This update to Fantasy Strike is live on Steam right now. The most exciting part of the update this month is our new "animation smear" visual effects which appear throughout the game. Here's some examples of the animation smears: https://gfycat.com/gifs/detail/neglectedtediouscicada https://gfycat.com/gifs/detail/pointlessshallowgiraffe We also improved the graphics for Valerie's "Wall of Truth" stage, did several minor balance changes, and fixed loads of bugs.

CHARACTERS

GRAVE --Fixed a bug that caused Grave’s hair to sometimes become frozen in a weird state and that also caused the dark cloth around his hips to wrongly go inside his body during his sweep and during his practice routine after online games. ---Fixed Grave's yomi counter, when used as the killing blow, to no longer have the victim fly in the opposite direction that he hit them. JAINA --Added fire effects to her bow string during her intro at the start of a fight. ROOK --Air C (Earthquake) no longer clears Argagarg’s bubble shield or poison, Midori’s parry-empowered state, or Setsuki's air super's invisibility. --Air C (Earthquake) followed by ground C throw no longer causes the victim to be knocked down 10f too long. --Air C (Earthquake) has 13f more recovery. This is so predicting an earthquake gives you more opportunity to punish Rook, especially with Argagarg. VALERIE --Air super (Rainbow Disc) duration down 3.8s -> 3.0s. Blockstun way down from 22f -> 5f. Pushback on block and on hit is much higher now. It now knocks down on hit. Notes: The disc is no longer a true blockstring between hits of itself, so opponents blocking the disc can now actually be crossed up and hit for real if they block wrong, and it also means opponents can do reversal attacks between the hits of the disc. Valerie can mix them up even harder now, but they have a lot more counterplay so she has to be careful. Because she has a lot more chance to hit them for real after they start blocking the disc, it knocks down now to prevent her from getting 6 damage combos all the time. Also, her old method of getting 2 full points of damage on block doesn’t work so well anymore because the pushback is now enough that they have a chance to do something during it all. SETSUKI --Her C -> C version of flying fox has 6f more landing recovery. If you want really great frame advantage after her C, use A (divekick) instead. If you’re using C -> C, that should be to hit jumpers, so it shouldn’t also be so safe on block. --The first hit of her B has 1f less blockstun. This allows Argagarg to block it, then hit her with his neutral A if she goes for the special throw by holding B. --Fixed Setsuki's air super causing a "frozen physics" bad state on the opponent during the final teleport part. DEGREY --Changed ghost colors for slots 4, 5, and 6 so they don’t look quite so similar to ghosts in the other color slots. MIDORI --When he parries a strike with C, the strike he automatically does is now highlighted white to show that it’s invulnerable. No change in functionality, just more clear what’s happening now. --Fixed Midori's B and air B hitting on their final frame so that they actually play out their on-hit recovery move, rather than recovering instantly. DRAGON --Ground C throw sped up, startup frames 29 -> 24. --Dragon’s jump is now faster and travels farther (pretty significant). --Air C (Talon Swoop) no longer grabs opponents who are in the air (to compensate for the increased power mentioned above). --Air C (Talon Swoop) pushboxes slightly adjusted as a temporary fix. Two patches ago introduced a new problem that caused the pushboxes on this move to sometimes push the opponent away rather than actually grab them. This is now solved, but will be slightly adjusted again when we do a more complete pass on his hitboxes. --Fixed Dragon's B and air B hitting on their final frame so that they actually play out their on-hit recovery move, rather than recovering instantly. LUM --Dice have 1hp instead of 2hp. Though it was intended before that they take 2 hits for the opponent to knock them away, it was never intended that they had 2 hit points vs projectiles. Somehow we never noticed until recently. We’ll roll back to the earlier 1hp dice, they are still good enough to use. --On the 2p side of the character select screen, Lum is no longer too big relative to when he’s on the p1 side. --Lum’s glasses are no longer too low on his face, halfway inside his head. --Whiffed throws no longer "hit" Lum's own dice. --Fixed Lum's B hitting on its final frame so that it actually plays out its on-hit recovery move, rather than recovering instantly. ARGAGARG --Fixed Argagarg incorrectly being able to do air A (whiffed), B+C super. He could not do not air A (whiffed), then press S to get super, he could only do this during the macro command, which was a bug. --Added sound effects to his practice routine (what you see after playing an online game in quickmatch). --Bubble shield, then air C bubble pop now has far fewer active frames. It’s still very good, but before the hitbox lasted too long after the graphics were gone, so it was confusing. --Fixed a minor graphical problem with Argagarg’s chest that caused parts of it to appear black accidentally. --Taking damage from poison no longer clears another Argagarg’s bubble shield or poison, Midori’s parry-empowered state, or Setsuki's air super's invisibility. --His back+A punch has a slightly lower hitbox at the start so that it no longer whiffs vs grounded Setsuki or Valerie.

STAGES

--Valerie's Wall of Truth. Pretty significantly changed the look of this stage. Increased the texture resolution of the mural to fix compression artifacts on it. Moved wall closer to the characters. Changed perspective of the floor so the wall itself takes up more vertical space on the screen than the floor. Adjusted contrast and color composition of the stage so that it doesn’t have bright white, blown out areas. This helps the characters pop off the background more and just looks better anyway.

MISC

--Changed the flow of selecting a character with keyboard in Quickmatch and Arcade. Now, you can select both the character and costume color by only using keyboard and not having to use the mouse. --On the friends list (tab to get to it quickly), you can now "add friend" using just the keyboard, without needing to use the mouse. Also, you can use this button at all in controller mode now. --Fixed the bad highlight state (like Rook having the "armored" blue outline) on the last frame of win poses after online quickmatch games. --Fixed a desync that could occur during some win poses during online play. --Improved the handling of Xbox One controllers. When you hold two buttons on the main menu to set them up, it’s no longer difficult to set the trigger buttons. --Announcer now says the character name when you pick them. --Slightly adjusted positions of characters on the 2p character select screen. --Fixed air recoveries to allow reversal moves consistently, instead of sometimes allowing them and sometimes not, depending on the height of the air recovery. (Here a “reversal move” means a move done at the first possible moment after your air recovery ends.) --Fixed projectile clashes so that P1's projectile doesn't also hit P2's character on the same frame it gets negated by P2's projectile. Now the projectiles just negate each other, without also hitting the characters. This fixes some bad clash interactions that would favor P1, mostly melee range same-frame mirror projectiles. --Fixed the languages dropdown not correctly updating its base button's text when you change the language. --Fixed a crash in the friends screen when dealing with non-Steam recent players. --Summoning the friends screen with the Tab key now pauses gameplay in offline games. --Fixed a bug that caused a flicker of a background stage to be shown just before the score screen after online games. --Many more small bugs in menus were fixed.

FRAME DATA DISPLAY

We fixed many things on the frame data display in practice mode: --Fixed air supers from accidentally counting the entire cinematic as extra recovery frames --Fixed recovery-only moves being displayed as "0 / NA / 0", they're now displayed as "0 / NA / " (ex: Dragon air C landing, Lum B on-hit and on-block, Valerie B-retreat) --Fixed cinematic supers from accidentally counting the cinematic on-hit duration when calculating the frame advantage on block (Grave S, Setsuki S, Valerie S) --Fixed several "follow-up" moves so that we actually see their frame data (Lum B on-hit / on-block, Arg air C landing, Setsuki C landing, Valerie S final hit, Valerie B-retreat) --Fixed Lum air B's recovery frames display showing way too high values (the hits were out of order) --Fixed Rook air C's on-block frame advantage display.