Melty Blood

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Melty Blood
メルティブラッド (MELTY BLOOD)
Genre	2D Fighting
Game
Developer	TYPE-MOON French-Bread (known as Watanabe Seisakujo prior to 2003)
Genre	Fighting Game
Platform	PC
Released	December 2002
Manga
Authored by	Takeru Kirishima
Publisher
Serialized in	CompAce
Original run	June 2005 –
No. of volumes	1

Melty Blood (メルティブラッド, Meruti Buraddo^?) is an immensely popular doujin 2D fighting game for the PC, created by TYPE-MOON and French-Bread (known as Watanabe Seisakujo prior to 2003), acting as a side story to TYPE-MOON's visual novel game Tsukihime taking place a year after the events in the "happy" alternative ending to Arcueid's path, where she remains alive. It is widely considered to be one of the best doujin 2D fighting games ever made, on par with the best professionally made 2D fighting games like the Guilty Gear and Street Fighter series. It was even chosen as one of the nine games that were to be played at the prestigious fighting game tournament Tougeki. It has been adapted into a manga series, authored by Takeru Kirishima and serialized in the CompAce magazine, that has been published since June 2005.

Melty Blood was originally released in December 2002 as a PC doujin fighting game in association with Watanabe Seisakujo, 2 years later, in May 2004 an expansion for the game was released, Melty Blood Re-ACT. The expansion added several new characters and fixed gameplay balance issues. Finally, Melty Blood ReACT Final Tuned,an update patch to Melty Blood ReACT,was released as a free download. This patch was specifically designed to allow the game to be configured to resemble the gameplay of Melty Blood: Act Cadenza.

Contents 1 Melty Blood: ReACT 2 Melty Blood: ReAct, Final Tuned 3 Melty Blood: Act Cadenza 4 Characters 5 Gameplay 6 Media 7 Translation 8 External links

[edit] Melty Blood: ReACT

The first revision to the game, entitled Melty Blood ReACT, fixed numerous balance and infinite-combo issues in the original, made some changes to the game's mechanics, and added several new characters, though only two are playable.

• Ren, also known as Len
• Satsuki Yumizuka (named as Satsuki Yumiduka ingame)

[edit] Melty Blood: ReAct, Final Tuned

Supposedly the final revision in this series, Final Tuned is an expansion to ReAct that brings over several new features (designed to allow the game to be configured to resemble the gameplay of Cadenza).

The most notable of these features are-

• The inclusion of a new analog-friendly controller setup
• New pad config options that let you assign previously combo-only moves to individual buttons
• The ability to alter and adjust most of the game's internal variables (via new interface options)
• Four new colors for each player as well as a wide variety of combo/power/timing/gameplay tweaks, and slightly updated animations.

[edit] Melty Blood: Act Cadenza

Melty Blood: Act Cadenza, is an arcade port of Melty blood to the NAOMI system by Ecole. It features new characters, new gameplay mechanics and a re-organized storyline. On August 8th 2006 a port of Act Cadenza to the Sony PlayStation 2 was released, marketing for the game was done by Ecole. However, it was not a straight port, as it included several balancing changes and revisions to the gameplay.

The characters introduced in Act Cadenza are:

• Aoko Aozaki
• Kishima Kouma
• Neco-Arc
• Neco-Arc Chaos

Along with various gameplay changes, Other notable differences in Act Cadenza are:

• New Artwork for character portraits
• New background scenarios
• New Special effects
• New animations.

[edit] Characters

As of Melty Blood Act Cadenza and Final Tuned, there are 18 playable characters.

