I still remember back when the 20 dlcs were announced, I got in an argument with someone that explained it was fine because BlazBlue sprites were complicated due to being based on 3D models. I told them this excuse doesn't work because some of the sprites (at the time of the argument) were 9 years old and already modified multiple times. They then told me that modifying sprites take a lot of time so that's why the older characters were DLC. I showed them a sprite sheet that a friend made for me of an edited kirby with Sol Badguy's hair (don't ask) and told them it took a day to do. They didn't answer back.
@@espurrseyes42 I used to do sprite comics with friends back in the day when I was younger and I used a Kirby with Sol Badguy's hair as a self insert in our dumb stories.
Did you upscale the entire sprite set for your Kirby comics? Because upscaling sprites is not the same as cutting a few pieces of a sprite and pasting it to another. It requires a ton of work. THe problem with BBTag is that Persona and BlazBlue had sprites that had lower resolutions than the totally new RBWY sprites and the newer Under Night In-Birth games. BlazBlue and Persona were HD games made in a 720p resolution. Uniel was made in 1080p and so were the new RWBY sprites. But the problem wasn't even just the upscaling, BBTag played astronomically different than any of the games, characters had to be rebalanced, and reprogrammed from scratch.
The fact that this game's DLC ended with three franchises only getting their first wave of characters, as well as the first non-RWBY RWBY character being the last one, AND a massive datamine leak that teased basically every character you could ever want just rubs sulfuric acid into the wound.
To be honest, a better name for that era would be the "SECOND Dark Era". To most of the OG FGC, the "Dark Age" refers to the period in which most developers had completely moved on from making 2D fighting games, aside from the occasional crossover titles with reused sprites. The original Dark Age started when SFIII didn't meet sales expectations, and devs kept trying and failing to make 2D fighters work in 3D.
@@alicekingston8521 just goes to show you how big a deal SF is in the FG genre. For better and worse, the series basically decides the next few years of the genre
It's more to say it was the dark age of Capcom games, as Tekken was still going strong with 5 and the BB series started. Thing is, SF is a very influental fighting game. The 1st thing many people casually think of when you talk about fighting games. For other fighters in the market to flourish, it's important for SF to be relevant and easy to recommend as a game. Casuals who then enjoy the game might want to check out other branches of the genre. Guilty Gear, MVC, Samsho, etc. When Street Fighter suffers, the rest of the genre tends to be affected by it's failure. There are also devs who look up to SF and Capcom, and take inspirations and advice from their game design, inclusing Arcsys.
@@leithaziz2716 It's called the "Dark Age" because developers, in general, stopped making fighting games because they weren't profitable. Namco was an exception, thanks mostly to Tekken. As TopHatGamingMan proved, fighting games as a whole were not perceived as profitable, even if the FGC and hardcore players enjoyed some of the best releases at the time. Other factors include the downfall of the arcade market, a flood of aborted fighting game franchises, the aforementioned growing pains with transitioning into 3D, and so on and so forth. The downfall STARTED with Capcom, but the struggles were felt all around.
It only seems that way if you follow Capcom FGs. KoF had been going strong past SNK's death and rebirth, Guilty Gear grew its beard with #Reload, Melty Blood would get its first release to all public restrooms, indie darlings like Akatsuki Blitzkampf provided an alternative for footsie based games, Tekken was building gods in South Korea, etc etc. FGs outside of Capcom seemed to actually thrive, tbqh. I'd argue post-SFIV was the real dark age. It was difficult as fuck to convince other FG players to play something not SFIV or Capcom related.
I gotta say I absolutely love this game. I bought it a long time ago when it was on sale for super cheap and just recently gave it some honest attempts and damn it’s good. Truly a unique game with a lot of heart and charm. And despite never playing a under light game, carmine has been some of the most fun I’ve had with a fighting game in a while. I hope more people give it a chance cuz the games in great state as of current
A couple things I wanna add about Mori's words and regarding BB as a whole, as I think they're very interesting to mention and I was also there witnessing the backlash happening in real time: 1) During one of the interviews about BBTAG, I remember him or someone on the team saying they were making the game EXCLUSIVELY to be played at EVO of that year, releasing only a month before it, which rubbed people the wrong way since even the creators of Skullgirls tried to get their game at EVO and were denied even though the game came out 3 months before the EVO of that year. 2) After the announcement of the 22 DLC characters, people were so mad that it caused radio silence for a full month before they posted a gif of Blake's gameplay on Facebook of all places, and the negativity from that was most likely the final push to make Blake and Yang free, along with the announcement of the game getting a full english dub. 3) Regarding the future of the BB series, Mori mentioned that they were pushing Noel more and more since Chronophantasma, what with the story involving her more and more, her becoming more popular, and even mentioned that since Ragna is out of the picture at the end of BBCF, that Noel would be the main character if there were to ever be a new entry in the mainline series. I sincerely think if they had abandoned that mindset at the beginning of trying to get the game out solely for EVO, more care would've been put into it, and that we could've started with at least more characters in the base roster, and even given more offline modes, like Arcade Mode (still not in at the time of writing this), and the Abyss Modes from the games' past.
rushing to release for evo was why sf5 had a poor start too I think. they really should have just delayed bbtag by like 6 months to get all the characters in. game would have fared far better public-wise if they did. though perhaps this was a lesson they can take with them going forward.
Damn, I would definitely want to see Noel as the main character after Ragna, though I see Juusan from Alternative: Dark War being a candidate for main character status considering she is literally Nu herself taking after Ragna.
That is what pushed me away from the game that it lacks offline content like arcade mode It is clear they wanted to focus more on online content to set up fighting game tournaments The only reason I got the game was to support English dub casts that basically shove to the side and wasn't told there wasn't going be an English dub for BlazBlue central fiction cause Devs were too lazy to dub the game and cause they wanted to rush the game out for EOV BBTAG was just undercook
Same reason why I'm kinda split about Virtua Fighter 5 (Ultimate Showdown), which is basically just known as the competitive online game with no Offline content outside of a simple 5-10 min Arcade mode and Training.
To me this is the major problem with modern fighting games. The majority of newer FGs are catered exclusively to the competitive crowd, and while it is true that the FGC has more exposure now than it ever has, competitive players still account for a pretty small percentage of a game's demographic. For people who are just playing for fun, don't have good internet, or just don't like playing online, there's almost no reason to buy a lot of current fighting games because the single-player content and even local multiplayer is so incredibly scant. All these games have is online, but online play inevitably has a short shelf-life; as time passes and the player base inevitably thin, all of the hours and labor that go into producing the netcode becomes for naught, and what's left is maybe 1/3 of a finished game. Soul Calibur V may be better as a fighting game compared to Soul Calibur II, but Soul Calibur II is infinitely more replayable due to its wealth of game modes and bonus content.
@@jojonoa3590 BBTAG proves that focusing only online will eventually kill the game Fun fact: It was actually a miracle that Soul Calibur 6 happen because 5th game nearly kill the series which is it why took 6 years for a sequel
To me the dlc crazy kinda killed it for me. Half the characters I wanted to play with were licked behind dlc with too many characters locked behind them and being too close to each other. And because of the dark era after Capcom I had the same problem with Omen of Sorrow. Also, respect to the guy with the Arcana Heart plushie.
I honestly didn't mind the DLC for this game in particular bc the price for the base game + the first 20 dlc chars was just an average 60 or less If the game had been full price with that kinda DLC it would've been ridiculous, but they had the state of mind to lower the base game's price so that you're only paying as much as you would for any other game The 2.0 cast obviously was more money to add but by then the game was frequently on sale anyways so you could arguably have gotten all of the game's content cheaper around the time the 2.0 cast launched
My problem with the dlc was that you had to get it in the specific packs. Just say you were only interested in the P4A characters; you're gonna have to buy basically all the dlc characters because they're divided up across a bunch of bundles. At least give us the option to get characters individually like almost every other fighter out there.
@@KrissyBlues "f the game had been full price with that kinda DLC it would've been ridiculous, but they had the state of mind to lower the base game's price so that you're only paying as much as you would for any other game" then they should of released the game with all or at least the vast majority those characters in the base roster at a full game price rather then piece meal everything to make you spend money on RE-USED characters. the entire issue is that these DLC characters don't justify even their small cost because we already know that all of them are just ported from old games instead of new stuff
@@joedatius I mean, no, cause they still took work to implement despite the sprites being reused, and they couldn't afford to wait until they had all these characters finished because the game had to be released before EVO or it was deader than it already was lol
The reason why MC2 got away with having a game made out of 90% reused assets was because the roster was HUGE. This game could have done the same if they launched with, say, 45 characters (all reused assets except the RWBY cast after all.) But no, they had to get greedy. Imagine if MvC game launched with 20 characters and then charged more for the rest.
MVC2 had a huge roster. And how many of the characters were paid dlc again? Zero. But I'm sure they would have done that back then if they could. Dlc has been more of a curse than a blessing tbh. We just can't have nice thing because humans are greedy and selfish by nature.
So something I want to note as being a former CF player and a current BBTAG player. When CF released and they showed the character reveal at Evo along with the first reveal for BBTag. At that point we thought that was going to be the last edition of the game but the game itself needed more work as far as patches go. So Central Fiction actually had two patches pre jubei and post jubei currently being the standard. Persona Ultimax also had a similar patch but it was only in Japan until recently where you can now play it in the current PS4 version. Now something to note is that they had the 2.0 characters that people could play at majors as a sort of beta for the game. Some of the players I followed on Twitter would state that some of the characters were changed slightly from that version of the game. When the DLC finally released that was the definitive version of the game that we got and just like CF and ultimax we expected a post DLC patch to fix the problems like Yumi damage scaling and B Zio. Instead we were greeted with more radio silence. I remember staying up till 3:00 in the morning to watch the fighting game Round Table watching twitch chat constantly ask about BBTag. The radio silence, the pandemic, and eventual cancellation of the Arc Revo tour was the nail on the coffin. Combined with an absolute terrible netcode there really wasn't a reason for people to play the game or even for me to recommend it. Personally I feel like the game is unfinished and you can tell mainly with the Akatsuki Blitzkampf not having their own stage and Blitztank not having any unique interactions with any of the cast. I had almost given up until the rollback announcement at CEO which absolutely nobody was expecting I even joked about it seconds before it was revealed. I still have a bit of hope that some sort of announcement will come for tag maybe a final patch just to fix these little problems. I think the game has a very diverse amount of characters and truthfully the addition of more characters would be great but I think it's fine where it is and just a patch would be better than nothing. In the meantime tournaments like WNF and IcuHater I've been doing a good job keeping people's interests with a recent 10 V 10 Japan versus America battle. I'm cautiously optimistic toward the future of the game but it is a game that I would highly recommend to a lot of people.
As a big fan of BBTag I was half expecting this to be like a lot of other videos ranting about how BBTag is the only fighting game with easy inputs ever and they made it for stupid baby idiots who can’t think but you actually did give it a fair shake, and I appreciate that.
Yeah its for argument like those that i hate the FGC if a game doesn't follow their self made standards then its trash or "not a real fighting game" , they're nothing but a bunch of cry babies
The Biggest problem of BBTAG aside from it's gameplay and Assine online and lobby is how shit Single player is. No Arcade mode no gallery mode, No Abyss or Golden Arena mode, and The Story mode sucked so much and the keyword final boss was lame as hell. Worse part is this was the last time we see Persona 3 and 4 characters and Christ they got done so dirty. This game has so much Potential, and they fucking wasted it!
I agree with your point, but for story mode personally tho, as crossover fighting game its fine (it just work) and I don't expect it to be spectacular cuz arcys is just a small company
@@danielmaster8776 The Leaked DLC list shows they had intents to add a fair chunk of more RWBY characters all of JNPR, Cinder, Adam, Roman etc but as a comment list said above that's literally where the game ended in turns of development and updates on it that leak list basically was a giant punch in the dick because it had a lot of fan wanted characters in it. There were also rumors to introduce Melty as a new Fate. (Heh)
I like RWBY and Persona 4, so imagine my reaction when I discovered this crossover fighting game with 2 of my favorite series battling each other alongside others franchises, that's how I met BBTAG. It is unfortunate that this happened to this game but hey! at least I could enjoy the interactions and diverse fighting mechanics. I geniuly liked this game, at least at a casual perspective.
It was a similar situation for me in regards to BB, P4 and UNI. I have little reason to return to BBTAG now that its own online presence is gone, but I'm grateful that I got to play online with some of my favorite characters from those games again for a little while. I'm crossing my fingers that UNI 2 will fare better even though it doesn't have the popularity of something like BB and P4 to back it up. One thing I'm certain of is that I'm going to make the most out of the month or so of competition that its release will bring to the online scene. I don't want to regret not jumping onto what may very well be the UNI series' last hurrah thanks to the surge in interest that rollback brings to a franchise.
