Seen at Andamiro's booth – Arcana Heart 2 (AMOA 2008)

Shaggy September 12, 2008 4

This came as a surprise – I was wandering around the show near the GlobalVR booth and between two Pump It Up games I see two Japanese candy cabs housing a fighter in them. I get closer to check it out and it’s Arcana Heart 2! I really didn’t expect to see this in the States in arcade form, but I’m guessing that the effect of SFIV is making some developers think twice about fighters.

The basic gist of the game is about girls fighting each other – with magic and sometimes swords. It’s hard to pass that up! While I didn’t consider myself good at the game, I think I did OK beating out two opponents and getting a several levels into the game before being defeated. The game has two modes – arcade and story. The story mode has a bit of text to go but at least it’s optional.

Graphically it looks very good between the high-res 2D animation (I’m not sure if it was HD resolution or not but it looked like it) and the special effects that the game throws about. The control scheme takes a little getting used to – I’m not used to fighters with five buttons schemes. Fortunately the marquee also serves as the manual so you can figure out what it is that you are doing.

Andamiro is going to bring AH2 to the States in kit form and at a “very low price”. I don’t have a date yet on this but I will be checking with my distributor on that as I assume that it is going to be very soon as the game is complete. For more check out the video below and witness my failed attempt to try and play the game with one hand. I guess it wasn’t too bad considering that it was the first time I played that game and the first time I tried to play a fighter like that.

Later I will be posting videos and info on GlobalVR, Incredible Technologies and more, but I might only get to that tomorrow.

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4 Comments »

  1. Sabin September 14, 2008 at 3:47 am - Reply

    This is cool news. We already know there was a localized location test in the USA (California) at Boomers arcade about two weeks ago. However, the machine was not in proper working order and kept eating credits, so it was pretty much a waste of a location test.

    However, this explains why a localized version of the game was on location test..just the problem is that a new upgrade (Sugoi! Arcana 2) is coming out, and its release is imminent…and this video seems to be based on the 2.1 (free upgrade)..so it seems like either way, America will be behind once again.

    I wonder if Andamiro is going to localize Sugoi! as well.

    If anyone is interested about more information about this game, come check out our humble shoryuken.com thread (we need a community, theres only like, 4 or 5 boards in the USA TOPS)

    http://forums.shoryuken.com/showthread.php?t=148299

    I cited your link on srk. Thanks for the news arcadeheroes!

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