Released today on digital label Rice Games Yatagarasu is a gorgeous 2D fighting game in the style of Street Fighter and King of Fighters. But it's been developed by just three people as part of Japan's blossoming indie community
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Yatagarasu: a beautiful 2D fighting game, built by just three people
Yatagarasu looks like the sort of super sharp 2D fighting game I used to love playing on the Saturn and Dreamcast. Imaginative characters, turbo-charged combos, an intricate fighting system, it pays homage to Third Strike era Street Fighter as well as SNK and Arc System Works titles like Blazblue and King of Fighters.
But the difference here is that Yatagarasu wasn't produced by a large team of dedicated programmers and designers. It is the work of just three men: King of Fighters artist, Kotani Tomoyuki, coder Shiza, and fighting game player Umezono, a veteran of the Street Fighter: Third Strike circuit who handles balance and mechanics. Together the trio formed PDW: Hotapen an ad-hoc studio that's part of Japans growing doujin games scene, where groups of friends get together to develop in their spare time. Comparable to the similarly expanding Western indie scene it's about passionate gamers producing and distributing their own titles, many of them offbeat and eccentric, many mining the key genres of the past.
"It tends to be a maximum of five or six people – just like the bedroom coding scene, really," says Geraint Evans, director of Rice Digital, the UK site that has just released a localised version of Yatagarasu for PC. "Zun, for example, is just one man working on a series of bullet hell shooters called Touhou, I think he's on number 13 now. There are also '.5' versions which are in the same universe, but are fighting games."
Evans and a small group of colleagues at the specialist games publisher Zen United set up Rice Digital last year as a side project. Zen deals with well-established Japanese titles like BlazBlue and Guilty Gear, but through working on these titles, the team was finding out about more obscure, independently produced titles. "We were getting frustrated," says Evans. "We kept seeing these exceptional games, but they weren't getting any love in the Western media, so we decided to set up a site to promote them. It was editorial at first, we wrote about the games we felt deserved more attention. The other side to it now is looking to work with those doujin circles, helping with a little bit of localisation, a bit or PR and support; just to introduce them to a new group of fans."
Since the launch of the site, several doujin circles have been in touch and now Rice has a growing stable of titles that it is promoting and digitally distributing, usually for under a tenner a game. Highlights include one-player arena battler Fairy Bloom Freesia and colourful hack-and-slasher, Croixleur.
Yatagarasu isn't just an indie knock-off of classic fighters – it has introduced a few new riffs on key conventions. Its 'button locking' parry system, for example, lets you tap a high, medium or low button to block incoming moves, and a window of offensive opportunity is opened up if you push forward at the same time, magnifying the value of a defensive approach. Added to this is a damage limitation system: if you mirror the attacking key presses of an opponent, you take much less damage, bringing in an emphasis on split-second timing and intuitive sparring.
Rice Digital has five more doujin titles planned for release in Europe before the end of May, again working with small studios and localisation companies. Just a quick hint – if you're planning on trying any of their shooters or fighting games on PC, consider investing in a decent arcade-style stick. These can be rather expensive, but Evans recommends the entry level Hori EX2, which retails for around £50. If you're going to do this, you may as well do it properly.