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Note: I started writing this two weeks ago and since then, Sajam has made an excellent video on the same topic. We have a lot of the same ideas, but I promise I'm not copying his homework.

I'll probably do a blog about my fighting game origin story at some point, but for the purpose of this blog, I think the important thing to mention at the beginning here is that I started following the FGC with the release of Marvel vs Capcom 3. The original Marvel vs Capcom was my favorite fighting game as a kid, so as I dived headfirst into this hobby, I spent hundreds of hours watching MvC3 streams.

But I only really played Marvel 3 online. I didn't start going to FGC events until 2013, which is when I first went to a local to play Skullgirls. It was my main fighting game focus until around 2017, and you can look at the previous blog post to see how much of an influence joining the FGC had over the rest of my life.

In 2018, Blazblue Cross Tag Battle came out. I was casually excited for this game when it was announced, as I had fun playing Persona 4 Arena and Under Night, but in my head it did just seem like a cash grab game using reused assets for a $70 price tag. It was a cash grab game using reused assets for a $70 price tag, but after playing the open beta test they had, I fell in love. I grinded this game heavily until COVID hit in 2020, and ever since its rollback release, I've been playing it on and off.

So the obvious through line between all of these games is that they're tag fighters. I've played a lot of other games in the meantime, even as the "main" game at certain points, but my one true love is tag fighters. And now that we're entering the what I've dubbed as the Tag Game Renaissance ^[1], and I'm very excited for what's coming.

Stepping back though, I was trying to narrow down what I like about tag fighters. I have a few major thoughts about the things I value the most out of them, but it's not even close to an exhaustive list.

Team Composition

I really love card games and competitive Pokemon; games where you have pre-match deck/team building to consider before you get to the game itself. You make choices about what to play, balancing what's strong, what's fun, what's good against the meta. Tag fighters are the only thing in fighting games that let you do the same thing. Obviously, there are always strong teams or shells that float up to the top as the best strategies, but even that can lead to fun scenarios where a low tier hero is able to make it work by backing up their character with a strong shell behind it. The right partner or assist can sometimes drastically change how their teammate is played, so I feel these games have so much variety that goes past the roster size.

Fast Paced

These games always have fun movement for when you're playing neutral, extremely degenerate offense once you win neutral, and then devastating and brutal combos once you've opened them up. The default state is high octane and frenetic gameplay, and then learning to control that gameplay is the most fun I have in fighting games.

Assists

Especially in a landscape of modern fighters being really tightly designed, assists really just completely warp every aspect of the game into something that's too open ended to ever really be fully accounted for, both in the design of the game and how it feels when you're playing.

I've always been jealous of people who find their fighting game soulmate, the one game they will play until they die. I enjoy being an FGC journeyman, but I have so much admiration for people who devote their life to one game. It's possible that I won't ever find something that lines up so perfectly, but I'm always on the lookout for games that I'm at least committed to for a few years straight. With my previous track record, I'm assuming that a tag fighter is the most likely candidate. Surely one of the upcoming ones will give me what I want, right?

Note #2: The idea I had for the second half of this blog was to just kinda talk about how excited I am for all the new tag fighters on the horizon. Amazingly, two more tag fighters got announced in the past few days. At this rate, this list will be outdated in a week, but I gotta post this at some point.

Now, by my count, there are five seven of these coming out in the next few years, which is so wild. I would love to know how all of these happened at the same time. A lot of these make sense to be tag games (2XKO being a League of Legends fighter or Nen Impact/Marvel Tokon having their roots and inspiration from MvC) but what was the climate that multiple fighting game developers thought "now's the perfect time for a tag fighter." We haven't seen a big one since DBFZ, so maybe they all just thought the subgenre was ripe for the picking.

I'm gonna do this tier list style because it's funny, why not. And we'll start from the bottom for all my thoughts on the upcoming games.

Invincible VS

This one is a bit of a tough sell for me. While this is also true of other games on this list, I have zero connection with the Invincible IP as I've never been interested in the comics or the TV show. And while the blood and gore is not a something that would bother me all that much, it is not an aesthetic that's really pulling me in either. I do think the artstyle of the game for the most part looks nice though, which other people seem to disagree with. Pretty impressive for what seems like not the biggest team.

