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Arc System Works has revealed that it will release the arcade version of Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes on March 27, 2025. People who prefer to play in arcades will soon be able to find the fighting game in amusement centers across Japan.

The arcade release will run under Sega's ALL.Net P-ras MULTI Version 3 platform. As such, players will be able to use Aime cards to record their save data. The arcade cabinets will also contain ports for external headphones and gamepads.

One of the screenshots for the arcade version revealed that it will have 25 playable characters at launch. Besides the three new debutants on the console releases—Kaguya, Tsurugi, and Kuon—it will also include Uzuki. The latter is the game's first post-launch character added via DLC in July 2024. However, that also means arcade players will not get immediate access to Ogre, the second DLC character who appeared more recently in consoles in February 2025. The season for the console releases also includes Izumi as its third and last extra character coming in August 2025.

The arcade version of Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes will appear on Thursday, March 27, 2025. The original fighting game is readily available worldwide on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

The post Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes Is Coming Soon to Arcade appeared first on Siliconera.

Arc System Works has confirmed its appearance at the Tokyo Game Show 2024 by opening a new official webpage. It revealed that there will be playable demos of three games, including Double Dragon Revive, at the Arc System Works TGS 2024 booth.

The full list of games that will have demo builds at the event comprises Double Dragon Revive, the Nintendo Switch port of Guilty Gear Strive, and River City Saga: Three Kingdoms Next. The latter is an sequel to the Chinese Three Kingdoms-based spinoff of the River City series, which Arc System Works will release simultaneously worldwide on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PC via Steam on November 7, 2024. Those who visit the booth and play the demos will be able to receive memorabilia based on each title.

Arc System Works will also hold talk show events at its booth. It will cover Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes in addition to the above three titles. People who cannot attend TGS 2024 in person will be able to watch live streams of the talk shows on the company's official YouTube and Twitch channels.

In addition, the company will set up a goods shop at Sanwa Denshi's booth in the TGS 2024 merchandise area. The lineup will have items featuring Guilty Gear Strive's post-launch characters. Prices will range from 1,200 yen (~$8.40) for Omamori charms to 2,000 yen (~$14) for acrylic stands.

Tokyo Game Show 2024 will take place at Makuhari Messe on September 26-29, 2024. Arc System Works will place its TGS 2024 game demo booth and merchandise shop in Halls 8 and 11, respectively.

The post Arc System Works Will Feature Double Dragon at TGS 2024 appeared first on Siliconera.

Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes looked eerily similar to the previous game, Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[cl-r] when I first sat down with it. The characters all looked and, at a glance, seemed to play the same. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as Tekken 8 recently showed the fantastic positives that come with being able to carry your skills from the previous games into the new entries. As I dug deeper into this game, I started to see the small tweaks, move changes, and visual details that made this fighter stand out and shine. And it doesn’t hurt that it’s a ton of fun thanks to some interconnected systems that add so much depth to which strike you use next.

Yes, it all looks deceptively similar to the previous title. That said, it feels like all of the visuals in the game have been sharpened and improved. All of the characters have some visual improvements to the already-impressive attack animations. Attacks seem just a little bit snappier or flashier. It’s the sort of thing that felt like a minor difference, but I felt my enjoyment of the game was a little bit higher. This was also aided by the clean interface. Something about the fonts, win screens, character portrait appearances, and other fine details of the game’s framework looked really nice. It’s not usually something that jumps right out at me, but it was so good that it really improved the game’s presentation.

If you’re new to the series with Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes and you like pixel artwork, you’re going to be impressed. I cannot get over how smooth the movement is in this title and its pixel work. I would just watch Merkava, a monstrous humanoid creature, just breathed as it stood there before the match kicked in. A ton of care went into the ways the characters moved in this game, and I found myself watching replays just so I could appreciate the pixel artwork in motion.

That same care went into animating some new attacks. All of the characters have a few new abilities to add to their kit, adding some neat adjustments to what they can do. I was far from being a high level player of the last game, so it’s a bit beyond me to explain how these moves change the characters and how they play, but I know I enjoyed having some new surprises I could bust out. A lot of them could be used with relative ease, too, as the game’s combo-assist-like strikes allow you to string together some easy beatdowns by mashing your light A attack (the game’s buttons are assigned A B C D). Very easy to jump in with and do cool things, but you’ll eventually have to branch out lest you become predictable.