This is a good video and generally does well at summarizing the good and bad about BBTAG. Still love this game even with it's flaws and it's worth giving a shot if anyone who sees this has not. Though it's sad to see how ASW sort of let an opportunity escape them by not further supporting the game in its current state outside of the rollback update that generally makes the game easier to play online.
Are there magic settings to make BB:CP/Tag play better than 5 FPS? Because I've got fifty fighting games and this is the ONLY engine that lags THIS HARD on my computer. It's an i7-era, too.
As a huge CF and P4A fan I still can't bring myself to enjoy BBTag unfortunately it's easily the most disappointing game I've ever bought personally. I've since realized I just don't like team games at all so it was probably doomed from the start for me.
This game could have been so much better had most of the roster not have been DLC and if they had continued with giving us more characters. The P4 Arena cast needed to be finished off by giving us Rise, Yukari, Ken and kuramaru, Junpei, etc., RWBY needed more characters then what we had because the web series was used as the selling point for this game. We could have gotten Jaune, Nora, Pyrrha, and Ren of team JNPR since they're just as important as team RWBY, we could have gotten Roman Torchwick, Cinder Fall, Adam Taurus, Mercury, emerald, and Qrow. And Blazblue and Undernight likely had a few more characters that people would have wanted as well.
I love this game but aye. The massive amount of characters locked behind DLC and the amount of unfinished rosters/small rosters was kinda my major problem with it. I was waiting for JNPR to be announced at some point, maybe Yuuki Terumi, certainly Sho Minazuki, but nope. Hell, if they were ever going to give us characters from alternate games, I would have hoped to somehow, some way, see some XBlaze characters too. I like the roster we have but it could be so much better.
@@Drakon_Minaka Yeah and with Smash Ultimate being revealed at the time a couple of weeks after BBtag released to the public you'd think arc would want to compete against smash for it's large ass roster, do an everyone is here thing for the four franchises that were tied in. Be no, now do get that arc is a small studio and they don't have large budgets but you'd think that other companies like Atlus/SEGA, Roosterteeth, and Frenchbeard (the ones that respectively own Persona, RWBY, and UnderNight) would be more than willing to help Arc out with coughing from some cash but of course they didn't bother to do that.
Great video , genuinely had a good time reminiscing about the past even though not all of it was good. BBTAG had it's problems but its still a game that is near and dear to my heart. I genuinely hope the game gets more support but if it doesn't thats fine too. Brought tears to my eyes. Good shit
This video is a trip down memory lane. This game was how I got some of my my friends to try out traditional fighters and came out in an important time in my life. So I'll always enjoy this guilty pleasure of a game. This game feels like it didn't really receive enough love to be great. Some of the characters had this weird thing, where they arrive dead on arrival but then get no love in future balances. Even worse, you could be Celica and get nothing.
I have a crackpot theory regarding the launch of the game and why Blake/Yang were DLC: it wasn't meant to release for another few months. Pricing the game at $50 instead of $60 really makes it feel like they weren't selling the full thing on release day and the strange state of 1.0 + DLC kind of supports my idea. The reason was so they could be at EVO instantly, and to do that, they needed to give competitors a few months with the game.
Mori literally confirmed that he was trying to get the game out before EVO 2018. It also makes no sense for blake and yang to have been DLC when they could have just put them in the base game. Look at how many characters persona 4 and undernight each got in base game. They got 4 characters in the roster while blazblue dominated the roster for obvious reasons. It's unfair and scummy that half of team RWBY was made into DLC just so mori could rush the game through the doors of EVO. On top of that in the story modes for BBtag Blake and 9 of the DLC fighters of the first 3 packs were already programmed in the game as non playable CPUs.
I personally dont mind the low health. due to playing with a big group of people who like spectating and having one match at a time. it can be super frantic sometimes and a lot of fun. But I understand not liking it, especially if you play against that one guy who knows some really high damaging combos. and knows how to block your setups.
Some good points here for how it went. I wasn't deep in the FGC when it came out so I only had the casual side. Half the characters being announced as DLC was a huge blow as I saw a lot of "wait for the definitive edition" talk since the game itself. The lack of representation for RWBY despite them being a main group was there to. There was a lot of "half the roster is Blazblue and there's like no RWBY characters". And it not being in the EVO immediately after 2.0 until fans called for it was another big thing
BBTAG was my first introduction to RWBY. I was playing the trial version of the game and played as Ragna and Ruby Rose, and fell in love with Ruby's design, and fighting style. Back than I was only familiar with the Blazblue and Persona characters, not so much the other two.
It sucks to this, because I hate to know this will be a one off and they aren't going back. They fumbled the game and it just breaks my heart. I played this game til launch up until it died.
Wow…..!!! This was a damn good video from beginning to end! I appreciate the work you put into it. I actually just bought a complete edition of this game and I’m currently waiting for it to arrive.
I had such high hopes for this game, very high hopes. When I purchased this game I was dedicated to finish the training mode for all characters. But then something happened and the spark was gone. Can't quite pin point it, but it collected dust after 1 month.
Still my most played fighting game. It got me into the genre. I came for Yang, stayed for Tager/Wald shenanigans. Loved all the netplay tourneys I did and my Evo run.
I love it, it did the fan’s expectations of getting players to play the original games, I love uniclr a ton, p4au is great, and bbcf is exciting once you’re used to it! I actually got friends to get bbtag and we play at school since I own it on switch. Once my principal saw us and he was interested and played against me, he’s a big fighting game fan, and has fought the students in MvC.
@@shaneee3113 It was Ragna and Hakumen. I choose Hyde and maybe Naoto kurogane. I remember being nervous in the select screen especially if he came across some of the “spicy” characters like Mai or Makoto.
as a massive rwby fan who loves fighting games its depressing as hell that rwby prolly wont be in any other game expect for one i have to go into discords to find games for it was my first fg which eventually got me into comp strive
BBTAG was the first fighting game I ever played, it brought me into the genre and to this day I still have more fun with this game than any other. I'm absolutely in love with this game and it has a very special place in my heart. Thanks for making this video, this game needs to be reborn.
I am honestly so happy that this game has gotten some attention again. BlazBlue is my favorite 2D fighting game franchise, and I genuinely love BBTAG, so it warms my heart to see that it got rollback, and some love once again.
Very informative video. I never played this game (I play Smash Ultimate) but I always wanted to make my own fighting game. The DLC discussion was super interesting. Too much DLC releasing in short time windows would definitely kill hype, especially if the characters were all revealed before their trailers were out. I'll definitely keep this in consideration.
BBTAG had a roller coaster of a ride that I didn’t know of I got the game, played it and didn’t find much enjoyment out of it so I left before 1.5 and 2.0 was announced I did return after the rollback update and had some enjoyment with the arcana hearts character. It wasn’t enough to keep me coming back for more. I’ll definitely look back at this game as the perfect pick up and play game for anyone who wants to play an in depth tag game or those who just want to pick up a controller and press buttons. BBTAG I think did a good job on that. It’s cool to see the game still be active to this day with the rollback update but it’s a little too late for me to get back into it. Great video on the history of the game! Looking forward to your next video ^^
As a competitive player in the Switch scene, and someone whom has shown the capability to hold up against even PS4 and PC players, a lot of people fail to realize how toxic 1.5 was. The Yuzuriha/Mitsuru/Akihiko core was incredibly dominant, but what was even worse was 1.5 Nine/Merkava which I would unironically argue was more toxic than Adachi/Yumi is today. Speaking of which, even in 2.0 EVERYONE DOWNPLAYS NINE! And their argument? "She's hard." which, yeah no, she still does too much damage, teleport is broken, corner to corner loops, SOLO UNBLOCKABLES, I can go on. That said, 2.0 ultimately ended up pretty okay except for a few glaring issues, some of which you already covered, but I'll go over a couple of the bigger ones you missed that made the patch fun but unhealthy. 2.0 DLC: With a few exceptions (Neo, Blitztank, Celica) it feels like the 2.0 newcomers were made broken on purpose to sell the DLC, making this a pay to win patch. Now Liz is half broken and half not. Her Point game sucks, but her Assist game is toxic. The other five though? Broken as hell, especially with other stuff I'll go over below. Unblockables: With the exception of Blitztank jC, unblockables in general became far too centralizing. Active Switch caused a lot of high/low and strike/throw setups, with Nine being able to do the high/low solo, and Susano'o having access to both. It caused Shirogane, Akatsuki, Hakumen, and other such characters to enable genuinely toxic situations that without Pushblock or Burst and sometimes even with those, left the player in disadvantage helpless. Neutral Skipping: Let's face it, this ended up causing problems on thousands of levels. We all know Adachi B Ziodyne by now, but there are a lot of super fast neutral skips that are near impossible to react to and are even safe on block, which when combined with the team mechanics can make these moves cancerous to deal with. Seth EX Setsuna (214C), Akatsuki B Tatsu, Yu EX Swift Strike (214C), Mai DP in general (which if they wanted to get rid of DP Assist completely, hers needed to be changed entirely), and even setups from full screen that can force a 4-Way mix, especially from Hilda. With Pushblock and in most cases other defensive tools being useless against a lot of these things, often times these situations can make any match into a 1 Player Game in an instant unless you hard read they're coming and guess the right response to the situation, with the punishment for guessing wrong being potentially fatal a lot of the time. That said, in spite of the glaring faults that doomed BBTAG's chances at being a massive success, it's still a fun game to play and go back to even with the game being in the state it's in. I owe a lot to BBTAG as if it weren't for it, I'd never have met a lot of the people I now consider close friends today. If it seems like I was coming off as overly negative, please keep in mind I'm being as critical as I am because BBTAG as a whole means a lot to me, and holds a special place in my heart even to this day. Here's hoping the future of the game is significantly better going forward, but considering the track record Team Blue has with communication or lack thereof, we can only wait and see.
You really think people are going to criticize Nine for doing what Nine is supposed to do? Like Nine is the only character who in their current state plays even close to how she did in bbcf So people are gonna ignore it
The main reasons were: - Watered down gameplay - The Atrocious DLC list (20-25 characters) - Yang and blake as DLCs (and just few characters for the RWBY franchise) - Horrible Online
I never once thought about if they just spaced out the DLC releases, it would have helped out a lot with the droughts later on. I just remember at the time thinking it shouldn't be taking as long as it did for these characters to get re-tooled, and put in the game. Great video, I really enjoyed it. For as weird of a time it was, I looked back fondly on it. Having a cross over fighter with four franchises I was into, had me incredibly excited from announcement to release.
I was very glad it was dubbed because Central Fiction gave me depression for cutting it I was a fan of P4A, BB and UNI so I was really excited to play as all my favorite characters, then they didn't add Tsubaki or Marie who are my favorites from both games, and I really wanted to see all the characters interact with one another, I really loved the story because of it and all it did was make me wish for more. What could be the next fate? How could the characters act with one another? Also adding one character per fate was disappointing
BBTag has a special place in my heart, literally stopped playing Video games back in 2007 over a 10 year break, Blazblue and BBtag brought me back and Akatsuki became my favorite fighting game character of all time, great vid.
Couldnt agree more with what you said about the expectations. I really had my heart set on this game playing like Blazblue but was crushed when it did not and because of this some characters took big hits comparing their Tag moveset to their OG moveset
I personally had fun with my team of Kanji and Yukiko where I used Kanji's back assist to safely use B fire charge during neutral against friends who didn't want to approach. I also found a lot of stuff with Yang and Izayoi that just made me want to lab team combos more than actually compete.
I'm not a pro fighting game player, not even close, and I don't aspire to be. I play fighting games to experience the stories, learn the basics of each character and maybe even try to learn some of the cool stuff I watch the pros do. With all that said, I *love* BB Tag. It put a smile on my face so many times with everything from the character interactions to the music selections and more. I come back to the game every couple months and have a blast every time. It really feels like a "party" in a way similar to Capcom vs SNK or MvC2, and not enough modern fighting games capture that feel
Having known about RWBY for a while by then, and getting into Persona at the time, I was able to get into this game, which in turn is what got me into BlazBlue and UnderNight, alongside the three they added later (especially SK).
I really liked this game because of the story and fan like seeing multiple characters interact with one another e.g. chie and makoto having fun, and thole cooking competition!