It's also worth mentioning that it's pre-alpha at this point. We've gotten some first impressions from the people who've gotten to play it early, and some of the systems seem a little weird. But this game won't be out for a long while and I'm sure they'll make the combo system more interesting as times goes on. I'll definitely be keeping my eye on it.

Saturday AM: Battle Manga

So this one is the one we know the least about and came the most out of nowhere (which is impressive, so many of these came out of nowhere). I guess it's an American company doing shonen manga-inspired comics, with mostly black authors/artists? Which, cool, that's awesome, I just didn't know. We don't have any other details on it either, other than knowing that some FGC members like Ryn are working on it. Excited to see more but we'll just have to wait and see.

Ultimate Sonic Smackdown

I'm only really a classic 2D Sonic fan, so I'm only getting maybe half of the brand recognition value that others are getting from the idea of a Sonic fighting game. I actually also played a bit of Sonic Smackdown in training mode, which was the previous 1v1 version of the game. It was fun to mess with but I don't think it had any netplay at the time so I never played it with anyone else. You could definitely feel it's MvC3 inspiration, so adapting it into a 3v3 tag fighter makes a lot of sense.

I think this one squarely fits into something I'd have some playing for a few days or with friends occasionally, but considering what other people are saying so far this may be a bit too kusoge in the touch-of-death way for me to really get too into. It's apparently very early in a "surprised they released it in this state" kind of way, so even though we already have our hands on it, we'll have to see how it develops. I do have immense respect for the history and culture of Sonic fan games though, and this does seem like an awesome one to add onto that lineage.

Hunter X Hunter: Nen X Impact

I basically have the same feeling about this game that I did about DNF Duel. Game will be extremely fun for the first few weeks and then things will get more optimized and the game will funnel down to a state where you have to be the right kind of sicko to stick around. That's more or less true for every fighting game, but I think the shift from step 1 to step 2 is extremely sharp for 8ing games. That's not a bad thing, even. I want everyone to be able to find the right game to harness their inner sicko. I just have a feeling that this game won't be the one for me.

I have watched a bit of dekillsage playing this game with parsec, and it actually does seem a lot less ridiculous than people were imagining. Obviously the game isn't even out yet and parsec netplay isn't the greatest, but it doesn't really seem to be a "every hit is a ToD" kinda game. I'm excited to see where the game goes and if that keeps up.

MARVEL Tokon: Fighting Souls

We're gotten to the ones where our hopes are getting pretty high. This might be the most beautiful looking fighting game of all time and Marvel fighting games have a strong hold on my heart. This one is weird, though, with it being "4v4" and "you only have to play one character." We really are in the dark on this one still. It makes sense to think that Strive's 3v3 mode is something that they'll be pulling from heavily (my bet is on a shared healthbar). It's not going to be Strive 2.0 or anything (I think people who are saying it has Strive's wall system are jumping the gun) but I mostly like recent Arcsys games so I'm not dooming that they're gonna make some bad game now.

Also, just look at the credits for the Battle Director? I can't not feel a little bit of hype about what he and his team might cook up. The trailer also made it seem like (speculation warning) it didn't have strong cross up protection, so they might be willing to move away from some of the more common Arcsys game design philosophies to really capture the Marvel vs Capcom spirit.

Scramble Heart City

This is the one where I want more and more people to know about it. I played some Tough Love Arena when it first came out, but when I saw SHC as their new game I was really excited. I got to try it at Combo Breaker 2024 and Paul, the main dev, was really fun to talk to. I tuned into some of his dev streams the next few months, and then played the online playtest weekend for a bit. At this year's Combo Breaker, I entered the side tourney and got top 8 just kinda playing tag fighter fundamentals + beam assist, but both of the new characters were really cool and I can't wait to have a chance to sit down with them.

