BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle

BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle (ブレイブルー クロスタグバトル) is a crossover fighting game with a tag-team system. It includes characters from Arc System Works’ BlazBlue, Atlus’ Persona 4 Arena, French-Bread’s Under Night In-Birth, and Rooster Teeth’s 3D anime-styled web series RWBY. The character art for this game is drawn by Higuchi Konomi who previously worked as a character designer of the XBlaze series.

Gameplay
This game will be a 2-on-2, two dimensional, tag-team fighting game, allowing the player to switch between characters during a fight. Each character has their own health bar.

The gameplay will not be exactly like BlazBlue, Persona 4 Arena, or Under Night In-Birth. However, some of their previous gameplay mechanics are retained and revamped, such as:
 * There are only five button inputs: A and B normal attacks, Crash Assault/Sweep (a C button), Tag (a D button) and Partner Skill (an Assist button)
 * ”Heat Gauge” is renamed Skill Gauge.
 * A new system called Cross Gauge, which is mainly used for Tag-based combos.
 * By consuming 100% “Cross Gauge” through pressing all 5 main buttons, Cross Burst will have the player’s secondary character to enter the fight while attacking their opponents, just as their main character retreat back.
 * Once activated the Cross Combo by pressing Partner Skill Button, the player’s partner will follow the suit of their main character, and attack their opponents, but will deplete slowly to 0. While holding Partner Skills after “Cross Combo” Activation, the gauge in the middle of the screen will increase until it reaches maximum where the Partner Skill is usable via any directions+Partner Skill button
 * ”Overdrive” from BlazBlue is now dubbed as Resonance Blaze, and can only be activated after the player’s teammate is down. The Resonance Blaze activation grants the player to refills the meter quickly, makes all Distortion Drives stronger, regenerates health, and can cancel Skills to Distortion Skills. However, Resonance Blaze can only be activated once.
 * The B+C throw button function is retained from BlazBlue.
 * As a result, the button function of “Furious Action” moves from Persona 4 Arena, which is very common for Dragon Punch-based move can only be activated by pressing A+Tag.
 * Using special moves with C button as an EX move retained from Under Night In-Birth.
 * Standing C is a Crash Assault. An Overhead attack which is unblockable against crouching opponents. After landing the attack, the timing which the player press the button will affect amounts of damage.
 * Cross System version of Crash Assault can be activated by pressing Partner Skill button, which switches the player’s main character who performs the Distortion Skill with their secondary character who will follow the main character with Distortion Skill.
 * Normal string attacks mechanic is based on Under Night In-Birth, such as having Crouching C as the primary sweep attack, and “Passing Link” chain normals.
 * An Auto-Combo called Smart Combo can be activated with either tapping A or B normals.
 * New input function for Distortion Skill Moves can only be activated through using special move command input+2 normal buttons, which cost 2 Skill Gauges.

Playable characters
It is confirmed that there will be 20 default characters and 20 DLC characters, totalling 40 characters. This caused backlash from fans, as many wanted all characters on the base game. The counter-argument from fans that were okay with this practice, was that the total price of the base game and DLC, would be around that of the average launch price of AAA fighting games.

Default characters: blue &middot; DLC only characters: green 


 * BlazBlue
 * Ragna the Bloodedge
 * Jin Kisaragi
 * Rachel Alucard
 * Hazama
 * Noel Vermillion
 * Azrael
 * Iron Tager
 * Makoto Nanaya
 * ν-No.13-
 * Es
 * Platinum the Trinity
 * Jūbei
 * Hakumen


 * Persona 4 Arena
 * Yū Narukami
 * Yōsuke Hanamura
 * Chie Satonaka
 * Yukiko Amagi
 * Kanji Tatsumi
 * Aegis
 * Naoto Shirogane


 * Under Night In-Birth
 * Hyde
 * Linne
 * Waldstein
 * Gordeau
 * Orie
 * Carmine
 * Vatista


 * RWBY
 * Ruby Rose
 * Weiss Schnee
 * Blake Belladonna
 * Yang Xiao Long

Mode

 * Episode Mode — An original story unfolding in a singularity called the Phantom Field, where the four worlds represented in the game collide.
 * Tactics Mode — The players can learn new techniques while playing a new systems of the game.
 * Survival Mode — The player have to defeat swarm of enemies.
 * Training Mode (トレーニングモード) — A mode where the player can practice handling different kinds of situations.
 * Gallery Mode (ギャラリーモード) — A mode that can be viewed all of the other illustrations.
 * Replay Theater (リプレイシアター) — A mode where you can check recorded replay of your previous battles.

Trivia

 * As RWBY is a series produced in the United States, RWBY characters start out with English as their default language.
 * Originally, the RWBY side was the only one to have dual audios between English and Japanese set for their characters, until it was confirmed on Arc System Works' Twitch livestream that the characters from each of the three other series aside from RWBY will also have an English dub.
 * This is the first BlazBlue fighting game to be released exclusively on console versions, instead of being released on Arcade, not counting update versions of certain BlazBlue titles.
 * According to Toshimichi Mori on Famitsu Interview:
 * Under Night In-Birth characters’ sprites will be redrawn to match out BlazBlue graphics.
 * Currently, there are no plans to include characters from other franchises such as from Guilty Gear in this game, despite Arc System Works’ awareness of this requests and wanted to expand it in the future, if possible.
 * The game’s main target crowd is the fans abroad rather than in Japan.
 * After the 2017’s New York Comic Con events, Arc System Works created a survey to hear the fans’ opinions for this game on their official website, until it is closed on November 5, 2017 at 8:00 AM.
 * It is one of the latest Blazblue to receive a new Logo style.