BBTAG was my first fighting game, I was a persona fan so I bought it with my friend on PC back when there were no persona games on pc. This was post 2.0, but pre rollback. So I bought the version with all dlc. I found it really fun to play thanks to the simplicity, it led me to looking deeper into fighting game stuff and learning the fundamentals, seeing all the other characters too made me interested in the other franchises. Fast forward to today, I still remember BBTAG whenever I have to learn a new character in a fighting game (Mostly just play strive but i like trying out a lot of them). If it wasnt for this game, I dont think I wouldve ever cared enough about fighting games to try more, sad to hear its story now in retrospective
I would also add as a HUGE BB fan, the dubbed fans of BB feel especially slighted since we spent every game with the dub until CF which was Japanese only, THEN we get BBTag which made it feel like salt in the wound after the fact. They dubbed characters for BBTag but not CF? I'm not a fan of the game but I respect the community. To this day I'm mixed on team blue
I haven't played BB Tag since it's first year, and even then, I only ever got to play the demo on Switch and the PS4 version whenever my friends brought it to Smash tournaments. It was the game that got me into traditional fighters, but honestly, I don't think I'd like it much if I went back to it. The simplified control scheme and reliance on auto combos are precisely what I loved about it before, but I don't think I'd be very fond of them nowadays. I hope one day they make a sequel which can address some of this game's flaws and maybe even introduce some more cool new universes (I think Deltarune characters would be all kinds of sick.)
it's funny, because along skullgirls, this game really holds a special place in my heart. skullgirls helped me get into fighting games, but bbtag was the first fighting game i was following and playing during it's lifespan (since other game i played like blazblue cf and guilty gear were pretty dead at the time thanks to being released so long ago) So this game has both some of my first interactions with online play AND my first interactions with the FGC, so yeah, both of these games are VERY important to me. and honestly, even trough it all i still love this game, it's one of the games i poured the most hours in and altough i still play a bunch of fighting games, it's a game i'm always down to come back to along with skullgirls. I do think it's quite dumb and unbalanced, but it's still a LOT of fun to just play and mess around with, and this game helped know a bunch of new friends that i still talk to to this very day. funny how both of my favourite fighting games has such a troubled history behind them, but oh well, it happens XD
As a BBTAG player, it’s very sad to see that this game does not get a lot of attention. Is the game dying? Maybe. I wish there’s more balancing changes in terms of patch notes. Cause right now, the BBTAG meta has become stale.
@@Koganai96 Take it from someone whom played comp BBTAG for a long time, it's definitely in that position is most cases. Obviously most of the cast can get really far with the right player, but unfortunately in 2.0 being a godlike player only does so much. Look at Shige with the Izayoi/Orie and you'll see what I mean. Man makes Top 8s pretty often and is actually hype to watch, but he can only get so far off of skill alone.
@@SonicSmashBro this doesn’t apply to just Shige. This apply to any player who runs the cheap same team over and over. Like Adachi/Yumi, Adachi/Yu. The same team that DanteThomas and Tempest uses. And seriously it was overpicked in tournaments
I feel that even with those odds, bbtag could have survived if they didn't release 2.0 half assed. Which makes a certain chara become broken and cause the game unplayable, and makes no plan to fix it then Dev gave up.
YO! This was so well put together! Really good job on this video. Sucks how this game died so suddenly. Even my friends avoid it like a plague. Ah well, I just hope it doesn't mean the Blazblue franchise as a whole is dead...
It's the best party-slash-fighting game ever. You can casually pick up any character and make random 2v2s against your friends. It's simple but intuitive system means you can very quickly get into figuring out cross combo shenanigans and universal invul reversal means you don't have to think too hard about how to get out of pressure with a character you just picked for the first time. It's great for casually playing with your friends, I hope that is what it will be remembered for. As a competitive fighting game though, that's another story.
I still think if they replaced RWBY with guilty gear when RT literally dragged their feet with the RWBY cast. Telling them when they want to put the characters in the game to "read the manga" is insulting. Can you imagine telling someone to read a whole series to figure out a moveset? IT says something that most their games have been aces but this one comes out and it's jank, half the rwby cast aren't finished, RT mostly Miles doesn't wanna work with them the rwby fanbase tried at the time so hard to dox and tell people not to buy the game. It was toxic, in my perfect world as soon as they told them to read the manga I'd walk away. Put MHA or Soul eater, better series not written by racist in anyway.
Also persona was vastly more well known and a bigger fanbase than RWBY let's be real. Persona has so many sequel and spin off games, cosplays, it's well known in both japan and America and sold well in both states. I knew people who when rwby came out as the forth were literally like "what even?" And "okay..." and even rwby fans were like "seems like a wasted slot they could of used GG for" And it certainly fell off, I mean look at how many critique videos exist out there. Look at how many people poop on it's story when it's not doing it itself.
@@sokumotanaka9271 Yeah persona tool the world by storm, literally most of the people who were interested in this brought it for persona and didn't even know what rwby was. I was the only one in my friend circle who knew what it was.
BBTAG has a special place in my heart, because it was my first anime fighter and helped me get into every other anime fighter I’ve ever played and enjoyed. I loved the game to death, and I still enjoy it to this day. I was really passionate about seeing it succeed and get better. It was sad to see the eventual fallout of everything bad that could ever happen. With rollback now added I’m hoping the community can somewhat heal over what has happened. Another thing I thought of was downfall of content creation of BBTAG, since many of the companies (particularly Rooster Teeth) started claiming all videos on the game because they copyrighted some of the in-game music months after release. It really hurt a lot of the content creators and imo hurt a chance to reach more people through content creation
I really love bbtag and much more important speech that you said about bbtag was truly understandable for me to listen to and giving my thoughts about it as my opinion on what to expect more update to this topic of a team game i love the speech from you i really appreciate it keep it up great work bro💚🖤
Ngl dispite me having a shit ton of feeling about the game it was still the knly fighting game that made me go. “Damn i love fighting games” and i had a very wild ride and had a huge character arc with it. At first i started palying with a heavy toxic community with the game and over time as i did get banned from that community with alot of raging overtime j got to meet and go to other communities and grow as a person better and not let my anger control me and i got to play bbtag with does people recommened them the game got them to play the source materials and meet 3 life long friends in the procress. When i first hanged out with that todic commjnity i only stayed cause in my 14 year old head it was saying that this is the only community and only people that will accept you to play with them and it led to alot of mental issues and alot of toxic behavior looking at this game jsut remind me of does days and thinking what if i havent raged that day where they kicked me out. But now i make better and much healthier relationships and memories with way better people and i keep introducing people to the game as much as i can due to this weird relationship i had with it and i hope that the people that i managed to bring in can have a better time with it than i had in the begining its jsut been a real journy with this game for me and it has helped me expand my tastes in games even tho i still have shit taste lol.
You really summed up a lot of my feelings and issues with this game. One thing though, I think your definitions of tag vs team games need swapping. I think a tag game is just a game where you can tag and a team game is where the whole team is more active. Great video 👍🏽
Whenever I say that this game is the Lego Dimensions of anime fighting games, I don't just mean in terms of premise, having many brands the studio has touched upon before, including original brands, even having franchises they've never touched before, having almost all the original voice actors reprise their roles and the fun interactions the characters have whenever you set up specific teams, some of the jokes are even some of the nerdiest jokes you'll ever hear, I also mean in terms of announcements and updates, sales and how it hit the downfall, though quite differently. You know, I do wonder if Multiversus is actually a response to this game, since it does have the same ideas, being a cross-over fighting game and a fighting game that relies on coop and teamwork.
@@keystone5750 I wonder what more anime franchises we could've seen in this game. One that would've been cool and literally had a dream about is the anime, BNA: Brand New Animal.
A few things to add that happened with this game. I remember pre launch there was a lot of should I say confusion over the pricing structure of this game with it being lower than retail price but them tacking on the pass for all the dlc in the form of the special edition there was discourse on whether the prices were scams or not. Another thing with dlc that you hadn't touched on was bbtag's lackluster story mode but another kick to the people who played it was that there were characters that were not playable yet that would appear in the story mode and this just got people more heated about the waits for dlc as the characters were already seemingly in the game (there was so much talk about reused assets and laziness here it was insane). It also made their inclusion as dlc instead of being in the base game that much more annoying. One thing you did touch on was the datamines and leaks but it was kinda undersold in this video this was a HUGE part of this game back then as I think specifically the 1.5 version dlc was known before its official announcement. This brought hype to the game but also killed some hype as well because the leaks were so rampant pretty much everyone knew who was coming already. One last thing for expectations that was a big letdown was the character selection and lack of characters from other series. Rwby was the first one like you said with Yang and Blake but many rwby fans expected ANY other character to show up at some point and it took all the way till Neo's release to finally get another this was especially annoying for rwby fans since this series was not only a big selling point for the game but it was one of the original fates but just had way less characters than the other 3. Persona also got a bit of this hate since it didn't have the full investigation team (main characters of persona 4) in the base game either and instead they came out later as dlc (and we still never got Rise lol). But this expectation of characters spread to the arcana heart, akatsuki blitzkampf, and senran kagura too where people wanted more characters but they just never came. To wrap it up I still say to this day I think arcsys should've just taken another year or so with bbtag and had it launch with something similar to 1.5 maybe announcing the 5th fate on release to show more was coming. I think if they had all the dlc characters from the 4 main fates in the base game and then went on to make dlc of rwby and the 3 extra fates after the game's release then there would've been a lot less discourse throughout the game's lifespan. You're right about hindsight being 20 20 because looking back it really feels like bbtag was just pushed out the door and then desperately trying to play catch up until it died. Really good video though, bbtag and dbfz got me into the fgc scene so even with all its ups and downs it's probably still my most played fighting game.
I bought BBTAG with my friends on the switch when it was on sale for like $3 in late 2019 and we had a BLAST. I was the only one who got the DLC though lol. Bought it again on the PC, but unfortunately can’t play rn cus of the weird lobby hack thing going on. Guess people found out how to steal your info in the BBTAG lobby on PC LOL
I wouldn’t call this period a dark era at all. Smash was blowing up. MKX was pretty big and is still played to this day with more viewing than mk11. Tekken came back from irrelevancy after tag flopped (was a great game tho). Xrd came. Only games that had any bad traction were capcom games.
I know it’s been months but I wanted to throw my opinion for the hell of it. I remember seeing BBTag being played by friends at a time when I was basically unaware of any of the 4 series, just a baseline knowledge of persona being a thing. I eventually bought the game and I thought it was really cool, I had grown up playing street fighter so it was a really weird game to me, that being said having also bought FighterZ I was getting used to the possibility of an anime fighter and an air combo heavy world. BBTag got me interested in fighting games in recent time, it was also one of my earlier switch titles so it was often played with friends with little to no knowledge of fighting games. It’s that ending bit that brought me here. I’ve always felt from the start that the game lacked a certain sophistication or complexity (well I was also fairly unaware of the added mechanics for 2.0) being a kid coming from street fighter I expected a fighting game to hold a level of work for a combo not pressing one button, even FighterZ left more room and reward for learning, at the least it felt more rewarding when I figured something out in FighterZ, BBTag felt like a very low bar in and not a significantly higher bar up (little did I know until I played against some actually good players) so not long ago I made a friend buy the game during sale. This friend had no fighting game experience, I felt like I had done something wrong to him, he’s asked to play at times but maybe I’ve become snobbish I have a hard time going back to the game after spending so much time diving into objectively better fighting games. Strive for example I think is great in that you can have a low entry and mess around with friends but there’s an insane amount to learn to get into higher levels of play. BBTag I felt I realistically only improved my play when I decided to try Yumi and magically started to win more. I think the game certainly is cool and fun but it’s just a little too much, I think partially I don’t like tag fighters as much as more traditional fighters. BBTag often feels hard to follow or like I’m turning my brain off and watching my Yumi sprite fly across the screen and do massive damage. It’s not the worst game but I think if it got a little more love and a little more balance it could’ve been ok.
Definitely gotta do your homework my guy. MKX was thriving and with the release of Inj 2 it only picked up. Plus the fact that NRS is currently still the number 1 leading FG Developer for both single player content and rollback network implementation definitely blew every JP game released at the time and still to this day out of the water.
nah nowadays arcsys is the #1 rollback dev, I think most people would agree. Altough in terms of feature completeness nrs is still the best because japanese studios always mess up the matchmaking/extra features like frigging frame data.
@@The300Player Yeah I agree and wasn't denying that, just saying a large majority of Japanese developed games are being compared along with it and MKX being used probably didn't cross his mind twice when making the video.
