After over four years of development, Fantasy Strike launches today on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Steam (Mac / Windows / Linux)! This update brings out of Steam Early Access to full release, and is live right now.

BOSS RUSH MODE

Our new, biggest single player mode is now available.
Boss Rush is where we can stop worrying about making things competitively fair and just let you do ridiculous things that are fun. You fight a series of eight (CPU-controlled) boss characters, and they get increasingly difficult. Part of that is their AI becomes smarter, but they also get crazy powerups like bombs dropping from the sky, dragons flying by, rivers with dangerous fish washing across the screen, and so on.
In order to deal with all that, you get powerups too. Before each fight, you pick one of three powerups. And before half the fights you get to pick a second, really powerful gold powerup from a random set of three. All of these are cumulative over the course of your run. So youre building a deck of powerups and you get to think about synergies and combos amongst them.
The mode is like a rogue-like in that you keep your deck until you lose. If you lose, we throw your deck away and you have to start over with a new run. Can you make it through all eight bosses? Playing as every character?
In testing this mode, we found that it was more fun when your super moves still mattered against later bosses even though they have a lot of hit points. Some powerups give you bonus damage to supers, but in order to keep super moves more relevant for everyone as you gain various other wild powerups, you always get +1 damage on supers starting at the 4th boss. And then +2 damage on super for the next boss, and +3 for the next, etc. This stacks with any powerups that might also increase the damage of your super moves. Some super moves dont deal damage in Fantasy Strike, such as Geigers Time Stop or Midoris Dragon Form transformation. For these, we added new properties to these supers that just happen in Boss Rush. Midoris Dragon transform roar now sends out a damaging shockwave in addition to him taking on the new form. And Geiger throws out a series of Time Spiral projectiles in addition to the usual powers of Time Stop whenever he has bonus super damage.

New AI

AI opponents in all single player moves are greatly improved. Rather than playing almost totally randomly, they ramp up in sophistication as you progress through arcade / survival / daily challenge / boss rush modes. In addition, you can pick if you want generally Easy / Medium / Hard AI in arcade mode and in single match mode.

RANK RESET

As part of the games launch, everyones ranked play stats have been reset. Profile data of pre-release has also been reset so everyone has a fresh start. This marks the beginning of Season 1 of ranked play. Seasons will last 3 months, after which ranks are reset, but starting with Season 2 youll get an initial boost after the reset based on how well you did the previous season.

CINEMATIC TRAILER

The Fantasy Strike cinematic trailer now plays automatically the first time you launch the game. The trailer is also available to watch any time in the Learn tab on main menu.

CONTROLLERS

There are now several new convenience features for game controllers in the Steam version. --The first time you do any input on a plugged in controller, now one of two things will happen: 1) Fantasy Strike looks up in our database if it knows about your specific controller in your specific operating system. If it does, then your controller will just work without you doing anything, or even knowing that anything had to happen. 2) If your controller is not auto-detected in this way, then you will be shown a setup screen with a picture of a PS4 controller (but ANY type of controller will work, not just PS4). Here, you press each button on your controller in the sequence prompted so the game knows whats what. Note that this is unrelated to button config where you set if you want X to be jump and so on. Rather, this step tells the game which physical button on your controller is X. --If you have to do step 2 above, youll only have to do it once for that controller. After that, the game remembers your previous setup. Also, in future patches, well add your controller to the database that all players benefit from. So over time, more and more controllers will just magically work with no setup step at all. --Improved hot-swapping of controllers. Before, if you plugged in a controller, then unplugged it, then plugged in a second controller, that second controller could wrongly be set to player2. Now, it will be set to player1 when its the only controller thats plugged in. Furthermore, this problem also sometimes caused controllers to be assigned to nonsense, non-functional slots such as player 3 or player 4 at which point you controller would no longer work until you restarted the game. This only affected players who plugged and unplugged several controllers per session, but is now fixed for everyone. --In-game help text now supports keyboard, PlayStation 4 button icons, Xbox One button icons, and Nintendo Switch button icons. The in-game help text automatically displays the correct kind of icons based on the controls youre using at the moment. There is also a new feature in game options that lets you lock the help text to a particular type. An example use-case of this is that perhaps you have a 3rd party Xbox One controller that is not auto-detected, so you do the manual setup step. It works fine, but you would like the game to display Xbox One help text to match the buttons on your controller. Now you can set that.

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS

Improved CPU performance by yet another 12-14%, plus an additional 6% in practice mode specifically. This comes from about 8 different cases of improving efficiency in facial animation, hit reactions, particle systems, and more. Youll see higher fps and less strain from rollbacks online because of this optimization.

