Great news. I never understood why they axed such an important character as Adam in the last two games :S
Limited Run is doing the physical release. It's times like these that although I'm grateful that Sega licensed their dead franchises out, the people stepping up just don't have the resources for a proper release.
Glad to hear this is at least getting some kind of physical release - at the same time, I'm kinda hoping it's like River City Girls and that at least one region gets a wider physical release with English-language support. Of course, the ideal would be a 'proper' mainstream physical release in the vein of Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, but a Limited Run release doesn't preclude that from happening - indeed, I believe that game had a Limited Run release prior to the mainstream physical edition.
I don't get it. The original sprite-work was always cartoony, and it progressed into a series where you literally had a playable kangaroo. Where's this notion of realism coming from?
I think that in comparison to the artwork from the original it looks a tad bit childish, that's all. Slightly reminds of such unforgettable classics as Tembo the Badass Elephant or the most recent entries in the Rayman series. It's still high-quality work, though.
The franchise was always grounded in reality, in terms of atmosphere. Playing as a kangaroo doesn't change that (see Tekken). The series' aesthetic, from the promotional art to the sprites, always had a grittiness to it, just like its 80's action movie inspirations. The new art seems more like a caricature of the original, and has a bit of cartoonist lightheartedness to it that I feel doesn't match.
Unless you were playing something that used digitized photography in the Genesis era, you weren't getting much more realistic than the seinen anime style it had. Calling it "cartoony" seems fairly disingenuous to me. Also what does the kangaroo have anything to do with it? Tekken has a boxing kangaroo and no one reasonable person ever called that series cartoony. Goofy yes, but that doesn't mean the art style has to look like shit.
I wouldn’t call Streets of Rage cartoony. I don’t know what the style’s called but it would be like calling GTA cartoony - yes it’s over the top ridiculous and not realistic but that doesn’t make it a cartoon. The second and third Streets of Rage are somewhat more cartoon-like, with their larger drawn sprites and more animated characters, but even then they’re not. Streets of Rage 4 is straight up a cartoon game. I hope it flows well whilst playing as so far it’s been hard to tell if that’s a good thing. I feel like you need to be in the hot seat to feel the weight of the punches.
Yeah while I wouldn't go as far as to call the art style of the new game shit, in fact it's quite good imo, it's also a clear drastic departure and even mismatch with the previous games. It's the same thing as Dragon's Trap (which changed the art from 80s style gag manga-ish fare to 2010s franco belgian comics fare), but a thousand times more drastic.
So, Hideki Naganuma's contributions to the OST have allegedly leaked, with two of the tracks being remixes from Jet Set Radio Future. I'm not gonna post them here, but they're out there on Youtube for now, and aren't hard to find. Their either convincingly well done fakes, or someone on the inside leaked these tracks. There's about seven of them in total. EDIT: Nevermind, they're fakes. Impressively done fakes, but they're not Naganuma's stuff.
I'm actually loving the art style. Loved it in Dragon's Trap, and I love it here. Comparatively though, when you look at the Battletoads game they previewed in last year's E3 (and the horrible atrocity to what they've did to the Dark Queen's redesign... ), this is a far better-looking game IMO.
Art for Abadede can be seen in the above video, so guess he's back. Really hope the bosses aren't just going to be a parade of the SoR2 ones. I'd rather have them as mid-bosses, with new ones at the end of stages. Also......There s two versions of 3's story so wonder what one they're going to reference, if any? :p
I think he is just trying to say that the characters are too youthful to be relatable to us old fucks. Not sure that makes a lot of sense, though, especially if they are trying to stay true to the setting. I thought it was interesting that they felt the need to explain the transition from pixel art to movie like animation. That seems fairly obvious. Its the art direction itself that I can't quite bring myself to appreciate. To my eye the animations do look pretty well done, but I am not the kind of person who nerds out over animation. Are they aiming for the Cuphead kind of design goal of animation? One way or another, Streets of Rage was just a brawler. Its gameplay was solid, but it was also fairly standard. The things that made it special were aesthetics and sound. To get those wrong is to get the game wrong, in my humble opinion.
I'll take "Bullshit developers say to justify their deviation from the source material" for 400, Alex.
IIRC one of the abortive attempts at a SoR4 (possibly Ancients own) was going to have the offspring of Axel and Blaze as playable characters. Funny thing is....with a 10 year time jump, it's still going to be set 10+ years in the past. So yeah....still not really "today" is it?
Indeed, with the offspring being literrally an Axel clone. Yikes. Glad they took the 10+ years approach. While it does help make the game feel like the next step, I just wish some ennemies like Barbon, Signal, Eagle....would have a little more changes.