SuperJew takes a moment out of his busy day to start up a new column about the wonderful world of fighting games, his experiences with them and breaking into the competitive scene, and in the fighting game community in general. Today’s post is about the brand-spankity-new fighting game Skullgirls, available RIGHT NOW on your PS3 or 360.
Image source: killeraphrodite.com
Skullgirls is the new fighting game out by Reverge Labs, and boy howdy what a way to break into the scene. If you’ve seriously never heard of anything about this game, I want you to go click that first link and just poke around for a minute and glean what you can. No, it’s cool, I’ll wait. I’ll go make some popcorn.
Oh, you’re back already? Great. So you probably saw that the game was developed by “Mike Z” Zaimont, a professional tournament fighting game guy who’s rather well known in the FGC (that’s fighting game community, for those of you without your handy dandy glossary at hand). You’ll probably also have seen that the soundtrack is done by Michiru Yamane, who has done lots of music work on the Castlevania games. You’ve also probably seen the site bandying about random terms like “Dark Deco,” “infinite detection” and others, so maybe a brief summary of things is in order.
This game is basically entirely hand-drawn in this neat sort of gritty art deco style – hence Dark Deco. The story of the game is basically that there is this ancient artifact that will grant the wish of any woman who takes hold of it – but if the woman is impure in her thoughts, it ends up tainting their wish and transforming them into a horrible monster. Basically all characters in the game are out to destroy the Skullgirl – the last person who grabbed the artifact, the Skull Heart, and transformed into said horrible monster. The characters are all wonderfully unique in both playstyle and in art style – while most have at least a hint of fanservice, you’ve got everything from a catgirl who can split apart into random bodyparts, the princess of the Canopy Kingdom (the setting of the game) who shoots people with her umbrella and sacrifices soldiers to protect her, a character who looks like a 1930s cartoon character outfitted with the most advanced laser system imaginable, to a girl who’s hair is actually a symbiote and can eat people. It’s a wacky game, backed up with the technical knowhow of people who actually PLAY these games – in addition to Mike Z’s own input, he took the game up and down the West Coast getting tournament fighters to help him out.
Difficulty-wise, this game isn’t the friendliest to new players unfortunately – given that this game was developed by tournament fighters, even the “Sleepwalk” mode can be difficult if you don’t know what you’re doing – and add in the fact that you don’t have an in-game movelist in the pause menu like you do in most fighters, this can make some beginner players really frustrated really quickly. (Don’t fret, though – the movelist is up on their site, downloadable as a PDF.) However, to counteract this, it features one of the most in-depth and helpful tutorial modes I’ve ever seen – because it will literally teach you the basics of every fighting game, ever, and basically bring you up to where you need to be to go on and play other games with at least moderate success.
There are truly very few bad things about this game – for the price (about 15 bucks), this game is amazing. Some people have lamented the exclusion of extra modes – currently, the only modes available in game are Story and Arcade for Single Player, Versus (on or offline) for Multiplayer, and Training mode which has the Tutorial as well as the Practice Mode (or the Lab, as most folks in the FGC refer to it). I honestly see no problem with it – most other things, such as Mission Mode where you have to demonstrate you can do combos, or other things like that, are really basically fluff, and as Mike Z has promised to patch in extra things for free later on, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I’m also saddened by the lack of characters, but keep in mind the fact that this is, again, a 15 dollar arcade game – there are already two DLC characters in the works, rumored to be set at a dollar each (they were concepts that ended up being cut from the main game).
So, the tl;dr – Graphics are great, music is great, gameplay is great if a bit hard at times if you’re not a veteran fighter (which I am not, by any stretch), and as of Day 1, it’s great. Things can only go up from here. I’d give this game an 8.7/10, if only because of a few Day 1 glitches and the lack of in-game movelist.
For more information on Skullgirls, you should check out the following:
–The Shoryuken page/forums – a good place to go for fighting game news, etc.
–The Skullgirls Youtube Channel – for videos of real fights in real time, often with voiceovers from Mike Z.
– DAT Wikipedia.
-The two links at the top.
And now, I leave you with fanart, which includes all of the characters (the nun and the horrible thing to the right are the same character), the final boss, and the two upcoming DLC characters.
~Super Jew, awaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!
Image source: Reverge Labs
“Fan Art Fridays”
The Red Shirt Crew Blog and Podcast Network 