Played BBTag last year. Didn't have it, but after a few months 9 times out of 10 there were literally zero players in any lobbies, so I just... Stopped playing too. I came in wanting to play more Yuzuriha so I can definitely say you're spot on about not getting to play your favorite characters.
Really nice job highlighting the history of this game and the events surrounding it! I remember first playing BBTAG at a friend's house on their PS4 when it was brand new. One of the characters my friend gravitated toward immediately was Gordeau. He became his main and damn was it a chore to deal with. Its reassuring to know I wasn't alone about this character. I quickly started to be let down by its stripped down control scheme and obnoxiously powerful and low effort team combos. I was never into Team or Tag games to begin with the exception of MVC2 and CVS2 on occasion. Every time I've booted up BBTAG in short bursts with my friends always made me wish I were playing Central Fiction or Project M with them instead, which we would find ourselves frequently returning to and playing much longer sessions of. I ended up getting TAG on PC when I heard it was getting rollback netcode and went on a good sale. I've always been allured by its vast array of characters and fully (a bit hit and miss) dub with unique character interactions. Big crossovers are something I like to see in general. I think it would've been way cooler if we got some Melty Blood characters instead of Heart and Yumi. But now we finally got a new Melty Blood game, a new Guilty Gear game and now DNF Duel. All of which I and all of my friends would rather play than BBTAG. Central Fiction is and will probably remain my dominant 2D fighter until a new traditional Blazblue comes out that proves to be better.
@@etam8099 The character variety is its strongest point, but in terms of character depth and variance of gameplay, I far prefer BBCF. I may have to give TAG another shot sometime though. I think it is a neat little game in short bursts.
I somewhat agree with the stuff you said in the community bit of the video but you forgot one thing: the community in game. For example the lobbies: the lobbies where cool and interesting ways to socialize with others that are playing the game and at the same time being able to play with them in a controlled area where you can choose the opponents you want to fight (to an extent). But a very big flaw with the lobby system was that is was TOO social, having the ability to type up custom messages in the lobbies brought it main big issue that is rollplayers. The people that would rollplay in the lobby would only do that and would just never actually play the fighting game and just sit around in the lobby. And the community that used the lobby mainly for rollplay was the rwby community, and because of the fact they they didn't come from a game but a web series it made some of the reasons for the rollplaying all more apparent. Fighting games aren't for everyone, and trying to get into a fighting game can sometimes be very intimidating if you are new and have no prior experience with one and most of the people coming from the rwby community fell in that category of no prior experience. some of them came into the game and found something they enjoy and got good at the game and had no major issues but there where also the people that where intimidated and never got fully over it. Seeing the fact that there favorite characters are in a game they choose to stay and use it for something else rather that the main focus of the game. The people that are there to play the game now have to deal with others rollplay and have "chats" the lobby. And there is nothing wrong with a little rollplay here and there and some chatting but the rollplaying and chatting where all the time and the only thing some players would do. Some of the thing said in the rollplays and chats have made people uncomfortable or caused drama. The issue with the rollplayers grew and never stopped which caused some of the people there to play just stop so they could avoid those people. Dwindling the size of BBTAG's community and giving it a very bad reputation in the fgc as a whole.
2:04 this is a really weird segment, a lot of these games are great, many of them I'd argue are far superior to DBFZ (which is kinda just treated like jesus through this entire video). Lumping SamSho 2019 and FEXL with MVCI and DOA6 is the most bizarre pile ever and it completely throws off the argument that this was a dark era. Altogether I would argue a lot of this video really seems to push this idea of a "dark era" with a weird amount of force that becomes clear when you realize how many great fighting games came out of the time. I do still like the video but I just don't get a lot of the non-BBTag takes.
Yeah same its really annoying how overrated Fighterz become it really looks great but there are people who say is the first good DBZ game or the best anime game of all time which is complete BS. Also Samurai Showdown is GOAT literally everyone liked it and SNK didn't really do anything wrong, same with MK X
Yeah, the idea of the "dark era" presented in this video isn't accurate at all imo. I honestly dismiss claims of a fighting game "dark age" between SF3 and SF4 too. It was only a "dark age" for Street Fighter players. There were plenty of great fighting games coming out between SF3 and SF4, even Capcom had other hits like MVC2 and CVS series. And the "dark era" in this video seems to be built on that same inaccurate depiction of fighting games in light of how well SF is doing.
@@moeshojo there was a real dark era between SF3 to SF4. Outside of Tekken(which though 6 was a good game the light being green for 7 was very shaky) most main stream fighting games were very quiet and fighting games were struggling. Then SF4 came out and in the same year BB came out which kick started everything back up. SF4 for the competetive scene and BB for the casual scene.
and to add to the pile, Guilty Gear Rev 2 got released during this "dark age" and GG Sign, then Rev 1 was active during this time too. DBFZ only exploded as much as it did was cause it was semi competent game that was easy enough to learn by anybody while having a Dragonball skin. That skin being the biggest factor in its rise to popularity and GG Strive rode that energy. Then you have all the other fighters mentioned, none of which are bad cept for MAYBE KoF XIV on release....then that game pulled its head out of its ass and got good....all during this same "dark age" If anything I'd argue that was the start of a golden age
I remember finding bbtag due to RWBY & Persona 4 Golden. I got it during 2020, with my first team being Yang & Chie. I'm currently picking up the game again. I'm still new to the game, but I hope to get better at it and show more people this fun game. I hope it could get some more characters or series one day. Also great video and I hope you have a good day. 👍
Man, this game introduced me again into de fighting games. (I only played dbfz at that Time) But when i tried this out on the Switch with my friends for 5 bucks, damn. Now I got knowledge from a lot of fighting games. And I still play Bbtag, such an amazing game
man, when this game was announced I lost my mind in hype. then they showed the only mechanic they carried over from some of the most complex 3 fighters in existance was the autocombos. that was such a gut punch that it made me get into mugen out of sheer dissapointment.
Oh please everyone would’ve loved this if there were no auto-combos. The characters were just too different from their actual game. That’s what ruined this game.
No they wouldn't. The core game alone is too different from literally all series involved and this game was bound to be a very niche thing, being both a fighting game and an anime fighting game at that with no casual appeal like DBFZ or "respect" Guilty Gear has. People would still be complaining about brawlers sucking, half the UNIST characters and Ruby being dumb and so on even with all buttons intact and no changes to characters. BBTag had odds stacked massively against it from its very conception. It got further ran into the ground by netplay, questionable DLC practices and radio silence, but what you're saying has always been a pretty dumb take.
I dunno man, DBFZ to my knowledge has auto combos and it soared in popularity. I personally can't pull off insane combos due to my horrible memory (plus in Strive's case, I feel like every attack essentially launches the opponent away from you). I tried getting into Granblue Fantasy Versus but my god, those inputs for me were insanely delayed. Like I was good at the game, but the input delay ruined it for me
@@chelsthegameruiner8669 DBFZ is carried hard by the IP. Whatever may be said about Goku Fighters' quality as a game, it's undeniable that it reached its height thanks to being based on one of the most popular shows of all time. If you were to replace all BBTag characters with popular shounen IPs, it would be an instant hit even if it had literally all of the same problems like half of the roster being day 1 DLC.
@@anothenblue2630 if the game didn’t have auto Connie’s I doubt the appeal would of lasted long tho for most casuals. The game was extremely easy to pick up and play and be at least semi decent in it
I played ALOT of fighters. And BBTAG it's still a fun casual game I always come back to. The feeling of playing two characters at the same time never gets old. Besides health is being a bit too small, it's definitely one of my favorites. (Thank God I started playing after the Big Patch) *It honestly breaks my heart that is failed.* I felt it was going to be "the Smash Bros of 2D fighters" & continuously add new characters from different series I love & one I've never heard about. But so many things were mishandled here. Again, it just breaks my heart. I was weirdly attached to this game. The fanservice voicelines and the gameplay kept me going.
funny enough- i picked up BBTAG because of Senran Kagura being announced to be in it. i was kind of hyped to see what new DLC would add. it was my first fighting game and looking back on it, it had the potential to be so much better, even so, i still like it. but nowadays i've moved onto undernight in-birth and melty blood mostly. i might buy it again on steam whenever it is on sale to give it another go though.
I used to enter local BlazBlue tournaments and got my ass kicked every time When Tag came out, I entered a tournament with Ruby and Noel and got Top 8 without knowing what the hell I was doing
I love this game, my fighting game history is Smash Ultimate, which helped me get into persona (the rpg) which made me see if P4U was on Nintendo switch, which is was playing basically everything on. I saw BBTag and I bought it. Soon it made me get into BlazBlue as a whole, as well as UNIB, for some weird reason, P4U was on Xbox, so was BB Cronophantasma, so I bought them both. When I figured out BBCF was on the switch I also bought it, I basically pissed my pants when P4U2 was announced for switch and pc, easy to say but I bought it on pc and switch day 1. Now about UNIB, it was a fun game, just isn’t for me, that’s all I have to say about it really. All the characters are cool and so is the story. From playing BB I eventually got into Guilty Gear, with Strive, which definitely has some of my favorite video game characters of all time. Needless to say, Smash Ultimate and BBTAG changed my life for the better, which I can only thank. Damn I wrote a whole essay, but I guess I’m not the first to do that.
i recently picked this game back up, and basically forced my friend to buy it. we've been having a blast, and are currently learning the whole "Tag" part of the game as a blazblue player, it felt weird at first, since characters like Susano'o and Nine played so differently, but i'm loving the game reguardless
I still remember back when the 20 dlcs were announced, I got in an argument with someone that explained it was fine because BlazBlue sprites were complicated due to being based on 3D models. I told them this excuse doesn't work because some of the sprites (at the time of the argument) were 9 years old and already modified multiple times. They then told me that modifying sprites take a lot of time so that's why the older characters were DLC. I showed them a sprite sheet that a friend made for me of an edited kirby with Sol Badguy's hair (don't ask) and told them it took a day to do. They didn't answer back.
What exactly would they have needed to modify about these 9 year old sprites? Also what was this Kirb Badguy/Sol Kirbguy about?
@@espurrseyes42 I used to do sprite comics with friends back in the day when I was younger and I used a Kirby with Sol Badguy's hair as a self insert in our dumb stories.
@@chipslight738 would Sol in Smash make your dreams come true then?
Did you upscale the entire sprite set for your Kirby comics? Because upscaling sprites is not the same as cutting a few pieces of a sprite and pasting it to another. It requires a ton of work. THe problem with BBTag is that Persona and BlazBlue had sprites that had lower resolutions than the totally new RBWY sprites and the newer Under Night In-Birth games.
BlazBlue and Persona were HD games made in a 720p resolution. Uniel was made in 1080p and so were the new RWBY sprites.
But the problem wasn't even just the upscaling, BBTag played astronomically different than any of the games, characters had to be rebalanced, and reprogrammed from scratch.
Capcom is full of DLCs, its not big deal of problem really.
The fact that this game's DLC ended with three franchises only getting their first wave of characters, as well as the first non-RWBY RWBY character being the last one, AND a massive datamine leak that teased basically every character you could ever want just rubs sulfuric acid into the wound.
I'm saying "rubbing sulfuric acid into the wound" forever now, thanks
Omg where is the leak? 😀
You right
What is worse is that only Yumi and Neo were actually new characters per se
There were also some very hyped characters in the leaks such as the entire team of Team JNPR from RWBY which people would’ve loved to see
To be honest, a better name for that era would be the "SECOND Dark Era". To most of the OG FGC, the "Dark Age" refers to the period in which most developers had completely moved on from making 2D fighting games, aside from the occasional crossover titles with reused sprites. The original Dark Age started when SFIII didn't meet sales expectations, and devs kept trying and failing to make 2D fighters work in 3D.
It seems funny that the game most considered to end the first dark age was SFIV, only for it's sequel to possibly cause another.
@@alicekingston8521 just goes to show you how big a deal SF is in the FG genre. For better and worse, the series basically decides the next few years of the genre
It's more to say it was the dark age of Capcom games, as Tekken was still going strong with 5 and the BB series started. Thing is, SF is a very influental fighting game. The 1st thing many people casually think of when you talk about fighting games.
For other fighters in the market to flourish, it's important for SF to be relevant and easy to recommend as a game. Casuals who then enjoy the game might want to check out other branches of the genre. Guilty Gear, MVC, Samsho, etc. When Street Fighter suffers, the rest of the genre tends to be affected by it's failure. There are also devs who look up to SF and Capcom, and take inspirations and advice from their game design, inclusing Arcsys.
