nWay Answered Some More Questions About POWER RANGERS: BATTLE FOR THE GRID
CB recently had the chance to speak to Steve Kuroki, VP of Creative at nWay, about Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid. A lot of the information coincides with things we’ve already learned from other interviews, but there are some new things. First, Kuroki once again confirms that Battle for the Grid is not a port of the mobile game Power Rangers: Legacy Wars, but rather it’s closer to Dragon Ball FighterZ and Marvel vs. Capcom in play style.
The first new piece of information is that they’ve been working with professional fighting gamers like Justin Wong. This is helping them balance the game and figure out a good balance of mechanics for new and casual players as well as the more hardcore and professional players. Talking about developing combos, Kuroki said:
“We realize that most of the time, most of the Power Rangers fans aren’t your hardcore fighting game player. We wanted to build a combat system that could support those kinds of players that can pick it up to mash on one button and do a really easy combo, but we also realize that kind of lends itself to not enough gameplay depth when it comes to advanced gameplay, competitive gameplay. We’ve designed a combat system that could be a little bit more freeform. You can create your own combos, you can do a combo that lends itself up to a launch, which then you can follow up with some air attacks, and follow up with specials to extend the combo.
Right now, in tuning, we actually have, on-staff, we have some professional fighting game players that have come on as designers. They’ve been helping us design the system itself. One player, in particular, we had Justin Wong come in and consult with us. With him coming on board and showing us his experience on playing these kinds of games as well as the people that we have on staff, we’re very confident that we’ll be able to hit not only the casual fighting games fans, the hardcore Power Ranger fans that can actually play the characters that are in our game but also the ones that are competitive and into true fighting games.”
One part of Battle for the Grid that fans cannot wait to find out more about is the roster. All Power Rangers fans have a favorite Ranger and a favorite series. Mine will always be Jason, the original MMPR Red Ranger, with his Gold Zeo Ranger as a close second. My favorite team would be the original MMPR team followed by the team from In Space. However, I am but one fan. Countless fans have their own opinions and Korki talked about the challenge of picking the roster:
“There are quite a few challenges. I think a lot of it comes into picking the right characters. Power Rangers, especially with the game that we’ve made for mobile, now features over 60 characters. We wanted to make sure that we pulled the right Rangers or villains from the Power Rangers universe to support all the archetypes needed for fighting games.
That’s always the debate within the studio itself, as we’re now Power Rangers fans. Which ones are our favorite? Which one will actually fit the role of a more bruiser, bigger type character, or the speedy type character? That’s always a fun conversation within the studio.”
If you’re interested in the Arcade Story Mode, you’ll have to purchase the Season 1 Pass which most likely means you’ll be preordering the deluxe version of the game at the awesome price of $40. Another aspect to keep in mind when you go to purchase this game is if you want to play online with your friends and what platform they’re using. While Nintendo Switch, PC, and Xbox One players will be able to play together, PS4 players will not be able to join in on the fun because Sony.
If you’re a person who likes to block during fighting games, there won’t be a button for you to press, but rather it will be more like Street Fighter where you press back on the analog stick. Also, if you like interactive stages, I’ve got bad news for you as the stages will not be interactive. It sounds like there’s a small chance that in future updates that may change, but I wouldn’t expect if for a long time. Finally, each Ranger has a distinct personality and Kuroki and his team thought hard about how to translate those personalities into the game. One way they’re doing this is incorporating poses after combos or special attacks as well as when they enter the battle.
“One of the things that we are building into the combat system in terms of how we show animations is to make sure that we have the opportunity to show the personality. For example, at the end of a combo string, or maybe at the end of a special attack, they can hit that pose that’s kind of a nod to the show, and how they’re portrayed, even into our Legacy Wars game. A lot of the intros where they’re coming in and showing off and flaunting their style, we’ll also have that as well.”
And then with the supers and everything that’s built in, we’ll be able to express their style in terms of anything that’s coming from the visual reference. In playstyle, that’s where we actually can fold in a lot of the fighting game expertise. You could imagine as Goldar, for example, he looks like a big brute. He’s got a sword, and you don’t expect him to move fast. So then we can really lean into that playstyle a lot more than we could do with the card-based game, which is a lot more based on timing and everything.
So, when Goldar pulls back into a big attack, he doesn’t necessarily have to automatically do the attack. The player for Goldar needs to make sure the defense of the opponent maybe puts them into a startup attack or some kind of confirm frame so that they can pull off the bigger attack or even a grab for example. We have grabs in this game that we couldn’t do in Legacy Wars.”
I’m becoming more and more excited for this game as we learn more details and I cannot wait for April. Hopefully, we’ll get an exact release date soon. If you want to grab the game, you can pre-order it for as low as $20 right now.
