Japan Amusement Expo 2014 has been going on this weekend, showcasing all of the upcoming arcade titles. The main stage was streamed on Nico, and there was a decent amount of gameplay footage for Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN-! Daisuke joined the hosts on Friday and Saturday, and there was an interview with him which may be translated in the future. One of the most noteworthy things he said was that the Guilty Gear series was too difficult for newcomers to get into, which was the philosophy behind many of the system and character changes introduced into Xrd.

On Friday, Akira, a known BB Tager player was a guest player on stage and had some matches vs the stage hosts. You can see him play Bedman, May, and Faust. The female host plays Millia, while both of the male hosts play Sol. All credit goes to Kurushii for ripping and re-uploading these stream videos.

GGXrd Jaepo 2014 Stream Clip from Kurushii on Vimeo.

On Saturday, a special tournament was held, in which 8 press representatives competed in a single elimination bracket! Some of them actually had an idea of how to play the game, so this is probably the best footage we’re going to get of the game before its eventual release. Speaking of release, Xrd has been officially announced to drop on February 20, so it will be coming in less than a week now. You can find the tournament footage in the Youtube clip below.

Last thing I will mention is site related. I am still lost as to how the fix the site comments, and for now I’ve pretty much given up. So instead, Norematch will now be using a third party commenting system called Disqus. I have heard that it increases page load time, so I hope that the effect won’t be too significant on this site. I apologize in advance, because it requires registration before making any comments. A slight inconvenience, but it’s still better than having no comments!