@@leithaziz2716 It's called the "Dark Age" because developers, in general, stopped making fighting games because they weren't profitable. Namco was an exception, thanks mostly to Tekken. As TopHatGamingMan proved, fighting games as a whole were not perceived as profitable, even if the FGC and hardcore players enjoyed some of the best releases at the time.
Other factors include the downfall of the arcade market, a flood of aborted fighting game franchises, the aforementioned growing pains with transitioning into 3D, and so on and so forth.
The downfall STARTED with Capcom, but the struggles were felt all around.
It only seems that way if you follow Capcom FGs. KoF had been going strong past SNK's death and rebirth, Guilty Gear grew its beard with #Reload, Melty Blood would get its first release to all public restrooms, indie darlings like Akatsuki Blitzkampf provided an alternative for footsie based games, Tekken was building gods in South Korea, etc etc. FGs outside of Capcom seemed to actually thrive, tbqh.
I'd argue post-SFIV was the real dark age. It was difficult as fuck to convince other FG players to play something not SFIV or Capcom related.
I gotta say I absolutely love this game. I bought it a long time ago when it was on sale for super cheap and just recently gave it some honest attempts and damn it’s good. Truly a unique game with a lot of heart and charm. And despite never playing a under light game, carmine has been some of the most fun I’ve had with a fighting game in a while. I hope more people give it a chance cuz the games in great state as of current
Ayy me too man wassup tryna play
Tag fighters are a VERY acquired taste
Same picked it up at a low price like 20 dollars I think.
If you liked Carmine; pick up UNICLR
@@Grizzexploder carmine is way better in his home game
A couple things I wanna add about Mori's words and regarding BB as a whole, as I think they're very interesting to mention and I was also there witnessing the backlash happening in real time:
1) During one of the interviews about BBTAG, I remember him or someone on the team saying they were making the game EXCLUSIVELY to be played at EVO of that year, releasing only a month before it, which rubbed people the wrong way since even the creators of Skullgirls tried to get their game at EVO and were denied even though the game came out 3 months before the EVO of that year.
2) After the announcement of the 22 DLC characters, people were so mad that it caused radio silence for a full month before they posted a gif of Blake's gameplay on Facebook of all places, and the negativity from that was most likely the final push to make Blake and Yang free, along with the announcement of the game getting a full english dub.
3) Regarding the future of the BB series, Mori mentioned that they were pushing Noel more and more since Chronophantasma, what with the story involving her more and more, her becoming more popular, and even mentioned that since Ragna is out of the picture at the end of BBCF, that Noel would be the main character if there were to ever be a new entry in the mainline series.
I sincerely think if they had abandoned that mindset at the beginning of trying to get the game out solely for EVO, more care would've been put into it, and that we could've started with at least more characters in the base roster, and even given more offline modes, like Arcade Mode (still not in at the time of writing this), and the Abyss Modes from the games' past.
Honestly i hope Noel DOES become the main character, she is my main and honestly the most likeable and most mistrested character
rushing to release for evo was why sf5 had a poor start too I think. they really should have just delayed bbtag by like 6 months to get all the characters in. game would have fared far better public-wise if they did. though perhaps this was a lesson they can take with them going forward.
There's no way they don't have an arcade mode, I thought team blue spent 6 months making an arcade port for the game
I know it
Damn, I would definitely want to see Noel as the main character after Ragna, though I see Juusan from Alternative: Dark War being a candidate for main character status considering she is literally Nu herself taking after Ragna.
biggest failure: lack of offline content like arcade mode
That is what pushed me away from the game that it lacks offline content like arcade mode
It is clear they wanted to focus more on online content to set up fighting game tournaments
The only reason I got the game was to support English dub casts that basically shove to the side and wasn't told there wasn't going be an English dub for BlazBlue central fiction cause Devs were too lazy to dub the game and cause they wanted to rush the game out for EOV
BBTAG was just undercook
Same reason why I'm kinda split about Virtua Fighter 5 (Ultimate Showdown), which is basically just known as the competitive online game with no Offline content outside of a simple 5-10 min Arcade mode and Training.
Lack of single player content is usually a nice recipe for failure in these sorts of games.
To me this is the major problem with modern fighting games. The majority of newer FGs are catered exclusively to the competitive crowd, and while it is true that the FGC has more exposure now than it ever has, competitive players still account for a pretty small percentage of a game's demographic.
For people who are just playing for fun, don't have good internet, or just don't like playing online, there's almost no reason to buy a lot of current fighting games because the single-player content and even local multiplayer is so incredibly scant. All these games have is online, but online play inevitably has a short shelf-life; as time passes and the player base inevitably thin, all of the hours and labor that go into producing the netcode becomes for naught, and what's left is maybe 1/3 of a finished game.
Soul Calibur V may be better as a fighting game compared to Soul Calibur II, but Soul Calibur II is infinitely more replayable due to its wealth of game modes and bonus content.
@@jojonoa3590 BBTAG proves that focusing only online will eventually kill the game
Fun fact: It was actually a miracle that Soul Calibur 6 happen because 5th game nearly kill the series which is it why took 6 years for a sequel
To me the dlc crazy kinda killed it for me. Half the characters I wanted to play with were licked behind dlc with too many characters locked behind them and being too close to each other. And because of the dark era after Capcom I had the same problem with Omen of Sorrow. Also, respect to the guy with the Arcana Heart plushie.
I honestly didn't mind the DLC for this game in particular bc the price for the base game + the first 20 dlc chars was just an average 60 or less
If the game had been full price with that kinda DLC it would've been ridiculous, but they had the state of mind to lower the base game's price so that you're only paying as much as you would for any other game
The 2.0 cast obviously was more money to add but by then the game was frequently on sale anyways so you could arguably have gotten all of the game's content cheaper around the time the 2.0 cast launched
My problem with the dlc was that you had to get it in the specific packs. Just say you were only interested in the P4A characters; you're gonna have to buy basically all the dlc characters because they're divided up across a bunch of bundles.
At least give us the option to get characters individually like almost every other fighter out there.
Licked?
@@KrissyBlues "f the game had been full price with that kinda DLC it would've been ridiculous, but they had the state of mind to lower the base game's price so that you're only paying as much as you would for any other game"
then they should of released the game with all or at least the vast majority those characters in the base roster at a full game price rather then piece meal everything to make you spend money on RE-USED characters. the entire issue is that these DLC characters don't justify even their small cost because we already know that all of them are just ported from old games instead of new stuff
@@joedatius I mean, no, cause they still took work to implement despite the sprites being reused, and they couldn't afford to wait until they had all these characters finished because the game had to be released before EVO or it was deader than it already was lol
The reason why MC2 got away with having a game made out of 90% reused assets was because the roster was HUGE. This game could have done the same if they launched with, say, 45 characters (all reused assets except the RWBY cast after all.) But no, they had to get greedy. Imagine if MvC game launched with 20 characters and then charged more for the rest.
MVC2 had a huge roster. And how many of the characters were paid dlc again? Zero.
But I'm sure they would have done that back then if they could. Dlc has been more of a curse than a blessing tbh. We just can't have nice thing because humans are greedy and selfish by nature.
@@Superluigi881 you can say that again.
9 months later and they did a
Exactly that for the Xbox release.
@@Stryfe52 it was way too late then.
So something I want to note as being a former CF player and a current BBTAG player. When CF released and they showed the character reveal at Evo along with the first reveal for BBTag. At that point we thought that was going to be the last edition of the game but the game itself needed more work as far as patches go. So Central Fiction actually had two patches pre jubei and post jubei currently being the standard. Persona Ultimax also had a similar patch but it was only in Japan until recently where you can now play it in the current PS4 version.
Now something to note is that they had the 2.0 characters that people could play at majors as a sort of beta for the game. Some of the players I followed on Twitter would state that some of the characters were changed slightly from that version of the game. When the DLC finally released that was the definitive version of the game that we got and just like CF and ultimax we expected a post DLC patch to fix the problems like Yumi damage scaling and B Zio. Instead we were greeted with more radio silence.
I remember staying up till 3:00 in the morning to watch the fighting game Round Table watching twitch chat constantly ask about BBTag. The radio silence, the pandemic, and eventual cancellation of the Arc Revo tour was the nail on the coffin. Combined with an absolute terrible netcode there really wasn't a reason for people to play the game or even for me to recommend it.
Personally I feel like the game is unfinished and you can tell mainly with the Akatsuki Blitzkampf not having their own stage and Blitztank not having any unique interactions with any of the cast.
I had almost given up until the rollback announcement at CEO which absolutely nobody was expecting I even joked about it seconds before it was revealed. I still have a bit of hope that some sort of announcement will come for tag maybe a final patch just to fix these little problems. I think the game has a very diverse amount of characters and truthfully the addition of more characters would be great but I think it's fine where it is and just a patch would be better than nothing.
In the meantime tournaments like WNF and IcuHater I've been doing a good job keeping people's interests with a recent 10 V 10 Japan versus America battle.
I'm cautiously optimistic toward the future of the game but it is a game that I would highly recommend to a lot of people.
If that will ever happen then they need to bring back the arcade mode
As a big fan of BBTag I was half expecting this to be like a lot of other videos ranting about how BBTag is the only fighting game with easy inputs ever and they made it for stupid baby idiots who can’t think but you actually did give it a fair shake, and I appreciate that.
Yeah its for argument like those that i hate the FGC if a game doesn't follow their self made standards then its trash or "not a real fighting game" , they're nothing but a bunch of cry babies
After DNF Duel I came to appreciate BBTag more
Well thats not entirely wrong simce thats button layout totally fucked characters like waldstein
@@pank3245 DNF Duel is far better than BBTAG lol
@@557deadpool Facts lol bbtag both games braindead af. Mixups take zero fucking effort and everything fills your screen with 2 buttons
I like dancing in the lobby :)
Me too
The Biggest problem of BBTAG aside from it's gameplay and Assine online and lobby is how shit Single player is. No Arcade mode no gallery mode, No Abyss or Golden Arena mode, and The Story mode sucked so much and the keyword final boss was lame as hell. Worse part is this was the last time we see Persona 3 and 4 characters and Christ they got done so dirty. This game has so much Potential, and they fucking wasted it!
Don't forget the dlc characters
I agree with your point, but for story mode personally tho, as crossover fighting game its fine (it just work) and I don't expect it to be spectacular cuz arcys is just a small company
Yeah that shit was horrible
@@Aripuni1 Arcsys has made some God tier fighting games wtf you talking about
@@Aripuni1 being small isn't isn't excuse for a shitty story
Not even rollback could save this game its insane
To be fair, the rollback on the PC version didn't do a really good first impression lmao
It’s actually doing alright on Xbox a month after release. I’m praying it’s a sign, but 😢😢😢😢
I'm still sad that the only RWBY character we got after completing team RWBY was Neo. I was expecting team JNPR at least.
It was unlikely since the developers wanted penny and Adam to be in it.
If team jnpr would be in it, it’ll more likely be Pyrrha
I can't believe it. The introduction of RWBY into the game was one of its main selling points. Why would they only add 5 characters from it?
@@danielmaster8776 The Leaked DLC list shows they had intents to add a fair chunk of more RWBY characters all of JNPR, Cinder, Adam, Roman etc but as a comment list said above that's literally where the game ended in turns of development and updates on it that leak list basically was a giant punch in the dick because it had a lot of fan wanted characters in it.
There were also rumors to introduce Melty as a new Fate. (Heh)
I like RWBY and Persona 4, so imagine my reaction when I discovered this crossover fighting game with 2 of my favorite series battling each other alongside others franchises, that's how I met BBTAG. It is unfortunate that this happened to this game but hey! at least I could enjoy the interactions and diverse fighting mechanics. I geniuly liked this game, at least at a casual perspective.
It was a similar situation for me in regards to BB, P4 and UNI. I have little reason to return to BBTAG now that its own online presence is gone, but I'm grateful that I got to play online with some of my favorite characters from those games again for a little while. I'm crossing my fingers that UNI 2 will fare better even though it doesn't have the popularity of something like BB and P4 to back it up. One thing I'm certain of is that I'm going to make the most out of the month or so of competition that its release will bring to the online scene. I don't want to regret not jumping onto what may very well be the UNI series' last hurrah thanks to the surge in interest that rollback brings to a franchise.
This is a good video and generally does well at summarizing the good and bad about BBTAG. Still love this game even with it's flaws and it's worth giving a shot if anyone who sees this has not. Though it's sad to see how ASW sort of let an opportunity escape them by not further supporting the game in its current state outside of the rollback update that generally makes the game easier to play online.
The tone of that game is Lighter & Softer.
Rollback Netcode still does plenty for the community of the game. Meanwhile I'm here hoping Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 gets Rollback.
