Fantasy Strike features similar animations to Street Fighter, King of Fighters and others; Sirlin Games attributes to 'Remix Culture'
Posted by John Velociraptor Guerrero • November 23, 2016 at 5:50 p.m. PST • Comments: 61
The developers of Fantasy Strike recently streamed a seven hour highlight on SirlinGames, and during this showcase viewers spotted a few character movements that looked a little familiar.
In the stream we see characters such as Setsuki throwing kunai and performing a neck breaker attack in an animation extremely similar to Ibuki from Street Fighter:
Click images for animated versions
Statement from Sirlin and Crew
"We feel quite differently about the virtues of Remix Culture apparently. Our patrons routinely contribute ideas for animations. Feel free to join and submit ideas.
As for Geiger’s Flash Gear, it matches the Yomi card art that was drawn 10 years ago. We see that as great, rather than a crime that it looks similar to a KOF character. Setsuki’s special throw also matches her 10-year-old card art.
That one is a reference to Ibuki’s throw, but again as per the whole concept of “remix culture,” that seems a plus rather than a minus. The move is used totally differently from Ibuki’s anyway. And likewise, DeGrey has some elements of Slayer (a good thing, to borrow what works), but he uses those elements differently. His overall gameplay involves a ghost mechanic, a powerful counter-super, etc.
The more interesting story is that we’ve worked hard to distill the familiar gameplay tropes of zoners, rushdown, grapplers, and so on into just a few moves, and that each character plays uniquely, even though they have elements of zoners, rushdowners, and grapplers in other games."
So essentially Sirlin's view is that nods to other games shouldn't be criticized, but rather encouraged. To throw my own viewpoint into the ring, I don't mind seeing things like Nash's HK Sonic Scythe being basically a Rugal Genocide Cutter (or the EX one being God Rugal's for that matter), or Dudley's Ultra 1 from SF4 being a nod to the boxing anime Hajime no Ippo (the Dempsey Roll in particular).
Hell, Street Fighter has characters that are carbon copies of REAL PEOPLE (Boxer and Fei Long), but we seem to think that's alright rather than being lazy design, right?
I remember when I first played Rivals of Aether, a game that is unashamedly a Smash Bros. clone, and as a Ness main, started looking for a character that suited my playstyle. I found Absa, and appreciated that my favorite Smash playstyle was repackaged into something familiar. Of course she's not the same as Ness, but she's about as similar to Ness as DeGrey is to Slayer, or Setsuki to Ibuki.
