Skullgirls has apparently been a thing in the works for quite a while now, but I’d never even heard of this fighting game until spotting it at E3. Two things about it really stood out to me. The immediate thing was its unique visual style and character design. The other, more gradual thing was that, for a game that seemed to me to be an unknown, there were always people teaming around it. Filled with intrigue, I eventually conceded and waited in line to give it a try.

A quick bit of info; Skullgirls is the marriage of the ambition of two people, artist Alex Ahad who had been working with the concept and characters for a while, and game tournament fighter “Mike Z” Zaimont who had started working on his own fighting game engine. After the two came together, they merged their respective work together with newly founded game developer Revenge Labs.

Now… I wish I could type away with how the game plays and such. But while I am into some fighters, I’m light years away from even grasping the basics of them. It also didn’t help that the Skullgirls demo setup used fight sticks, which I’m also terribly unfamiliar with. So, the best I can say in that regard is that it felt like I would have expected using my fabulous button mashing style. I at least figured out how to perform the tag-in. The representative handily kicked my butt without even putting half his attention into the game (my best hits were when he stopped playing briefly to talk to someone).

Three characters were available in the playable build. The game’s “Ryu” appeared to be a school girl named Filia, who suffers amnesia after awakening with the parasitic Samson affixed to her head in the fashion of a futakuchi-onna. Her fighting style makes great use of Samson’s hair-like tentacles and toothy maw. The next is circus performer Cerabella, the grappler type. Her combat is heavily assisted by an enormous armed monster named Vice-Versa which she wears on her head like a hat. Finally there’s Peacock, a young girl whose clothes and body modifications give her the visage of a Steamboat Willie era cartoon. She seemed to specialize in all manner of tricky projectile attacks. Given the game’s theme, it seems possible all the fighters will be some nature of femme fatales and, following with my Otomedius Excellent hands-on, I am completely fine with that.

After getting beaten around pathetically, I figured it would be more useful to talk to the rep than challenge him. From what he said, I came to realize how passionate the people behind Skullgirls are about fighting games, and how much they want it to be taken seriously by tournament fighters. They don’t want it to be just another fighter, but to stand among the greats like Street Fighter and Marvel vs. Capcom.

A lot of what the rep told me centered around Skullgirls intuitive controls. The controls themselves are akin to most other fighters with your strong and weak punches and kicks, and gestures like the quarter circle, the “Z” and the full circle swing. But Skullgirls is created so that the game better understands what you want to do. One example the rep gave me is how in a lot of fighters, you end up jumping when you try to perform a full circle swing on the stick, which forces a lot of players to pull off such moves after a jump. The system in Skullgirls has some leeway in how it detects moves, and reads the full circle input if it figures that’s what you want to do (most players probably don’t do a full circle when they just want to jump). The same goes when you try to perform an air dash; in other fighters if you don’t reach the maximum height from a jump, you just end up punching instead. Safeguards are also put in to detect infinite combos and null them out.

Because the game is made to recognize gestures more broadly, the developers hope it will appeal to novice gamers like myself while still having all the depth and strategy to appeal to seasoned tournament players. The game will come with a challenge/practice mode meant to help new players get a handle on the controls and moves. Rather than having AI try to emulate human players, the CPU players are built around the specific skills and abilities of each character. With this, the developers hope players can better learn the various strategies against each type of character and transfer that into real competitive play with other gamers.

As I mentioned before, the characters have a very cool hand-drawn style and are lushly animated. I was told each character has on the order of 1400-1700 frames of animation. Also, rather than having fixed palettes, each character is made from a layer of coloring overlaid by a layer of shading. Because of this, alternate player colors can be more unique and don’t risk strange coloring to certain parts of the body. Additionally, the characters are drawn in twice the resolution of 1080 HD, so that there’s no jaggedness during zooming in.

In play, it appeared you could select up to three characters to go into battle, similarly to Marvel vs. Capcom 3. You will also be able to assign characters to assist attacks. What’s nice there is that you can assign any one of the attacks from their whole move pool. At this point, it’s uncertain how many total characters will be in the game. The Skullgirls website lists eight, but the rep was unsure to certify that number, saying it could possibly be more or less.

I do have some concerns that Skullgirls might not make it. Being a downloadable title, it’s possible the fighting game community might not take it as seriously as retail releases, especially when it has a much smaller character roster (though I imagine there’s a chance new characters could be added via DLC, if there’s enough interest). Also, while its visual style and theme are really cool, this uniqueness could also end up driving Skullgirls into a niche. It’s pretty difficult to say when considering an entirely new concept like this.

Nevertheless, I have high hopes for Skullgirls. I may be kidding myself in thinking I could get good at it, but its fresh content and passionate development make me want it to be a contender. Skullgirls is slated to release on XBLA and PSN by the end of this year.

Tags: 2D Fighter, downloadable games, E3 2011, fighter, fighting games, hands-on impressions, Playstation 3, preview, Revenge Labs, Skullgirls, Xbox 360

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