Are there magic settings to make BB:CP/Tag play better than 5 FPS?
Because I've got fifty fighting games and this is the ONLY engine that lags THIS HARD on my computer. It's an i7-era, too.
As a huge CF and P4A fan I still can't bring myself to enjoy BBTag unfortunately it's easily the most disappointing game I've ever bought personally. I've since realized I just don't like team games at all so it was probably doomed from the start for me.
Same, p much only got it for P4 characters then I saw most of them were dlc and immediately regret my purchase
Tag fighters are a different beast
This game could have been so much better had most of the roster not have been DLC and if they had continued with giving us more characters. The P4 Arena cast needed to be finished off by giving us Rise, Yukari, Ken and kuramaru, Junpei, etc., RWBY needed more characters then what we had because the web series was used as the selling point for this game. We could have gotten Jaune, Nora, Pyrrha, and Ren of team JNPR since they're just as important as team RWBY, we could have gotten Roman Torchwick, Cinder Fall, Adam Taurus, Mercury, emerald, and Qrow. And Blazblue and Undernight likely had a few more characters that people would have wanted as well.
Qrow would have been awesome, they have so many good fights to take from too.
I love this game but aye. The massive amount of characters locked behind DLC and the amount of unfinished rosters/small rosters was kinda my major problem with it. I was waiting for JNPR to be announced at some point, maybe Yuuki Terumi, certainly Sho Minazuki, but nope. Hell, if they were ever going to give us characters from alternate games, I would have hoped to somehow, some way, see some XBlaze characters too. I like the roster we have but it could be so much better.
@@Drakon_Minaka Yeah and with Smash Ultimate being revealed at the time a couple of weeks after BBtag released to the public you'd think arc would want to compete against smash for it's large ass roster, do an everyone is here thing for the four franchises that were tied in. Be no, now do get that arc is a small studio and they don't have large budgets but you'd think that other companies like Atlus/SEGA, Roosterteeth, and Frenchbeard (the ones that respectively own Persona, RWBY, and UnderNight) would be more than willing to help Arc out with coughing from some cash but of course they didn't bother to do that.
Man I wanted more Akatsuki Blitzkampf characters, mainly Adler and Perfecti
Great video , genuinely had a good time reminiscing about the past even though not all of it was good. BBTAG had it's problems but its still a game that is near and dear to my heart. I genuinely hope the game gets more support but if it doesn't thats fine too. Brought tears to my eyes. Good shit
This video is a trip down memory lane. This game was how I got some of my my friends to try out traditional fighters and came out in an important time in my life. So I'll always enjoy this guilty pleasure of a game. This game feels like it didn't really receive enough love to be great. Some of the characters had this weird thing, where they arrive dead on arrival but then get no love in future balances. Even worse, you could be Celica and get nothing.
I have a crackpot theory regarding the launch of the game and why Blake/Yang were DLC: it wasn't meant to release for another few months. Pricing the game at $50 instead of $60 really makes it feel like they weren't selling the full thing on release day and the strange state of 1.0 + DLC kind of supports my idea. The reason was so they could be at EVO instantly, and to do that, they needed to give competitors a few months with the game.
Mori literally confirmed that he was trying to get the game out before EVO 2018. It also makes no sense for blake and yang to have been DLC when they could have just put them in the base game. Look at how many characters persona 4 and undernight each got in base game. They got 4 characters in the roster while blazblue dominated the roster for obvious reasons. It's unfair and scummy that half of team RWBY was made into DLC just so mori could rush the game through the doors of EVO. On top of that in the story modes for BBtag Blake and 9 of the DLC fighters of the first 3 packs were already programmed in the game as non playable CPUs.
It doesn't have an arcade mode...
I love this game. My only complaint about it is that the health bars are so small matches end so quickly.
I personally dont mind the low health.
due to playing with a big group of people who like spectating and having one match at a time.
it can be super frantic sometimes and a lot of fun.
But I understand not liking it, especially if you play against that one guy who knows some really high damaging combos.
and knows how to block your setups.
My complaint is the lack of a single player arcade mode
@@youwayo I always prefer a survival mode tbh
Some good points here for how it went. I wasn't deep in the FGC when it came out so I only had the casual side. Half the characters being announced as DLC was a huge blow as I saw a lot of "wait for the definitive edition" talk since the game itself. The lack of representation for RWBY despite them being a main group was there to. There was a lot of "half the roster is Blazblue and there's like no RWBY characters". And it not being in the EVO immediately after 2.0 until fans called for it was another big thing
BBTAG was my first introduction to RWBY. I was playing the trial version of the game and played as Ragna and Ruby Rose, and fell in love with Ruby's design, and fighting style. Back than I was only familiar with the Blazblue and Persona characters, not so much the other two.
It sucks to this, because I hate to know this will be a one off and they aren't going back. They fumbled the game and it just breaks my heart. I played this game til launch up until it died.
Wow…..!!! This was a damn good video from beginning to end! I appreciate the work you put into it. I actually just bought a complete edition of this game and I’m currently waiting for it to arrive.
I had such high hopes for this game, very high hopes. When I purchased this game I was dedicated to finish the training mode for all characters. But then something happened and the spark was gone. Can't quite pin point it, but it collected dust after 1 month.
Still my most played fighting game. It got me into the genre. I came for Yang, stayed for Tager/Wald shenanigans. Loved all the netplay tourneys I did and my Evo run.
This is total rage, for we are in your grappler cage.
I love it, it did the fan’s expectations of getting players to play the original games, I love uniclr a ton, p4au is great, and bbcf is exciting once you’re used to it! I actually got friends to get bbtag and we play at school since I own it on switch. Once my principal saw us and he was interested and played against me, he’s a big fighting game fan, and has fought the students in MvC.
That's a pretty damn cool principal u got there. 👌
Which were the lucky 2 characters to be his team haha
@@shaneee3113 It was Ragna and Hakumen. I choose Hyde and maybe Naoto kurogane. I remember being nervous in the select screen especially if he came across some of the “spicy” characters like Mai or Makoto.
Thank you for the info. Watching Awesome Videos Like This Made Me Realize That it’s fun to watch Documentaries like this.
Great video! Always saw this game from a distance so it's interesting to here about its relevancy over the years!
there are exactly 9 people playing this right now and this is a good day
as a massive rwby fan who loves fighting games its depressing as hell that rwby prolly wont be in any other game expect for one i have to go into discords to find games for
it was my first fg which eventually got me into comp strive
Always a good day when I see a new scrappy vid in the sub box
BBTAG was the first fighting game I ever played, it brought me into the genre and to this day I still have more fun with this game than any other. I'm absolutely in love with this game and it has a very special place in my heart.
Thanks for making this video, this game needs to be reborn.
I am honestly so happy that this game has gotten some attention again. BlazBlue is my favorite 2D fighting game franchise, and I genuinely love BBTAG, so it warms my heart to see that it got rollback, and some love once again.
Very informative video. I never played this game (I play Smash Ultimate) but I always wanted to make my own fighting game. The DLC discussion was super interesting. Too much DLC releasing in short time windows would definitely kill hype, especially if the characters were all revealed before their trailers were out. I'll definitely keep this in consideration.
BBTAG had a roller coaster of a ride that I didn’t know of
I got the game, played it and didn’t find much enjoyment out of it so I left before 1.5 and 2.0 was announced
I did return after the rollback update and had some enjoyment with the arcana hearts character. It wasn’t enough to keep me coming back for more.
I’ll definitely look back at this game as the perfect pick up and play game for anyone who wants to play an in depth tag game or those who just want to pick up a controller and press buttons. BBTAG I think did a good job on that.
It’s cool to see the game still be active to this day with the rollback update but it’s a little too late for me to get back into it.
Great video on the history of the game! Looking forward to your next video ^^
Nice! Been hoping to see someone to do a indepth video on this game. From time I've spent playing BBTag I've enjoyed it myself I have to say.
As a competitive player in the Switch scene, and someone whom has shown the capability to hold up against even PS4 and PC players, a lot of people fail to realize how toxic 1.5 was. The Yuzuriha/Mitsuru/Akihiko core was incredibly dominant, but what was even worse was 1.5 Nine/Merkava which I would unironically argue was more toxic than Adachi/Yumi is today. Speaking of which, even in 2.0 EVERYONE DOWNPLAYS NINE! And their argument? "She's hard." which, yeah no, she still does too much damage, teleport is broken, corner to corner loops, SOLO UNBLOCKABLES, I can go on.
That said, 2.0 ultimately ended up pretty okay except for a few glaring issues, some of which you already covered, but I'll go over a couple of the bigger ones you missed that made the patch fun but unhealthy.
2.0 DLC: With a few exceptions (Neo, Blitztank, Celica) it feels like the 2.0 newcomers were made broken on purpose to sell the DLC, making this a pay to win patch. Now Liz is half broken and half not. Her Point game sucks, but her Assist game is toxic. The other five though? Broken as hell, especially with other stuff I'll go over below.
Unblockables: With the exception of Blitztank jC, unblockables in general became far too centralizing. Active Switch caused a lot of high/low and strike/throw setups, with Nine being able to do the high/low solo, and Susano'o having access to both. It caused Shirogane, Akatsuki, Hakumen, and other such characters to enable genuinely toxic situations that without Pushblock or Burst and sometimes even with those, left the player in disadvantage helpless.
Neutral Skipping: Let's face it, this ended up causing problems on thousands of levels. We all know Adachi B Ziodyne by now, but there are a lot of super fast neutral skips that are near impossible to react to and are even safe on block, which when combined with the team mechanics can make these moves cancerous to deal with. Seth EX Setsuna (214C), Akatsuki B Tatsu, Yu EX Swift Strike (214C), Mai DP in general (which if they wanted to get rid of DP Assist completely, hers needed to be changed entirely), and even setups from full screen that can force a 4-Way mix, especially from Hilda. With Pushblock and in most cases other defensive tools being useless against a lot of these things, often times these situations can make any match into a 1 Player Game in an instant unless you hard read they're coming and guess the right response to the situation, with the punishment for guessing wrong being potentially fatal a lot of the time.
That said, in spite of the glaring faults that doomed BBTAG's chances at being a massive success, it's still a fun game to play and go back to even with the game being in the state it's in. I owe a lot to BBTAG as if it weren't for it, I'd never have met a lot of the people I now consider close friends today. If it seems like I was coming off as overly negative, please keep in mind I'm being as critical as I am because BBTAG as a whole means a lot to me, and holds a special place in my heart even to this day. Here's hoping the future of the game is significantly better going forward, but considering the track record Team Blue has with communication or lack thereof, we can only wait and see.
Very thoughtful read fam I miss BBTAG a lot 🥲
You lost me at competitive switch player
You really think people are going to criticize Nine for doing what Nine is supposed to do?
Like Nine is the only character who in their current state plays even close to how she did in bbcf
So people are gonna ignore it
The main reasons were:
- Watered down gameplay
- The Atrocious DLC list (20-25 characters)
- Yang and blake as DLCs (and just few characters for the RWBY franchise)
- Horrible Online
I never once thought about if they just spaced out the DLC releases, it would have helped out a lot with the droughts later on. I just remember at the time thinking it shouldn't be taking as long as it did for these characters to get re-tooled, and put in the game.
Great video, I really enjoyed it. For as weird of a time it was, I looked back fondly on it. Having a cross over fighter with four franchises I was into, had me incredibly excited from announcement to release.
I had so much hype for this title... 😔😔
I was very glad it was dubbed because Central Fiction gave me depression for cutting it
I was a fan of P4A, BB and UNI so I was really excited to play as all my favorite characters, then they didn't add Tsubaki or Marie who are my favorites from both games, and I really wanted to see all the characters interact with one another, I really loved the story because of it and all it did was make me wish for more. What could be the next fate? How could the characters act with one another?
Also adding one character per fate was disappointing
I just want byakuya.....is it too much to ask😭😭😭
BBTag has a special place in my heart, literally stopped playing Video games back in 2007 over a 10 year break, Blazblue and BBtag brought me back and Akatsuki became my favorite fighting game character of all time, great vid.
Couldnt agree more with what you said about the expectations. I really had my heart set on this game playing like Blazblue but was crushed when it did not and because of this some characters took big hits comparing their Tag moveset to their OG moveset
I personally had fun with my team of Kanji and Yukiko where I used Kanji's back assist to safely use B fire charge during neutral against friends who didn't want to approach. I also found a lot of stuff with Yang and Izayoi that just made me want to lab team combos more than actually compete.
