City Connection's revealed their final new title ahead of TGS: Rushing Beat X: Return of the Brawl Brothers, a new game in their Super Famicom brawler trilogy Rushing Beat (localised as Rival Turf, Brawl Brothers and The Peace Keepers, respectively) that, just based on the publisher logos in the teaser trailer, seems to be western-made, or at least western-focused. I'm surprised it took them this long, frankly—SOR4's, what, three years old now?
This was a series that only succeeded to the extent that it did by being in the right place at the right time—that is, being the two-player brawler option when Capcom under-delivered with their Final Fight port—and while the later games certainly showed more ambition in terms of non-linearity and an ever-so-slight focus on character interactions (much of which was excised from the localisations), I'd hardly consider them hidden gems or anything, and I can't imagine many people are going to have strong opinions about which direction they may or may not be taking the series because.... like, who gives a shit, really.
(as opposed to, say, Forever Entertainment getting their claws on Night Slashers... brace yourselves.)
that said, the reason this series is even on my radar is because lil dude was obsessed with Brawl Brothers for a minute—I bought him the NSO sub at the same time I gifted him SOR4 and a bunch of other games but whenever I'd check in on him he'd be playing Brawl Brothers instead of SOR4 or Splatoon or whatever, and bringing it up in conversation with his friends as if they'd have any idea what the hell he was talking about, and it was that moment that I knew that, despite my best efforts, I had well and truly fucked him up
No platforms just yet, but it'll be out next year. Both the illustration style and the general visuals strike me as familiar, but hell if I can place them right now... City Connection's listed as the developer, but even if it is completely in-house, they've got a lot of houses... (EDIT: a little snooping tells me it's internal CC, for the most part)
As the name suggests, they're specifically modelling this new game after the second game, Rushing Beat Ran/Brawl Brothers: five of the six player-characters in the key art are straight from that game (the other being a brand-new character), most of the mechanics seems to be iterations on the specific systems seen in Ran, and the game's story is positioned as a direct follow-up to Ran that may or may not bridge to the third game, Rushing Beat Shura/The Peace Keepers. They're also adding a character-upgrade gimmicks, in-game missions and a system to combine carried foods into new ones at healing trucks, as well as an unlockable database of weapons/enemies/etc. It's limited to two players, and there's no mention of online play.
Soichiro Morizumi (director and/or writer and planner on a bunch of Super Robot Wars games & spinoffs, including writer/director of both Project X Zone games) is working on Rushing Beat X as a planner/writer, and will be present at one of City Connection's TGS talk panels on Saturday, so all will be revealed before long. It's playable on the floor, too, so get at it.
EDIT: the character design & key art's by another SRW/PXZ alum, Kazue Saitou.
yknow what, I should've introduced this series via this @Kawaiikochans shirt but I did not and I am truly sorry
https://www.4gamer.net/games/741/G074162/20230923087/ 4gamer posted a little writeup from City Connection's Rushing Beat X stage show... it doesn't offer a ton of info, save for explanations about how X (cross) not only symbolises it being a bridge between Ran and Shura but also a sort of merging of the Japanese and international series settings, as well as explicit acknowledgment of the connections to other Jaleco games: the ninja player-chara Kazan was always a reference to other Jaleco ninja games, they gave Douglas a bunch of moves from Dead Dance/Tuff E Nuff, they added the throw-people-into-the-background gimmicks from 64th Street, etc
City Connection's president Yoshikawa was also bold enough to declare Rushing Beat one of the three pillars of belt-scrolling action alongside Final Fight and Double Dragon and idgaf what yall say about this game anymore because as far as I'm concerned, the only person I want at the helm of a new Rushing Beat is the person who's willing to say that shit and really mean it
hands-on & mini-interview from TGS https://www.4gamer.net/games/741/G074162/20230925015/ the basic points on the system mechanics are as such:
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three attack types: normal attacks, special attacks (launchers) and weapon attacks
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you can dash-cancel or jump-cancel out of pretty much everything
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you can stock up to five weapons/food items and pull them out whenever you want, which includes pulling out and/or switching weapons mid-combo; weapons have multiple actions, and food items can be combined at the food trucks
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there are auto-combos ("Rushing Attacks"): holding the normal attack button does an auto-combo, and you can transition between manual and auto combos however you like
The basic idea on the dev side is to keep things open and give people the freedom to put moves together however they like, while also maintaining the quirks of Ran's combat, and they feel it got a good response (but that they could stand to offer more explanation/reminders of the mechanics). The description of the player-characters they haven't shown off sounds more or less in line with how they play in Ran: Lord J's a heavyweight brawler, Wendy's a lightweight with a ton of aerial moves and Kazan's a high-mobility character with gimmicky air-to-ground tricks and so on.
They say it's 50% done, for whatever that's worth; based strictly on the footage I've seen, I think just speeding everything up would do them wonders... you can be loosey-goosey or slow, but not both.