ONLINE PLAY

--Fixed a multiple black screen crashes when resuming a single-player mode after an online match. --Fixed a black screen crash at the start of a ranked online game when you lose connection to the opponent. --Fixed a crash during online play (a GGPO assertion) having to do with incorrect handling of particle some effects. --When you quit an online match voluntarily (pause -> Disconnect), you no longer get disconnected from the server a few seconds later. --Fixed a spectator issue during ranked games that could cause spectators to kick each other out, or disconnect the players game. --Fixed spectators seeing three characters for one player (!) when they join spectating from the ranked score screen, or after they let the ranked score screen countdown run out. This would of course immediately desync the spectator. --Fixed a visual bug when ranking up from Diamond league to Master league. The score screen would wrongly show you an infinite loop of increasing ranks, but now correctly handles the transition to Master league. --Fixed a UI bug in the following sequence: play online, have someone spectate you, go to your friends list (which defaults to showing you who is watching you), then resume play and have them stop watching you, then go to your friends list again. In this case, your friends list wrongly defaulted to showing you a blank screen of who is watching you. In the case where no one is watching you, going to your friends list now correctly defaults to showing your actual friends rather than the blank whos-watching-you tab. --Profile screen: When selecting "All Seasons", Daily Challenge shows your best run rather than the nonsensical value of the sum of all your runs.

CHARACTERS

GRAVE --Fixed a bug that caused Graves super to do 3 damage, rather than 2 damage, in the case when it was done exactly 1 frame before Rook inputs his own ground super. --Corrected Grave's air super to be highlighted green for f1-21, which is the correct parry window, rather than f1-23 which included 2 green frames for no reason. VALERIE --Fixed a small animation error in Valeries knockdown that caused her to slide too far away, then pop to a closer position. This was visual only and didnt affect gameplay. SETSUKI --Fixed a visual bug at the end of Setsukis forward throw which caused her wrists to rotate 360 degrees nonsensically. --Setsukis B teleport kick now has a white highlight during the frames where you can see her on screen, but she is invulnerable. There is no change to gameplay here, the highlight was just missing before. GEIGER --Fixed Geiger's watch sometimes being desynced from Geiger's "selected" animation in the VS screen. MIDORI --Dragon B and Dragon air B (the body torpedo moves) have slightly worse hitboxes. Its a very small nerf from the front. Also, ground B is more vulnerable to being attacked from above, but is still very good. And air B has 14f landing recovery on hit or block. This change is to encourage a wider variety of moves in Dragon Form than just using B over and over. LUM --The mini-lum item used to appear with Lums default costume colors for a few frames, then it took on the correct colors of Lums costume. Now, mini-Lum has the correct colors that match Lums current colors on all frames. --Lums animation smear colors now reflect the color of his paws rather than his fingernails. --Air Bs smears now match the yellow highlights on his paws. Those yellow highlights are also now a brighter yellow.

FRAME DATA DISPLAY

The following fixes do not affect gameplay. They are all fixes to the information display of frame stats in practice mode, and to the information display of frame advantage visual effects in all modes. --Fixed a bug that was causing incorrect frame data to display for active frames of these moves: Jaina S, Grave S, Setsuki S, Rook air S. --Fixed an error in the frames-to-landing prediction code, which had a wrong order of operations within a frame when forces on the character changed. This could cause frame stats for jumping moves to display errors in frame data sometimes. For instance, if Grave jumped straight up, then pressed B at a certain time, the display would wrongly show 0 active frames but now correctly shows 4 active frames in that case. --Fixed an off-by-one-frame error in the frame advantage display code for airborne moves. This caused most airborne moves to have -1 displayed frame advantage relative to the truth, and also caused the display 1f of landing recovery rather than correct 2f of landing recovery. --Fixed an error in the landing recovery prediction code, which still thought that default airborne moves had a landing recovery of 1f, rather than 2f. This caused most airborne moves to have +1 displayed frame advantage, basically canceling the previous problem's effect on displayed frame advantage. Though these two errors cancelled each other out, how about having no errors instead. --Fixed frame advantage visual effects for all knockdown moves. The previous patch introduced a problem where knockdown moves would wrongly show a circle of the same size as whatever the LAST frame advantage effect you did was. Now it correctly shows the largest sized circle (most frame advantage) for knockdown moves such as Graves C, etc. --Dragon Midoris neutral A now shows frame advantage effects at all. They were accidentally omitted before. --Human Midori now shows frame advantage effects at all in the case where he does neutral jump A, then steers it left or right. The steered version of the move used to wrongly omit them.

MISC

--In the Linux version, the videos in the Learn screen (character spotlight videos) now work at all. --On the character select screen, selecting, then deselecting a character now correctly destroys the particles that the selected animation might create. This fixes the issue where you could make Valerie's paintbrush glow super brightly if you kept selecting and deselecting her, and same for Jaina's bow. --Fixed a lighting issue on main menu characters where the seeing a win pose after a match then returning to main menu could cause the main menu character to be lit too dark and from the side. --Fixed the Survival score screen always wrongly showing default costume color. Now it shows the costume color you actually played Survival with. --The announcer now says Congratulations! after winning a team battle. --The team battle roulette screen has minor audio improvements. The shuffling sound effect transitions better to the character locked in sound effect. Also, in the case where theres only one character left on each side, so no shuffling happens, it no longer wrongly plays a shuffling sound effect. --Pausing the game is now disallowed during the 30 frame fade in from black. This saves you from being in black or way too dark state if you mash pause as a match starts.