I'm not a pro fighting game player, not even close, and I don't aspire to be. I play fighting games to experience the stories, learn the basics of each character and maybe even try to learn some of the cool stuff I watch the pros do.
With all that said, I *love* BB Tag. It put a smile on my face so many times with everything from the character interactions to the music selections and more.
I come back to the game every couple months and have a blast every time. It really feels like a "party" in a way similar to Capcom vs SNK or MvC2, and not enough modern fighting games capture that feel
I must say this was a wonderful retrospective of Cross Tag. But hey nothing beats the magical word of Rollback. Aye you get my sub my dood
Having known about RWBY for a while by then, and getting into Persona at the time, I was able to get into this game, which in turn is what got me into BlazBlue and UnderNight, alongside the three they added later (especially SK).
everyone else drowned? Central fiction was release on console in the same year. NRS games never drown MKX is still played to this day
And SamSho is still fun. Not completely dead.
I really liked this game because of the story and fan like seeing multiple characters interact with one another e.g. chie and makoto having fun, and thole cooking competition!
BBTAG was my first fighting game, I was a persona fan so I bought it with my friend on PC back when there were no persona games on pc. This was post 2.0, but pre rollback. So I bought the version with all dlc. I found it really fun to play thanks to the simplicity, it led me to looking deeper into fighting game stuff and learning the fundamentals, seeing all the other characters too made me interested in the other franchises. Fast forward to today, I still remember BBTAG whenever I have to learn a new character in a fighting game (Mostly just play strive but i like trying out a lot of them). If it wasnt for this game, I dont think I wouldve ever cared enough about fighting games to try more, sad to hear its story now in retrospective
Loved this video. Subscribed right away before video started because O knew this video was finna be a gem. Turns out I was in my assumption
I would also add as a HUGE BB fan, the dubbed fans of BB feel especially slighted since we spent every game with the dub until CF which was Japanese only, THEN we get BBTag which made it feel like salt in the wound after the fact. They dubbed characters for BBTag but not CF? I'm not a fan of the game but I respect the community. To this day I'm mixed on team blue
I haven't played BB Tag since it's first year, and even then, I only ever got to play the demo on Switch and the PS4 version whenever my friends brought it to Smash tournaments. It was the game that got me into traditional fighters, but honestly, I don't think I'd like it much if I went back to it. The simplified control scheme and reliance on auto combos are precisely what I loved about it before, but I don't think I'd be very fond of them nowadays.
I hope one day they make a sequel which can address some of this game's flaws and maybe even introduce some more cool new universes (I think Deltarune characters would be all kinds of sick.)
it's funny, because along skullgirls, this game really holds a special place in my heart.
skullgirls helped me get into fighting games, but bbtag was the first fighting game i was following and playing during it's lifespan (since other game i played like blazblue cf and guilty gear were pretty dead at the time thanks to being released so long ago)
So this game has both some of my first interactions with online play AND my first interactions with the FGC, so yeah, both of these games are VERY important to me.
and honestly, even trough it all i still love this game, it's one of the games i poured the most hours in and altough i still play a bunch of fighting games, it's a game i'm always down to come back to along with skullgirls.
I do think it's quite dumb and unbalanced, but it's still a LOT of fun to just play and mess around with, and this game helped know a bunch of new friends that i still talk to to this very day.
funny how both of my favourite fighting games has such a troubled history behind them, but oh well, it happens XD
A sin I have still not yet forgiven nor ever will since it appears that won’t be fixed: the lack of single player options, namely arcade mode
As a BBTAG player, it’s very sad to see that this game does not get a lot of attention. Is the game dying? Maybe.
I wish there’s more balancing changes in terms of patch notes. Cause right now, the BBTAG meta has become stale.
That it has. I still check in on current Top 8s and aside from specialists like YoFavScrub and Shige, it's the same old shit every single time.
@@SonicSmashBro then what to do? If you wanna be competitive and win tournaments and matches, u are kinda forced to be stale.
@@Koganai96 Take it from someone whom played comp BBTAG for a long time, it's definitely in that position is most cases. Obviously most of the cast can get really far with the right player, but unfortunately in 2.0 being a godlike player only does so much. Look at Shige with the Izayoi/Orie and you'll see what I mean. Man makes Top 8s pretty often and is actually hype to watch, but he can only get so far off of skill alone.
@@SonicSmashBro this doesn’t apply to just Shige. This apply to any player who runs the cheap same team over and over. Like Adachi/Yumi, Adachi/Yu. The same team that DanteThomas and Tempest uses. And seriously it was overpicked in tournaments
I feel that even with those odds, bbtag could have survived if they didn't release 2.0 half assed.
Which makes a certain chara become broken and cause the game unplayable, and makes no plan to fix it then Dev gave up.
Outstanding video!! Thanks for it
YO! This was so well put together! Really good job on this video. Sucks how this game died so suddenly. Even my friends avoid it like a plague. Ah well, I just hope it doesn't mean the Blazblue franchise as a whole is dead...
It's the best party-slash-fighting game ever. You can casually pick up any character and make random 2v2s against your friends. It's simple but intuitive system means you can very quickly get into figuring out cross combo shenanigans and universal invul reversal means you don't have to think too hard about how to get out of pressure with a character you just picked for the first time. It's great for casually playing with your friends, I hope that is what it will be remembered for. As a competitive fighting game though, that's another story.
I still think if they replaced RWBY with guilty gear when RT literally dragged their feet
with the RWBY cast. Telling them when they want to put the characters in the game to
"read the manga" is insulting. Can you imagine telling someone to read a whole series to figure
out a moveset? IT says something that most their games have been aces but this one comes
out and it's jank, half the rwby cast aren't finished, RT mostly Miles doesn't wanna work with them
the rwby fanbase tried at the time so hard to dox and tell people not to buy the game.
It was toxic, in my perfect world as soon as they told them to read the manga I'd walk away.
Put MHA or Soul eater, better series not written by racist in anyway.
Also persona was vastly more well known and a bigger fanbase than RWBY let's be real.
Persona has so many sequel and spin off games, cosplays, it's well known in both japan and
America and sold well in both states. I knew people who when rwby came out as the forth were
literally like "what even?" And "okay..." and even rwby fans were like "seems like a wasted slot they could of used GG for"
And it certainly fell off, I mean look at how many critique videos exist out there. Look at how many people
poop on it's story when it's not doing it itself.
@@sokumotanaka9271
Yeah persona tool the world by storm, literally most of the people who were interested in this brought it for persona and didn't even know what rwby was.
I was the only one in my friend circle who knew what it was.
Really nice to hear about this game again
I dropped it in 1.0 in part do to buying the switch version but maybe ill try it again and see how it is now
BBTAG has a special place in my heart, because it was my first anime fighter and helped me get into every other anime fighter I’ve ever played and enjoyed. I loved the game to death, and I still enjoy it to this day. I was really passionate about seeing it succeed and get better. It was sad to see the eventual fallout of everything bad that could ever happen. With rollback now added I’m hoping the community can somewhat heal over what has happened.
Another thing I thought of was downfall of content creation of BBTAG, since many of the companies (particularly Rooster Teeth) started claiming all videos on the game because they copyrighted some of the in-game music months after release. It really hurt a lot of the content creators and imo hurt a chance to reach more people through content creation
I really love bbtag and much more important speech that you said about bbtag was truly understandable for me to listen to and giving my thoughts about it as my opinion on what to expect more update to this topic of a team game i love the speech from you i really appreciate it keep it up great work bro💚🖤
Ngl dispite me having a shit ton of feeling about the game it was still the knly fighting game that made me go. “Damn i love fighting games” and i had a very wild ride and had a huge character arc with it. At first i started palying with a heavy toxic community with the game and over time as i did get banned from that community with alot of raging overtime j got to meet and go to other communities and grow as a person better and not let my anger control me and i got to play bbtag with does people recommened them the game got them to play the source materials and meet 3 life long friends in the procress. When i first hanged out with that todic commjnity i only stayed cause in my 14 year old head it was saying that this is the only community and only people that will accept you to play with them and it led to alot of mental issues and alot of toxic behavior looking at this game jsut remind me of does days and thinking what if i havent raged that day where they kicked me out. But now i make better and much healthier relationships and memories with way better people and i keep introducing people to the game as much as i can due to this weird relationship i had with it and i hope that the people that i managed to bring in can have a better time with it than i had in the begining its jsut been a real journy with this game for me and it has helped me expand my tastes in games even tho i still have shit taste lol.
I remember getting hyped for the next character in BB Tag like Smash Bros. Good times!
You really summed up a lot of my feelings and issues with this game. One thing though, I think your definitions of tag vs team games need swapping. I think a tag game is just a game where you can tag and a team game is where the whole team is more active.
Great video 👍🏽
Whenever I say that this game is the Lego Dimensions of anime fighting games, I don't just mean in terms of premise, having many brands the studio has touched upon before, including original brands, even having franchises they've never touched before, having almost all the original voice actors reprise their roles and the fun interactions the characters have whenever you set up specific teams, some of the jokes are even some of the nerdiest jokes you'll ever hear, I also mean in terms of announcements and updates, sales and how it hit the downfall, though quite differently. You know, I do wonder if Multiversus is actually a response to this game, since it does have the same ideas, being a cross-over fighting game and a fighting game that relies on coop and teamwork.
holy fuck lego dimensions is a blast from the past but like
that makes sense though
@@keystone5750 Yeah, even a great game can eventually fall and be left forgotten if it's not careful.
@@keystone5750 I wonder what more anime franchises we could've seen in this game. One that would've been cool and literally had a dream about is the anime, BNA: Brand New Animal.
This game is an underrated gem. I love this game.
A few things to add that happened with this game. I remember pre launch there was a lot of should I say confusion over the pricing structure of this game with it being lower than retail price but them tacking on the pass for all the dlc in the form of the special edition there was discourse on whether the prices were scams or not.
Another thing with dlc that you hadn't touched on was bbtag's lackluster story mode but another kick to the people who played it was that there were characters that were not playable yet that would appear in the story mode and this just got people more heated about the waits for dlc as the characters were already seemingly in the game (there was so much talk about reused assets and laziness here it was insane). It also made their inclusion as dlc instead of being in the base game that much more annoying.
One thing you did touch on was the datamines and leaks but it was kinda undersold in this video this was a HUGE part of this game back then as I think specifically the 1.5 version dlc was known before its official announcement. This brought hype to the game but also killed some hype as well because the leaks were so rampant pretty much everyone knew who was coming already.
One last thing for expectations that was a big letdown was the character selection and lack of characters from other series. Rwby was the first one like you said with Yang and Blake but many rwby fans expected ANY other character to show up at some point and it took all the way till Neo's release to finally get another this was especially annoying for rwby fans since this series was not only a big selling point for the game but it was one of the original fates but just had way less characters than the other 3. Persona also got a bit of this hate since it didn't have the full investigation team (main characters of persona 4) in the base game either and instead they came out later as dlc (and we still never got Rise lol). But this expectation of characters spread to the arcana heart, akatsuki blitzkampf, and senran kagura too where people wanted more characters but they just never came.
To wrap it up I still say to this day I think arcsys should've just taken another year or so with bbtag and had it launch with something similar to 1.5 maybe announcing the 5th fate on release to show more was coming. I think if they had all the dlc characters from the 4 main fates in the base game and then went on to make dlc of rwby and the 3 extra fates after the game's release then there would've been a lot less discourse throughout the game's lifespan. You're right about hindsight being 20 20 because looking back it really feels like bbtag was just pushed out the door and then desperately trying to play catch up until it died.
Really good video though, bbtag and dbfz got me into the fgc scene so even with all its ups and downs it's probably still my most played fighting game.
Really hated that you couldn’t control your normals so a lot of characters movesets were trapped in the middle of an auto combo
I bought BBTAG with my friends on the switch when it was on sale for like $3 in late 2019 and we had a BLAST. I was the only one who got the DLC though lol. Bought it again on the PC, but unfortunately can’t play rn cus of the weird lobby hack thing going on. Guess people found out how to steal your info in the BBTAG lobby on PC LOL
I wouldn’t call this period a dark era at all. Smash was blowing up. MKX was pretty big and is still played to this day with more viewing than mk11. Tekken came back from irrelevancy after tag flopped (was a great game tho). Xrd came.
Only games that had any bad traction were capcom games.
Soul Calibur 6 was also the highest selling game in the series so I don't know how that was the dark era either.
smash and MK being big doesn't mean anything.
