE4. It would also fit Persona 5 since it's the first "HD" game in the mainline series. The style of the 3D models of Persona 5 could be adapted well to ASW's engine by their artists in a way that would capture the original characters really well.
(Also, imagine getting finishers that end with a transition to 2D art similarly to how the various All-Out attacks work in this game)
Another aspect that's interesting to talk about is obviously the Roster. This is interesting because I believe it's size will most likely be tied to the visual style they pick.
If they pick the HD Sprite style of P4A then we'll probably see all of those characters just ported over, just like with the BlazBlue games, regardless of story relevance with the addition of the P5 cast.
If they go for their recent cel-shaded style, then they'll most likely be a little more picky. GGXrd Sign, their first cel-shaded fighting game, had a total of 15 characters when it came out on consoles, with 2 who came later as DLC. As of the latest release, Rev 2, there are 25 characters in total. So it's safe to expect around 15 characters at launch but we could potentially get more. As I said before, they've gotten better at making characters and one character does not take them as much time as it did before. As of now, there are 17 characters that are revealed for Dragon Ball FighterZ with "many more coming" (according to the producer on the TGS stream).
So 15 characters is a safe expectation but we could get more. With that said, let's talk about the characters themselves.
The picks also rely on the story the game'll tell, if any. The P4 spin-offs were all trying to fit inside the canon of the main series (with the exception of PQ where they forget everything at the end) but that may not be the case with the P5 spin-offs if P5D and P3D are any indication since they won't have a story mode. If not having a canon story is a possibility, then I believe it's safe to expect the following:
-Joker
-Skull (Ryuji Sakamoto)
-Panther (Ann Takamaki)
-Mona (Morgana)
-Fox (Yusuke Kitagawa)
-Queen (Makoto Nijima)
-Noir (Haru Okumura)
-Crow (Akechi Goro)
These are the absolute, most obvious picks.
The only one who may not get in is Crow but if the game is set to be non-canon then there's no reason not to have him. If it is canon...well they'll figure something out. Crow is interesting also because he has two Personas. They could have two different slots, one for each outfit/Persona. Or if it has a story and they bring him back to life somehow, he could have the two Personas in his moveset which would be cool as well).
Beyond those, I think we'll probably get more original characters. Labrys and Sho could return and they could make new ones for this.
We could also see the P3 Protag if the game isn't supposed to be canon.
Roster is one thing I'm not too sure on. Very curious as to what you guys are expecting.
Here's the GDC Panel I mentioned:
It's fasnicating, especially if aesthetics is something you care a lot about. The panel itself is 35 minutes with a Q&A afterwards.
