Back in April of 2024, at Evo Japan, Bushiroad and 8ing showed off the then-current build of their in-development fighting game, Hunter X Hunter: Nen X Impact.1 It made two simple but highly effective promises: it would be a traditional fighting game adaptation of the beloved shounen battle series; it would also adopt a 3-on-3 tag team gameplay format, taking direct mechanical inspiration from Marvel vs Capcom 3 and Tatsunoko vs Capcom.
I’m no Hunter X Hunter fan, but as someone who loves 8ing’s fighting game design approach and is inescapably afflicted by brain worms that make me like tag team fighting games - games which are almost invariably predicated on subjecting your opponent to the most heinous shit the genre will allow - this seemed like a pretty good deal. I’d get a game that married together the best parts of two of the best games of their kind, all bundled up in a nostalgically low-budget package that would probably include better netcode than either of the games whose design space it shared.
Fast-forward to September of 2024 - after months of radio silence - and Nenpact appears at Tokyo Game Show 2024. It is now Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid. I don’t think I like this.
For context, when I say Nenpact is now Battle for the Grid, what I mean is that the team gameplay dynamic is almost completely changed. Where the game used to have a tag mechanic similar to the one found in Dragon Ball FighterZ, and players would otherwise have to rely on meter expenditure to change the active character, Nenpact now utilises a so-called “Active Switch” style mechanic almost identical to the Assist Takeover mechanic found in Battle for the Grid - players press an assist button to call in an assist attack, and can then press that assist button again to cancel the attack and have the assist character take over as the new point character.
Now, I want to stress that I do not think this is a bad mechanic. Battle for the Grid is easily one of my favourite tag team fighting games, and the flexibility of the Assist Takeover mechanic is a huge part of why. There’s no reason to think that its inclusion in Nenpact is going to make the game worse as a fighting game experience - these systems don’t negatively affect the creative team-building exercises inherent to tag team games, and I trust 8ing, of all developers, to execute this system mechanic in a way that is fun and wildly entertaining. But this is kind of like if SNK announced The King of Fighters XVI as a mechanical sequel to The King of Fighters XI, only to reveal 12 months out from release that they’ve redesigned the game to actually be a mechanical sequel to The King of Fighters 2000 - I’m not upset because I think one idea is worse than the other, I’m upset because the thing I’m getting is no longer the thing I thought I was getting.
I’ve had people tell me that the overhauled team mechanics make more sense for the source material - apparently, Hunter X Hunter places a large emphasis on cooperation between users of the series’ power system, and that’s better expressed through an “Active Swtich” system as opposed to a more traditional assist/tag system. Besides, why would I want the game to be Marvel vs Capcom 3 when I can just play Marvel vs Capcom 3? And there are other, smaller points I could respond with, such as:
- Sorry, but I don’t actually care about the source material
- Playing Marvel vs Capcom 3 online requires me to use Parsec, a solution which is not acceptable, and anyone who tells you that it is acceptable is coping
- By that logic, if I wanted to play Battle for the Grid, I could just play that game. I could also just play BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle, Marvel vs Capcom Infinite or 2XKO2
But the fact of the matter is that back in April, Nenpact advertised itself as a particular kind of game, and now come September, it is advertising itself as a completely different kind of game. Of course, the developers are allowed to do whatever they want - it’s their game, after all - but I think I’m allowed to be a little bit disappointed when the developers want to uproot the entire gameplay concept when I’m not looking. There might be advantages to the new one, but I liked the old one - that’s got to count for something, right?