While each character has a good game plan you’ll want to figure out and implement (a lot of which are extremely satisfying to put to work), the GRD system throws a little chaos into the mix in Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes. The GRD gauge sits in the bottom middle of the screen, and consists of six diamonds on you and your opponent’s side. As you play aggressively and defend well, you will fill your diamonds up with color. Back off or play defensively and those diamonds will drain on your side. Meanwhile, a circle (the TS Gauge) steadily fills as the match progresses. Once it finishes a rotation, whoever have the most filled diamonds gets a 10% buff called a Vorpal state.

However, that’s not all you can use the GRD diamonds for. You can use Force Function to do a special character-specific attack (press B & C) that expends one diamond. If you get ahead on diamonds, you’re free to do some extra cool attacks as your reward for playing consistently and aggressively. You may not want to burn too many of these, though, as you can lose all of your progress to GRD Break, which can happen if you’re thrown or if you try to use a Shield Block (block while holding D) and screw it up. This means people might scramble for throws when you’re building up a stockpile of diamonds, or that your mistakes cost a whole lot more than usual.

Now, you also have your EXS Gauge, which is what fuels your special moves and your extremely powerful Infinite Worth attacks (Supers) in Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes. This builds through play, but during Vorpal state, you can also do a Chain Shift to dump your remaining diamonds into fuel for your EXS bar. The EXS bar persists between rounds and GRD doesn’t, so if the match is about to end, you can funnel that into your EXS bar so you can really slam your opponent during the next round.

What I really enjoy about these systems is that they throw extra things to consider into the mix. While you have a game plan you want to execute, you’ll need to pay attention to the GRD Gauge as you execute it. Did you have to backdash to escape something your foe was doing, and now the TS Gauge is almost finished its rotation? Better do a throw to nullify the opponent’s GRD advantage before that circle is complete. If you have a bunch of diamonds left and you’re in Vorpal state, should you dump those into your EXS bar early so that you have an advantage next round (or just to funnel into an Infinite Worth), or hold onto them this round to keep your current advantage? It made me continually adjust my game plan, resulting in some scramble-y matches (in a game where matches are already pretty wild).

Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes also lets you add further damage by activating Veil Off, which uses your whole EXS Gauge (you need 100% out of 200% minimum to use it, though) but gives you a 20% boost in damage (and this stacks with the 10% from Vorpal if you wanna go wild). This state lets you string together things that don’t normally work together as it lets you use EXS moves so long as you have a little bit of meter in the EXS Gauge instead of needing a whole bar, allowing for some of your nastiest combos while having a huge damage buff.

So, again, there is much to consider within the general ebb and flow of a match besides your character and what they’re capable of. All of these systems feed into one another in ways that can result in massive damage boosts or huge shifts in momentum (a couple of careful Shield Guards can give an opponent on the ropes enough advantage to get the buffs they need to turn the tide). I found myself constantly weighing options and changing strategies based on the GRD Gauge or the state of my opponent, and it resulted in matches that just felt very involved and interesting.

Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes has a solid tutorial to teach you all of this stuff, too. It’s a bit intimidating at first as you find yourself looking at a wall of text, but it is all laid out in very careful steps to help you understand the nuances. You can also try many of these moves out right on the spot. I felt it was set up in such a way that it made the complexities make a lot of sense fairly quickly, and it also offers some practice in the more complex elements of fighting games if you want some lessons on creating frame traps or stringing combos together.

That’s especially helpful with the two new abilities that were added to this game. Creeping Edge is a quick defensive move that lets you shoot forward towards your opponent (or through them), avoiding their attacks while closing distance. It costs GRD Gauge to use, so it’s expensive, but the ability to ignore their strike and start some trouble of your own is very useful. The other ability, Celestial Vorpal, occurs when you turn Vorpal but have all six bars filled. When this happens, you steal all of your opponent’s GRD diamonds, getting twelve diamonds worth of duration on your Vorpal state. It’s a huge, long advantage that makes the battle for GRD diamonds even more intense as they fill up.

