More than a year after retail release for the PlayStation 3 in Europe, Arc System Work’s Battle Fantasia is finally coming to North America, courtesy of the PlayStation Network.
North American PlayStation 3-owning fans of Arc fighters like Guilty Gear and the recently-reviewed BlazBlue were somewhat disappointed last year when Battle Fantasia was released exclusively for the Xbox 360 at retail. Relief is now in sight, however, as Aksys announces a fall release for the game in downloadable for on the PlayStation Network.
“The fans have been asking for it and we’re here to deliver,” said Frank “Bo” deWindt II, Project Lead, Aksys Games. “Thanks to the revival of the fighting genre this year there hasn’t been a better time to release such a fun and exciting fighter like Battle Fantasia on the PlayStation Network.”
See? They would have released it on the PlayStation 3 earlier, but it just wasn’t a good time. It should be interesting to see how well the magic-meets-steampunk game does as a downloadable title, seeing as the 360 boxed version didn’t exactly take the country by storm.
Kotaku AU Note: Battle Fantasia was released in Australia on Xbox 360 and PS3 last week.
Neil Williams
July 14, 2009 at 2:01 PM
If I can make a suggestion to anyone in Australia who is interested in purchasing the game for 360 locally…DON’T!
It’s a good game and all, but the PAL version is butchered to all hell. The Story mode dialogue is completely missing the original Japanese voice-overs with no replacement with English voices (not a deal-breaker, but a strange move seeing as the game keeps the Japanese voices during gameplay).
The big issue is that any alternate paths through the Story mode are completely removed, for no reason I can logically work out. And unfortunately, with finding an online match nearly impossible because everybody else in the world played and got over the game months ago, Story is really the meat-and-bones of the game left, and without the alternate paths through each character’s story, they’re really not a lot left.
Again, it’s still a good game. But it’s definitely not work $80 for a butchered game. I’d definitely suggest either importing a NTSC copy, or waiting for the PS3 downloadable copy and hope it’s based on the NTSC version.
Report Permalinksle_epy
July 14, 2009 at 11:27 PM
So is battle fantasia available for download or do you have to actually go out and buy the game cause I can’t seem to find it on the Aus PSN store at all??
Report PermalinkRocK_M
July 19, 2009 at 11:53 PM
Question.. so is the gimping only applied to the 360 version or does it carry over to the PS3 version?
@sle_epy: It’s available as a hard copy for PS3 here in AU. The game was never officially released outside the PAL market (one of a rather few occurances) but since there was so much demand they are offering it over there as a DLC
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