Pre-orders have opened today for Dynamite Bomb!!, a new fighter that is launching just for arcades. Designed by Light Green Games (some of the staff were involved with Dragon Ball Fighter Z) along with exA-Arcadia, this is a 2D anime fighter that is looking to provide a deep fighter with a focus on chain combos and rewarding skilled play. The game has been mentioned on the site before, where I had a very early look at it back in 2021; Here’s video I shot of the game this past March:
For some additional details on the game, it features:
- 10 characters
- 0.5 frame input lag response
- Chain combos+launchers with tech recovery and parries on the defensive side
- Story mode with full voice acting for each character
- 100% exclusive to arcades (not based on any port and not coming to consoles/PC)
- Plays in landscape or portrait (TATE) mode
This runs on an engine that exA has developed for their platform, and is being used by other titles like Axel City 2, the engine also being the key to the super low input lag targets. ExA posted several “how-to” videos about this one on their YouTube channel, although presently they only have them in Japanese. The half-frame input lag is quite an impressive feat, and the game looks nice in person. Note that the gameplay area is 4:3, while the sides that fill up the 16:9 screen has character art (just like in Samurai Shodown V Perfect); But if you play it in TATE mode, it changes to fill the top/bottom. I’m not aware of a fighting game doing this before – although if you’re wondering why this is even an option, it’s for arcades that might be running their exA system vertically (mainly with shoot ’em ups).
The general ordering page can be found here, where the game is available for around $1550USD. That puts it into the same cost realm as most of the exA’s other fighting games. Japanese and European customers can also order through their local distributors (in the case of the latter, there’s Red Sun Systems). Here’s the kit:
As for the exclusive thing – this has been a criticism of the exA platform from a small segment of haters, although the position is often misconstrued. It is true that most of the games are adaptations from other platforms, but they’re not all from consoles or STEAM – if they were, you wouldn’t have a chorus of people begging for a Gimmick port – and when they are, there are changes/additions to make them work for arcades and play better than their former versions. Sure, a few of the early games didn’t add a whole lot, like Kung Fu, but they’ve been adding more to most recent titles and regardless the amount of content added, the exA versions of any one of these games serves as the definitive version of any particular game from what I’ve played, thanks in good part to the focus on minimal input lag.
Of course, I’m all for full exclusives and in my discussions with exA, I can tell that they know that content is king. Why have their efforts focused on ports so far? It’s far more difficult to get a company with this business model off of the ground by handling more expensive and risky original titles. They’ve gotten past that point though, which is bringing us this game, which is going to be quickly followed by the release of another exA exclusive Axel City 2. We could also probably count P-47 Aces Mk. II as a full exclusive, given how different it is from the 1996 original arcade piece.
Anyways, enough harping on that – what do you think about this?