With so many systems in play, and with the addition of the new ones, Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes is even more aggressive, yet still extremely complex and thoughtful, than ever. Adding great rollback netcode into the online play also made it feel extremely satisfying to play online. I rarely had many hiccups while duking it out (although I learned that I have a long ways to go to get better at the game). Having a solid online component alone makes this entry worth picking up.

That said, for all of the nice additions, I just kind of wish I liked the way more of the characters looked. This is a deeply personal reason to complain, but something about the character designs just doesn’t impress me. I love seeing them in motion, find their attacks and abilities to be really impressive, but I just don’t care for a lot of the cast and find it limits me on who I want to play as. I almost feel silly bringing it up, but so many of these characters look like lost teenagers on their way to school, or weird monsters and twisted people that are missing a key detail to make them really pop, that I just wish I could like the designs more.

Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes, as a sequel, might also feel like it’s a bit lacking compared to the bigger fighters out there due to a limited number of modes. You get your online ranked, casual matches, room and matches. For single player, you have an Arcade story, Score Attack, Time Attack, Survival, and Combo Missions, but there’s no large story mode to tie it all together. It feels like it’s lacking compared to some of the bigger games, but in the same vein, I also didn’t find I cared. The Arcade story was in-depth enough (although I don’t know the lore well and this game doesn’t do much to help you learn it) and the other modes were good enough to help me figure out the characters. It’s a good amount of depth as you have 24 characters to experience individual stories with, so I don’t feel single player folks will feel it’s missing much.

The one place I wish it had gotten a bit more was with characters. The game added three new playable characters (although more are on the way), and I didn’t much care for any of them, visually. Tsurugi looks like yet another lost high schooler, except he has a big shield. Kaguya has a suite of impressive gunplay attacks and movements that made her the standout of the new characters. Kuon is the big bad, and he has some neat strikes that send him behind the opponent, the ability to fly temporarily, and some nasty screen-filling strikes. They’re fun to play, but again, the character designs just didn’t impress me. It’s a small element that is going to mainly be a really personal problem, but I have to it that it keeps bugging me in this game.

Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes felt similar to predecessors at first, but the visual cleanups, new attacks and details, nicer interface, improved online, and a handful of new characters make it feel like the best possible package for this series so far. Whether you’ve played previous titles or are coming in brand new, this feels like the best version of the game to get. If you love complex fighters where the matches can get utterly wild from explosive characters and interwoven systems, you cannot go wrong with this game.

Under Night in Birth II SYS: Celes is available now on the PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and Windows PC.

The post Review: Under Night in Birth II: SYS Celes Polishes an Excellent Fighter appeared first on Siliconera.

The full lineup for the EVO Japan 2024 fighting game tournament is now known. A total of seven titles will be available for people to test their skills to the limit with a prize pool for the top six players. Tekken 8 and Street Fighter 6, the respective latest entries from Bandai Namco and Capcom's flagship series, are also included in the list.

Here is the full lineup of EVO Japan 2024, along with the maximum player allocations for each title:

• Granblue Fantasy: Versus -Rising- by Cygames and Arc System Works - 2,048 players
• Guilty Gear -Strive- (PS5) by Arc System Works - 2,048 players
• The King Of Fighters XV (PS5) by SNK - 2,048 players
• Street Fighter III 3rd Strike: Fight for the Future by Capcom - 768 players
• Street Fighter 6 by Capcom - 6,144 players
• Tekken 8 by Bandai Namco - 6,144 players
• Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes by Arc System Works and French Bread - 2,048 players

Some of the titles in the lineup are yet to be released as of this announcement, but they will already be available by the time EVO Japan 2024 is held in late April 2024. Cygames will release Granblue Fantasy: Versus - Rising on December 14, 2023. Arc System Works and French Bread will launch Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes on January 25, 2024. Last but not least, Bandai Namco's Tekken 8 will be available on January 26, 2024.

The tournaments for all seven titles will feature a double-elimination bracket with the same prize pool. The winner of each tournament will win one million yen (approximately $6,750 as of December 1, 2023). The event will also hand out ￥450,000 to the runner-up, ￥250,000 for the third place, ￥140,000 for the fourth place, and ￥80,000 to two fifth-place finishers who went up to the Losers' Quarterfinals.

EVO Japan 2024 will take place at Ariake GYM-EX in Tokyo on April 27-29, 2024.

