- Devs get absorped by a bigger publisher in hopes of getting more support.
- Gets a season pass with four characters.
- Half of the team is canned halfway through the season pass
- The last two characters release at once, both with game breaking glitches/infinites.
It wasn't my favorite game, but TFH was a treasure. It was more feature complete than most other games released around the same time. They had built a pretty nice community too. before Modus/Maximum games dragged it through the dirt, it was my favorite fighting game to suggest to newcomers. I really hope the team gets on their feet again.
TFH's original release hit at a really pivotal time in my development as a fighting game player where i was finally managing to overcome the major plateau in both mentality and execution ability that comes from deciding to take them more seriously and move beyond being a "casual" player, and getting involved with a game with a small, brand-new community pushed me even further into developing my skills at combo routing and general labmonstering because there simply wasn't anyone to just download combo routes from. the dozens of hours i logged labbing that game took my execution on things like motion inputs and combo timing from "pretty decent but still drops things occasionally" to "very solid and confident", which of course was a general skill that has applied to everything else i've touched since then. i may not have played that game in forever due to other things eventually taking my attention and never really circling back, but just thinking about it, i can feel the muscle memory for my old Oleander combos still live in my neurons. i was able to finally get decent at BlazBlue, a game i had always wanted to play at a non-beginner level but found beyond my abilities, because of TFH.
in recent times i had tried to go and watch some tournaments of it, but it seemed like the game kind of suffered from the classic FG problem of the DLC guys being a little too strong (well, maybe not just a little in this case) and it's really sad the last guys just got released in such an unfinished state. unfortunately this is probably going to leave a game that was really special to me in a forever-tarnished state, because if they let most of the team go and forced them to drop something clearly unfinished in what feels like a case of "publisher cutting their losses", i have no hope of there being sufficient patches to fix it, if it even gets any at all.
at least i'll always have my memories of launch Oleander. rip fucked up magic horse