This game is interesting because it seems like all of the other games that we know are coming out (well, not sure about Sonic and Saturday AM) are games with active switch mechanics. I'm totally fine with active switch mechanics in these games (I'm a BBTag player afterall) but SHC is a very by the books MvC 2 or 3/Skullgirls style tag game. Assists and DHCs are the only team based mechanics. The movement is a little bit weighty, but it has wavedashing and air dashes so it feels fun to move around. It feels kinda Skullgirls-y in a way that is very fun and familiar.

This game is a ways off, but I'm really excited to try it more as they get further in development. The gameplay is really fun, the dev is cool, the art is really nice. Really hoping this one can come together nicely and develop a good scene. It's also refreshing to see new fighting games that aren't part of a decades old series, or based on an external IP. It's even more rare in tag fighters, so that's another thing I'm happy about with this game. I'd say to check out the Top 4 from Combo Breaker to see how this game is shaping up to be.

2XKO

2XKO was the first tag fighter to be announced in this recent era and because of that I had so many hopes riding on it. It's the first tag game we were gonna get after seven years and has a really deep roster of FGC vets on the dev team. We started seeing some of the gameplay and it really looks like it has a mix of elements from both of my favorite tag fighters. Movement and characters kinda feel like Skullgirls and it's a 2v2 active switch game like BBTag. It has a lot of interesting ideas that other fighting games hadn't really tried before. In fact, it has so many that it makes me kind of feel like its an older era fighting game, the kind that threw a billion mechanics at the wall and just kinda sees how it plays out. I'm sure they'll sand off some of the rough edges but it makes me hopeful that they're willing to let the game have some texture.

Along with that, it has a lot of potential upsides outside of the gameplay. Finally, we'll see how a well made free-to-play fighting game will do. Riot has some insane cross country networking infrastructure magic so we might get the best netcode we've ever seen in a fighting game before. The 2v2 mode is maybe actually genius for people to have more ways to play.

Admittedly it's been a rocky few months recently for the game's hype cycle. A tough showing in its second public alpha test and a now a ton of competition has a lot of people dismissing the game. Even if it manages to stick its landing, it will be at a time where there's new shiny games just on the horizon.

But I still want this game to be good more than any of the others. It feels so close to being the exact kind of game I want it to be. If it can find the right design and balance of all its systems, I can see this being the main game I play for the next few years. Truth be told, I might be slightly more excited for Scramble Heart City gameplay than 2XKO gameplay, but realistically I know that 2XKO is gonna be the one where I can play it at locals and that a lot of my friends will be playing too.

In my search for "new fighting game that I am devoting years to," I think 2XKO is still the one most likely to take that crown. Is it foolish to put my trust in Riot Games? Probably, yeah. But that game looks so close to what I want, that I can't help myself from dreaming. Thankfully, though, with the Tag Game Renaissance I have more than one horse to bet on.

P.S. This is something I want to get off my chest. I know there are some people who are mad that the next few fighting games are all tag fighters. I even argued with two different friends about it this week. This is an insane complaint to me (unless you have a specific hang up that I will judge you for, I'll get to it in a second) because the majority of all fighting games are 1v1. You have essentially infinite choices to pick from. Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 are going to continue to be the biggest fighting games of the next few years. They're both gonna keep releasing new content and headline all the majors. And if you don't like those specific games, there are ton of great older games like BBCF or Melee or VSAV that you can play. Why not try out some of those? You also got Virtua Fighter coming up soon, too!

I think the real complaint is that "I want to play the shiny new thing but the shiny new thing doesn't appeal to me." I get the appeal of wanting to play the big, popular, mainstream game of the moment. I just spent 1500 words on all the stuff I'm looking forward to in the future and it's part of why I'm excited for Tokon and Tuco. But I promise you that playing a smaller game with a tighter knit community is way more rewarding than you think it is. If you don't like the current big game, go play something else and have fun with that. This genre has been too cool for too long to limit yourself to games on the Evo lineup.

[1] I don't know if I was actually the first person to call it the Tag Game Renaissance, I wouldn't be surprised if it was something I pulled from elsewhere or if someone else had the same idea at the same time. I just do know that I used that specific term when talking to the Scramble Heart City dev during Combo Breaker 2024.