The post EVO Japan 2024 Lineup Includes Tekken 8, Street Fighter 6 appeared first on Siliconera.

Arc System Works will hold an open beta test for Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes globally on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4, according to an announcement on its Japanese website with an English translation. The open beta test client will be available from November 17, 2023, at 10 AM JST / November 16, 2023, at 8 PM ET to November 20, 2023, at 4 PM JST / 2 AM ET.

Players in the open beta will be able to try offline and online matches. The latter will feature a rollback netcode and players do not have to subscribe to PlayStation Plus. The beta version will have 23 out of 24 characters set to be playable at the full game's launch. Kuon will be the only character yet to be accessible in this build.

Arc System Works will also open digital pre-orders for the PS5 and PS4 versions of Under Night In-Birth II at the same time as the open beta release. People who purchase the Deluxe Edition will gain a 72-hour early access to the full game. While the fighting game is also slated to appear on the Switch and PC, the company has still yet to announce the pre-order dates for those platforms.

Arc System Works first revealed Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes at the EVO 2023 tournament in August 2023. The full-blown sequel to the Under Night In-Birth series will also come with a story continuation. The full release will include Kuon as the 24th playable character at launch.

The Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes open beta test will run on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 on November 16-20, 2023. The full game will also be available on Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam on January 25, 2024.

The post Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes Open Beta Will Appear on PS5 and PS4 appeared first on Siliconera.

Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes will come out on January 25, 2024. A new trailer, which you can see on Arc System Works’s official YouTube , shows off some of the new moves and characters that you can play as. In total, there will be 24 characters at launch.

You can watch the new Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes trailer below:

Some changes and improvements that Arc System Works made to the original Under Night In-Birth include new animations and graphics. The arcade mode will also feature a new story, which seems to finish up the existing plot. For the first time, it will also have a rollback netcode, which will improve the experience of playing online. Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes will also implement casual matches into the game for the first time.

Three new characters in Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes include Kaguya, Tsurugi, and Kuon. Arc System Works will reveal more information on Tsurugi and Kuon at a future date. New skills for existing characters include Blaring Outrage (Hyde), Soaring Dragon (Linne), Reverie Obelisk (Orie), and Gloomy Invitation (Seth). The website will continue to update with new techniques as Arc System Works reveals them. 

Finally, there are two new battle mechanics: Creeping Edge and Celestial Vorpal. Creeping Edge allows you to approach an opponent while dodging their attacks. If you activate it at a close distance from your opponent, you can even appear behind them. If you have over six GRD gauges when you activate Vorpal, it’ll be Celestial Vorpal instead. All of the GRDs will become yours, and your attack will be greatly boosted for a set period of time.

Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes will come out on January 25, 2024, for the PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam.

The post Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes Will Come Out in January 2024 appeared first on Siliconera.

At Evo 2023, Arc System Works and French-Bread announced Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes. The next entry will continue the series’ story on the Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, and PC via Steam. 21 characters are confirmed, and it will offer rollback netcode. It is set to debut in 2024.

Things pick up after the original game, with Hyde heading off to face Kuon the Aeon after Linne disappears. This means he’ll head into the Night, as will other familiar faces from the original game and updates.

Here’s the first trailer.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m55Ju_OmSvU[/embed]

The first batch of screenshots also appeared and confirmed the following 21 returning fighters:

• Akatsuki
• Byakuya
• Carmine
• Chaos
• Eltnum
• Enkidu
• Gordeau
• Hilda
• Hyde
• Linne
• Londrekia
• Merkava
• Mika
• Nanase
• Orie
• Phonon
• Seth
• Vatista
• Wagner
• Waldstein
• Yuzuriha

And here's the first set of screenshots for the game:
[gallery columns="7" size="full" ids="976164,976165,976166,976167,976168,976169,976170,976171,976172,976173,976174,976175,976176,976177" link="file"]

The original Under Night In-Birth originally appeared in arcades in Japan in 2012. It wasn’t until Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late that it showed up on the PS3, then PC, worldwide. That was followed by Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[st]. The most recent version was Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[cl-r], which appeared worldwide in 2020.

Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes will come to the Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, and PC via Steam in 2024.

The post Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes Debuts in 2024 appeared first on Siliconera.