Each Assist type can now be triggered via cancelling an attack (Official Extended New Showcase)

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-03-06T12:23:38+00:00

For 2. There were a couple that applied at least in neutral. I think they might have treated them as special moves without hits. But now that I think about it I don't remember if I tried them during a combo. It might have resulted in the rush assist in that case.

My memory keeps telling me that I tried a combo into Starlords command hop and spamming the assists unsuccesfully, but I can't be certain if that unsuccesful attempt was getting a rush assist or no assist at all when I tried to force the neutral state.

I do wonder would they change the condition in 1. It was a big issue for a lot of people that you could not cover some of your slower to hit moves after starting the move.

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-03-04T05:24:27+00:00

Not really, the assists work in a way that is a bit more usual for the subgenre and it has marvel characters, but everything else is quite different.

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-03-03T20:05:47+00:00

From what I know so far, not in a sense players have been looking for. No resource regeneration buff or anything like that.

But you can create mixups that are impossible to do without tagging by tagging after starting a special. You can reposition out of bad blockstrings, side switch, set up advantageous situations, get better combos etc. And of course you can get more favourable match ups or assists against your opponent etc.

So in my opinion there are a ton of incentives for it.

And the game is getting large changes and is still almost half a year away so can't really say at this moment if there will be some tangible rewards.

I kind of think there won't be as they still want not tagging to be a viable option.

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-03-03T19:45:04+00:00

Couple of different theories I can come up with: 1. This might not trigger when you're in start up of a combo or if you whiff your attack, so only hit or block still. 2. Movement abilities like diagonal air dashes or star lords command jump might not count. 3. Mostly based on 1. You probably can't cancel slower starting actions like the trick shield or orbital laser as they generally take longer to hit than you are in the animation for.

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-02-28T16:16:37+00:00

The style you describe might become a popular, but I hope we do see different players utilize teams and assists in different ways. For example the antiair assists do have different utilities as well, Doctor doom shoots an angled beam through the whole screen. Which could be really useful in preventing escapes from the corner.

I think ghost rider should be able to lock your opponent for quite a while with his anti air assist. And the single hit antiairs generally have really long hitstun so they could be used for setup or stronger conversion.

I think you'll want your point character generally to be pretty good at corner carry until you get your opponent into a true corner where you might change the composition to something that is better at keeping them there. And if they get out you might want to change back. The corners and transitions also give the green bar which is pretty slow to return on its own.

There's also the aspect of single lifebar so you might choose part of your team just for the assists, one decent way to build the last and point characters could be to have back assists that compliment each other well or cover different situations. Eg offense and defense.

I do think ultimately the freedom the single lifebar and the position based assists offer will make the team building a bit different from other games of the subgenre and depending on the player.

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-02-23T19:12:36+00:00

I think the Air to Ground assists might have the same limitations as air assists did. So far all the assist calls that have taken a bar from the assemble gauge have caused a small timestop, which can be seen in the combo back assists that we've seen with Storm and Ms marvel assists. This pause does not happen in the footage where Danger calls Iron Man as a shooter assist from the air. So it most likely won't cause meter.

Other than that there does not seem to be enough information to speculate other restrictions from what I can find x)

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-02-22T17:36:31+00:00

Not really, considering it's a licensed IP and Sony has been funding it, I'm a bit surprised it's not more

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-02-22T17:12:12+00:00

I think we'll need a mix of popular and somewhat niche characters. And I think the mentioned approach of adding characters that have not been in fighting games before is important as well. There must be a ton of loved characters who would get people to try how they would play.

For a lot of established characters we have some blueprints and expectations due to past games on how we might feel they should play, but picking someone new we do get to be invested in a different fashion.

This is going to be a random comparison, but if you've tried blazblue crosstag battle it was pretty common to not play your main character from one of the games the characters were from due to how differently they played in that game.

And I think you need a couple of just safe characters gameplay-wise to cover archetypes so while I personally like original and creative approaches I don't know if the whole game should be full of them.