Tekken already existed for years before and isn't counted
Xrd was never very popular
@@joedatius Yes, it does mean A LOT that they are big
MK11 actually has way more views than MKX, it's consistently getting more views
I know it’s been months but I wanted to throw my opinion for the hell of it. I remember seeing BBTag being played by friends at a time when I was basically unaware of any of the 4 series, just a baseline knowledge of persona being a thing. I eventually bought the game and I thought it was really cool, I had grown up playing street fighter so it was a really weird game to me, that being said having also bought FighterZ I was getting used to the possibility of an anime fighter and an air combo heavy world. BBTag got me interested in fighting games in recent time, it was also one of my earlier switch titles so it was often played with friends with little to no knowledge of fighting games. It’s that ending bit that brought me here. I’ve always felt from the start that the game lacked a certain sophistication or complexity (well I was also fairly unaware of the added mechanics for 2.0) being a kid coming from street fighter I expected a fighting game to hold a level of work for a combo not pressing one button, even FighterZ left more room and reward for learning, at the least it felt more rewarding when I figured something out in FighterZ, BBTag felt like a very low bar in and not a significantly higher bar up (little did I know until I played against some actually good players) so not long ago I made a friend buy the game during sale. This friend had no fighting game experience, I felt like I had done something wrong to him, he’s asked to play at times but maybe I’ve become snobbish I have a hard time going back to the game after spending so much time diving into objectively better fighting games. Strive for example I think is great in that you can have a low entry and mess around with friends but there’s an insane amount to learn to get into higher levels of play. BBTag I felt I realistically only improved my play when I decided to try Yumi and magically started to win more. I think the game certainly is cool and fun but it’s just a little too much, I think partially I don’t like tag fighters as much as more traditional fighters. BBTag often feels hard to follow or like I’m turning my brain off and watching my Yumi sprite fly across the screen and do massive damage. It’s not the worst game but I think if it got a little more love and a little more balance it could’ve been ok.
Great vid, wish for your success sir.
No arcade mode kill this game
Definitely gotta do your homework my guy. MKX was thriving and with the release of Inj 2 it only picked up. Plus the fact that NRS is currently still the number 1 leading FG Developer for both single player content and rollback network implementation definitely blew every JP game released at the time and still to this day out of the water.
nah nowadays arcsys is the #1 rollback dev, I think most people would agree. Altough in terms of feature completeness nrs is still the best because japanese studios always mess up the matchmaking/extra features like frigging frame data.
Mkx still does well cause mkx is actually good unlike mk11
To be fair I think he was mostly comparing JP fighters
@@aarong8099 he showed an image of MKX at the start though and like op said, that game was fairly huge at the time.
@@The300Player Yeah I agree and wasn't denying that, just saying a large majority of Japanese developed games are being compared along with it and MKX being used probably didn't cross his mind twice when making the video.
Played BBTag last year. Didn't have it, but after a few months 9 times out of 10 there were literally zero players in any lobbies, so I just... Stopped playing too.
I came in wanting to play more Yuzuriha so I can definitely say you're spot on about not getting to play your favorite characters.
Really nice job highlighting the history of this game and the events surrounding it! I remember first playing BBTAG at a friend's house on their PS4 when it was brand new. One of the characters my friend gravitated toward immediately was Gordeau. He became his main and damn was it a chore to deal with. Its reassuring to know I wasn't alone about this character. I quickly started to be let down by its stripped down control scheme and obnoxiously powerful and low effort team combos. I was never into Team or Tag games to begin with the exception of MVC2 and CVS2 on occasion. Every time I've booted up BBTAG in short bursts with my friends always made me wish I were playing Central Fiction or Project M with them instead, which we would find ourselves frequently returning to and playing much longer sessions of. I ended up getting TAG on PC when I heard it was getting rollback netcode and went on a good sale. I've always been allured by its vast array of characters and fully (a bit hit and miss) dub with unique character interactions. Big crossovers are something I like to see in general. I think it would've been way cooler if we got some Melty Blood characters instead of Heart and Yumi. But now we finally got a new Melty Blood game, a new Guilty Gear game and now DNF Duel. All of which I and all of my friends would rather play than BBTAG. Central Fiction is and will probably remain my dominant 2D fighter until a new traditional Blazblue comes out that proves to be better.
I dunno, BBTAG always stood up to me because of how much variety it had in it's fates, who knows who the last fates would have been anyway
@@etam8099 The character variety is its strongest point, but in terms of character depth and variance of gameplay, I far prefer BBCF. I may have to give TAG another shot sometime though. I think it is a neat little game in short bursts.
I mean if the tag battle aspect was removed maybe people might play it more?
Fucking love the hell out of this game
I still got BlazBlue cross tag battle on my PS4 till this day. But I don't always play it, only if I wanted to.
I somewhat agree with the stuff you said in the community bit of the video but you forgot one thing: the community in game. For example the lobbies: the lobbies where cool and interesting ways to socialize with others that are playing the game and at the same time being able to play with them in a controlled area where you can choose the opponents you want to fight (to an extent). But a very big flaw with the lobby system was that is was TOO social, having the ability to type up custom messages in the lobbies brought it main big issue that is rollplayers. The people that would rollplay in the lobby would only do that and would just never actually play the fighting game and just sit around in the lobby. And the community that used the lobby mainly for rollplay was the rwby community, and because of the fact they they didn't come from a game but a web series it made some of the reasons for the rollplaying all more apparent. Fighting games aren't for everyone, and trying to get into a fighting game can sometimes be very intimidating if you are new and have no prior experience with one and most of the people coming from the rwby community fell in that category of no prior experience. some of them came into the game and found something they enjoy and got good at the game and had no major issues but there where also the people that where intimidated and never got fully over it. Seeing the fact that there favorite characters are in a game they choose to stay and use it for something else rather that the main focus of the game. The people that are there to play the game now have to deal with others rollplay and have "chats" the lobby. And there is nothing wrong with a little rollplay here and there and some chatting but the rollplaying and chatting where all the time and the only thing some players would do. Some of the thing said in the rollplays and chats have made people uncomfortable or caused drama. The issue with the rollplayers grew and never stopped which caused some of the people there to play just stop so they could avoid those people. Dwindling the size of BBTAG's community and giving it a very bad reputation in the fgc as a whole.
2:04 this is a really weird segment, a lot of these games are great, many of them I'd argue are far superior to DBFZ (which is kinda just treated like jesus through this entire video). Lumping SamSho 2019 and FEXL with MVCI and DOA6 is the most bizarre pile ever and it completely throws off the argument that this was a dark era.
Altogether I would argue a lot of this video really seems to push this idea of a "dark era" with a weird amount of force that becomes clear when you realize how many great fighting games came out of the time. I do still like the video but I just don't get a lot of the non-BBTag takes.
Yeah same its really annoying how overrated Fighterz become it really looks great but there are people who say is the first good DBZ game or the best anime game of all time which is complete BS.
Also Samurai Showdown is GOAT literally everyone liked it and SNK didn't really do anything wrong, same with MK X
Yeah, the idea of the "dark era" presented in this video isn't accurate at all imo. I honestly dismiss claims of a fighting game "dark age" between SF3 and SF4 too. It was only a "dark age" for Street Fighter players. There were plenty of great fighting games coming out between SF3 and SF4, even Capcom had other hits like MVC2 and CVS series. And the "dark era" in this video seems to be built on that same inaccurate depiction of fighting games in light of how well SF is doing.
@@moeshojo there was a real dark era between SF3 to SF4. Outside of Tekken(which though 6 was a good game the light being green for 7 was very shaky) most main stream fighting games were very quiet and fighting games were struggling. Then SF4 came out and in the same year BB came out which kick started everything back up. SF4 for the competetive scene and BB for the casual scene.
and to add to the pile, Guilty Gear Rev 2 got released during this "dark age" and GG Sign, then Rev 1 was active during this time too. DBFZ only exploded as much as it did was cause it was semi competent game that was easy enough to learn by anybody while having a Dragonball skin. That skin being the biggest factor in its rise to popularity and GG Strive rode that energy. Then you have all the other fighters mentioned, none of which are bad cept for MAYBE KoF XIV on release....then that game pulled its head out of its ass and got good....all during this same "dark age"
If anything I'd argue that was the start of a golden age
I remember finding bbtag due to RWBY & Persona 4 Golden. I got it during 2020, with my first team being Yang & Chie.
I'm currently picking up the game again. I'm still new to the game, but I hope to get better at it and show more people this fun game. I hope it could get some more characters or series one day.
Also great video and I hope you have a good day. 👍
Man, this game introduced me again into de fighting games. (I only played dbfz at that Time) But when i tried this out on the Switch with my friends for 5 bucks, damn. Now I got knowledge from a lot of fighting games. And I still play Bbtag, such an amazing game
Thanks a lot! wild video!
man, when this game was announced I lost my mind in hype.
then they showed the only mechanic they carried over from some of the most complex 3 fighters in existance was the autocombos.
that was such a gut punch that it made me get into mugen out of sheer dissapointment.
Oh please everyone would’ve loved this if there were no auto-combos. The characters were just too different from their actual game. That’s what ruined this game.
No they wouldn't. The core game alone is too different from literally all series involved and this game was bound to be a very niche thing, being both a fighting game and an anime fighting game at that with no casual appeal like DBFZ or "respect" Guilty Gear has. People would still be complaining about brawlers sucking, half the UNIST characters and Ruby being dumb and so on even with all buttons intact and no changes to characters.
BBTag had odds stacked massively against it from its very conception. It got further ran into the ground by netplay, questionable DLC practices and radio silence, but what you're saying has always been a pretty dumb take.
Idk P4A has auto play and its really beloved
I dunno man, DBFZ to my knowledge has auto combos and it soared in popularity. I personally can't pull off insane combos due to my horrible memory (plus in Strive's case, I feel like every attack essentially launches the opponent away from you). I tried getting into Granblue Fantasy Versus but my god, those inputs for me were insanely delayed. Like I was good at the game, but the input delay ruined it for me
@@chelsthegameruiner8669 DBFZ is carried hard by the IP. Whatever may be said about Goku Fighters' quality as a game, it's undeniable that it reached its height thanks to being based on one of the most popular shows of all time.
If you were to replace all BBTag characters with popular shounen IPs, it would be an instant hit even if it had literally all of the same problems like half of the roster being day 1 DLC.
@@anothenblue2630 if the game didn’t have auto Connie’s I doubt the appeal would of lasted long tho for most casuals.
The game was extremely easy to pick up and play and be at least semi decent in it
I played ALOT of fighters. And BBTAG it's still a fun casual game I always come back to. The feeling of playing two characters at the same time never gets old. Besides health is being a bit too small, it's definitely one of my favorites. (Thank God I started playing after the Big Patch) *It honestly breaks my heart that is failed.* I felt it was going to be "the Smash Bros of 2D fighters" & continuously add new characters from different series I love & one I've never heard about. But so many things were mishandled here. Again, it just breaks my heart. I was weirdly attached to this game. The fanservice voicelines and the gameplay kept me going.
funny enough- i picked up BBTAG because of Senran Kagura being announced to be in it. i was kind of hyped to see what new DLC would add. it was my first fighting game and looking back on it, it had the potential to be so much better, even so, i still like it. but nowadays i've moved onto undernight in-birth and melty blood mostly. i might buy it again on steam whenever it is on sale to give it another go though.
Same lol
I used to enter local BlazBlue tournaments and got my ass kicked every time
When Tag came out, I entered a tournament with Ruby and Noel and got Top 8 without knowing what the hell I was doing
I love this game, my fighting game history is Smash Ultimate, which helped me get into persona (the rpg) which made me see if P4U was on Nintendo switch, which is was playing basically everything on. I saw BBTag and I bought it. Soon it made me get into BlazBlue as a whole, as well as UNIB, for some weird reason, P4U was on Xbox, so was BB Cronophantasma, so I bought them both. When I figured out BBCF was on the switch I also bought it, I basically pissed my pants when P4U2 was announced for switch and pc, easy to say but I bought it on pc and switch day 1. Now about UNIB, it was a fun game, just isn’t for me, that’s all I have to say about it really. All the characters are cool and so is the story. From playing BB I eventually got into Guilty Gear, with Strive, which definitely has some of my favorite video game characters of all time. Needless to say, Smash Ultimate and BBTAG changed my life for the better, which I can only thank. Damn I wrote a whole essay, but I guess I’m not the first to do that.
i recently picked this game back up, and basically forced my friend to buy it. we've been having a blast, and are currently learning the whole "Tag" part of the game
as a blazblue player, it felt weird at first, since characters like Susano'o and Nine played so differently, but i'm loving the game reguardless
BBTAG was the game that really got me into the fgc so I still really love the game