QCF: Blade Strangers

ighting games are a staple here at PPR. Capcom, SNK Playmore and Arc System Works still reign supreme in the genre, there's no denying that, but it sure would be nice to have a decent fighting game from a completely different studio—something with high-res sprites, decent backgrounds, maybe a crossover of some kind. Like, if there was a game that took a bunch of obscure but cool characters from a slew of cult classics and indies and threw them into a super-Japanese story involving a bunch of computers and a super-strong deity. It would be cool if it were created by Studio Sai Zen Sen, the creators of Code of Princess EX, and published by Nicalis too.

Eh? Whazzat? This exact thing exists, in the form of Blade Strangers on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4? Oh, neat. And, as it turns out, it's a pretty fun versus fighting game, too? Well, sign me up!

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QCF: Professor Layton VS Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney

side from a heroic blue android who shoots giant jellybeans of deadly plasma and a series of tournaments famous for hosting sparring matches on public roads, the iconic yellow and blue brand of games, Capcom, is memorable for one other type of venture when it comes to their software—crossovers, they’re practically experts on the sort of thing.

One such experiment however, utilizes all these ingredients and elegantly manages to expand the respective conventions and features through the mixture two licenses, and as a result, creates an incredible engrossing experience that engaging in its own right—one that doesn’t need to be completely carried by the fan-service of the subject-matter in order to be appealing.

Professor Layton VS Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is a thoughtfully choreographed dance between two different classes of logic-driven gameplay that gracefully bounce off of each other with every step they take.

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QCF: Project X Zone

he video Game Crossover is definitely nothing new. Much like many comic and cartoon series have in the past, quite a number crossovers have been mashed together over the last three decades or so in North America, including notable entries such as Battletoads & Double Dragon, Aliens Vs. Predator, Capcom Vs. SNK, and of course, Super Smash Bros. But in Japan, the sheer amount of crossovers is kind of mind-numbing. Perhaps the greatest crossover series ever is Bandai and Banpresto's Super Robot Wars (oddly titled in its original Japanese name for releases in North America, despite Japanese stickers on merchandise reading “SRW”). Super Robot Wars collects a simply ridiculous amount of giant robot anime series together and crossses them over in a hugely deep strategy RPG setting. So it's no surprise that Banpresto was the one to collect over 50 different characters together in Namco Bandai's Project X Zone (pronounced Cross Zone) on Nintendo's 3DS.

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