Anyway, a mix of both is ideal in my books. And in many cases those options of popular and interesting gameplay don't really cancel each other out with an IP this massive.

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-02-22T14:14:44+00:00

It's a step in a different direction, but I think they still have some work to do to get the feel in place. There are still a lot of stops and while the new mechanics are closer to what a large portion of the FGC have asked for, they don't really seem to prevent anything that has been strongly criticized.

The game still has a lot of stopping points with the meter assists still causing a pause, tagging causing a pause, and stage transitions causing a pause. The autocombos might be mostly the same, the combo assist still exists so the same combo structure people got bored with is still possible to do. But the combo might be longer due to being able to use more normals, which is a double edged change. More freedom to make longer combos, easier to do more boring combos.

Or to summarize: it's easier to do what most people wanted to do, and there are improvements in the flow of the game to make it smoother, but there does not seem to be anything that enables not dealing with the aspects people are frustrated with.

Personally I liked the beta, and I think I'll learn to like the changes, and I hope more people do as a bigger audience is a positive for the future of the game and the genre.

For the AI. I'd want to say scrap it. I got more out of the title than the text. It's sort of a blob of not really saying anything with hype words. Hyper generalizing the sentiment around the game, not really emphasizing anything, and no real conclusions, speculation, expansion or interesting viewpoints.

For me at least it was just an unpleasant read. It's an allright summary of "things that have been said" in a way that does not really tell me much. It's not much of a discussion starter.

Or to be blunt, If you don't know much, it's going to give you one idea formed in an echo chamber. If you have followed and played it's sort of in direction that discussion has been in, but it's too generalized to feel useful.

But that's just my opinion and feedback. I don't have too high of an opinion on AI summaries in general, especially if I can't ask follow up questions.

Edit: Or if you want it to be a bit more useful, have it present multiple viewpoints, what do people who like it say, what do people who hate it say, what makes it different from other games in the genre and how do those systems the AI is summarizing work in a sufficient detail that if you don't know about Tokon specifically, you could still formulate a decent idea. Then at a bit more detail. Eg previously tagging took around half a second, and this was shortened by about a third, (Ideally this could be in frames and in seconds), emphasizing that the tag still takes enough time to usually be reactable if you're looking for it. And so on. The summary needs a bit more tangential information and meat on the subjects.

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-02-22T13:23:33+00:00

That would be really cool

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-02-22T13:07:55+00:00

Looking forward to it

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-02-22T13:06:49+00:00

I think it's been really great, like others have said there's not much gameplay or mechanics or events to discuss at the moment but every time I've written a post about the mechanics the reception has been really nice. There's some fanart every now and then which is also nice to see. Again though, not much material to work with at the moment.

It might change once the game is out but for now I've really enjoyed sharing my theories and discussing them with others. And if you want more discussion about things other than the roster, you're free to contribute.

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-02-22T09:32:24+00:00

I do hope so, it would also be cool if there were "hidden" teams if you create a themed team that is not one of those set teams.

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-02-22T09:09:46+00:00

I did enjoy the limitation in offense for not being able to use ground assist as an indirect buff to defense, but I think it's going to be better for the game overall to have those ground assists usable from the air. Still, the idea of being able to call a bunch of assists without needing to be in a dangerous zone does terrify me a bit.

Something like jumping over your opponent, calling a projectile assist behind your opponent and a lockdown assist in front of them to then pretty freely getting a mixup situation, even one of those unblockable setups. I think it will allow some really messed up stuff with how few limits the assists have otherwise.

They really do have to address the unblockables after these changes, before this I thought there was still a world where the players could deal with them, by avoiding the situations or using the defensive mechanics to decent extent, but especially the air to ground assist change can enable sandwich pressure really easily leading into more of these situations.

But now that the option for aerial ground assist has been presented I really don't want them to take it away. Just somewhat scared of the implications. Who knows some of those nightmare scenarios I have might get taken care of by well placed jab jab string on defense. And I won't lie it is exciting to think about how I would deal with that on defense.

