Bushido Blade is the only fighting I've ever really loved: an outlier in a genre of ridiculous costumes and complicated Super-EX-Ultra meters that dared to strip everything back to the basics. There were no health bars; your opponent's limbs could be permanently buggered just by striking their arms or legs; they could even be killed in a single hit if you were able to strike them in the right spot. Stages took place not in single-screen arenas but in massive multi-screen locations - if you found yourself on a losing streak, or you were just a bit of a coward, you could simply run away until you were in a more advantageous location. It's style of fighting game that lamentably slipped by the wayside - but isometric brawler Kyoto Wild looks like it might be bringing it back. It's a four-player, weapons-based fighting game featuring an open, Feudal Japan town setting and one-hit kills. Yes please.
Here's a bit more info from the site, now that I've stopped banging on about Bushido Blade.
"Kyoto Wild is a 4-player weapon brawler about retired ronin fighting through feudal Japan. When a village-wide brawl ignites, the former masters face off with any weapons still on hand - swords, knives, rakes, a paper fan…
"Four players face off in a one-hit-kill battle. The surviving ronin moves on to face more opponents in a new part of town, controlled by the three slain players. And the fight goes on."
Kyoto Wild is the work of Teddy Diefenbacher, one of the developers of Hyper Light Drifter, and before you start to worry that development of that gorgeous GIF machine might suffer, he's working on Kyoto Wild in his spare time.
There's nothing more to go on on the site , but Diefenbacher did reveal a bit more about the game to Eurogamer .
"The main thing about Kyoto Wild is that you travel around the town mid-fight, and control new characters each time you die."
"Each weapon controls differently, and characters largely control the same outside of that. You can carry a few weapons at a time. You can either attack with your main weapon or throw it as a projectile. When you throw a weapon, you equip the next weapon you're carrying as a backup, so there's sort of an economy of weapons to the game."
It sounds like fascinating stuff, but it doesn't really come across in the few still images released so far - I can't wait to see Kyoto Wild in motion.
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