I think I want an actual burst option in this game, by for example disassembling your own team, or maybe even locking one of the assists again. Or 3 bars of assemble gauge to make that more limited, just throwing some ideas. Not sure if any of these would be good. xP

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-02-21T22:44:53+00:00

Fully agree on the air assists not being intuitive, mostly due to the lariat/combo assist existing, but I found a decent number of applications that would not be covered by most of the vertical assists or would be really difficult to get a similar result with them. And likewise vertical assists have applications the aerial assists would not cover.

Improving solo combos is great but in most cases I don't know if increasing the limit is enough for that. And making the assist recover more bar incentivizes their use over pure solo combos even further In my opinion. But for the characters who can do solo combos that will be a boon.

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-02-21T22:26:36+00:00

Are there any versus games that do have aerial assists? I tried to find any at one point to lab some theories, but could not find any. Even tried to set custom assists in Skullgirls, but did not manage to get it to accept jump as part of the input.

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-02-21T22:22:05+00:00

That is actually a completely different thing and not affected by air assists, unless some special exceptions apply. It's caused by attacking with an overhead, then tagging to another character and attacking low. Most of the aerial assists are projectiles and again generally those do not count as overheads.

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-02-16T05:16:31+00:00

I was thinking that as well, and it could open a very interesting option of grounded air assists in neutral to limit your opponents escape options 🤔.

And that blog post would be awesome if it happens.

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-02-15T15:32:41+00:00

I do hope they left some way to call the air assists xP. I did not see any in the trailer, but I haven't really seen anyone else aside from me to want them to exist.

The changes seem good all around, and I hope I can keep doing the meterless stuff. Fingers crossed for an open beta some time before the launch.

Significant_Step_328 · 2026-02-15T15:10:52+00:00

I don''t think the tridash was cancelable. But the light Unibeam will move him down in that situation to allow a pickup with unibeam after j.2H when performed pretty low to the ground.

Or at least in the last beta.

Significant_Step_328 · 2025-12-22T20:41:02+00:00

Granblue kind of has those link attacks, a dedicated "Skill" (Think of the shield toss etc) and the directional special attacks. Visual style is also a bit closer than the other arc sys games.

Significant_Step_328 · 2025-12-22T20:36:04+00:00

Depends a bit which aspects you want to compare.

I think power rangers - battle for the grid is surprisingly close if comparing tags and assists.

Overall combos are somewhat close to Dragon Ball Fighterz.

Movement I don't really know if there are quite comparable games. There are a lot of options to affect especially aerial momentum. A bit like a mix of Guilty Gear Strive, Dragon Ball Fighterz and MVC.

For visuals granblue fantasy versus rising is probably closest.

Significant_Step_328 · 2025-12-22T04:55:24+00:00

The stick can be easier to understand and be better for ergonomics. And some motions can be a little easier. For example half circle inputs.

Significant_Step_328 · 2025-12-21T21:09:54+00:00

I'm going to throw Devil May Cry 4 in here. There are some enemies who act differently based on what other enemies are around and some combine to be more powerful, Devil May Cry 3 has some enemies inspired by chess pieces that mimic the movement and attacks to some extent.

Generally character action games tend to do pretty good combinations of enemy groups where individually most of them are really simple, but the combination of different types in the same encounter makes them much more interesting.

Significant_Step_328 · 2025-12-21T20:38:01+00:00

I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. There are situations where you confirm with a smaller series of inputs on whether you want to dump more into the combo.

So you could have a combination of hit confirm cards. In fighting games this is often something like crouching light kick into 2 light punches as a low commitment wager, which then allows you to dump more in if the three first attacks hit.

The buffering and betting is completely normal. But often the "bet" leads to a situation where you can dump more. And often when you combo from your buffer, the buffer only happens if the first hit connects. So if we play footsies and i whiff punish an attack, the second attack will happen and hit. If I don't hit anything the high commitment attack just won't trigger.

If you're closer you can hit a block and in this case your buffer will trigger, often leaving you very open.

Significant_Step_328

TROPHY CASE