• Akiha Tohno
• Vermillion Akiha (called Kurenaisekisyu Akiha before Act Cadenza)
• Arcueid Brunestud
• Red Arcueid (Called Warcueid before Act Cadenza)
• Ciel
• Hisui
• Hisui & Kohaku
• Kohaku
• Mech-HISUI
• Miyako Arima
• Nrvnqsr (Nero) Chaos
• Shiki Tohno
• Shiki Nanaya
• Sion Eltnam Atlasia
• Sion TATARI (called Vampire Sion before Act Cadenza)
• Warakia (TATARI)

In the original Melty Blood, only six of these characters were available to be played, with eight more being unlockable through story-mode. However, in a later update released for the game (the 'Nero' patch), all the characters are available from the start. The reasons for this are slightly unclear; they appear to be the result of a legal snafu where TYPE-MOON mistakenly thought they would no longer be allowed to produce updates/patches, and thus made a 'last patch' which unlocked the characters as a sort of gift for the fans. Whatever the reason, TYPE-MOON has left these characters available throughout all subsequent releases. In addition, Aoko and Kouma were both added to the game as of Act Cadenza, although Aoko was a boss in previous versions. Act Cadenza also changed the given names of several characters.

[edit] Gameplay

Melty Blood makes use of widely used concepts in fighting games such as cancels (canceling an attack before its animation ends, then beginning another, allowing for more complex and damaging combos) chain combos (normal moves that can be link without the use of cancels) and the use of power bars (called Magic Circuits in-game). Magic Circuits serve more purposes than just allowing the execution of special moves. Chain combos are much easier to perform in comparison to other games, In addition it also brings several interesting features to the concept of Shielding (similar to Street Fighter III's "parrying", Garou: Mark of the Wolves' "just defense," and the Guilty Gear series' "instant blocking") into the game.

Shielding in Melty Blood serves various purposes ,It makes it possible to cancel an opponent's attack completely, it gives the player the possibility to trigger Last Arcs, in addition there are several shield specific moves, it should be noted that unlike many of the games mentioned above, shielding is assigned to a specific button. The features of shielding vary in each of the revisions of Melty blood.

Magic Circuits as stated before, work as the super meter in melty blood. They present a variety of modes that allow different gameplay mechanics, such as recovering health or make it possible to activate devastating attacks. like many other features,each revision of the game modifies some aspects of the Magic Circuit.

Simultaneous impacts: A canceling move,where if 2 characters hit each other at the same time they will nullify each other out, however the counter-attacks array that can be performed is very limited. This mechanic is handled similarly in Guilty Gear.

Dash Shielding: In Melty Blood some dash animations have a certain number of defense frames, if the opponent attacks the character while these certain frames are active, his/her attack is cancelled.

Aerial recovery: Another feature often used in many fighting games, this can only be performed once your character has been thrown into the air and is falling towards the ground by tapping any button, by doing so the character will recover his/her standing animation and grant temporary invulnerability, mostly used to prevent an opponent from comboing.

Tactical Recovery: Performed by pressing any directional button twice other than down when you character falls to the floor. This makes the player's character quickly recover when knocked down to the ground. It is usually to the player's advantage to do this in professional level play where laying down can give the opponent a chance to get close and start a wake-up game (A tactic that involves making your opponent guess what you're going to do when they get up from the floor).Also widely used to recover with little or no damage from attacks like throws.

[edit] Media

Promised Dawn ~ Melty Blood Original Sound Track Is the original soundtrack compilation of Melty blood. Originally released in April 29, 2003, as a Double CD published by Watanabe seisajuro. Music was Composed by Raito Kate. Arrangement was made by James Harris (2-7), Number 201 (2-9)

Track listing

• Disc One
• VS Part

1. Melty Blood 3:27
2. I will begin 0:47
3. On the edge 0:13
4. Encount 3:30
5. Elegant Summer 2:56
6. Troublesome Visitor 3:35
7. Fearless 2:08
8. Noble Mind 2:04
9. Stillness Dark 3:29
10. for Crimson Air 3:12
11. Midnight Raider 3:56
12. PE-RI-CA 3:40
13. The theme of Arcueid 2:38
14. Emergency Occurrence 3:14
15. Help Me! 3:32
16. The end of 1000 years 3:06
17. A G Man 1:38
18. Chinese Girl 2:21
19. Count Down 0:44
20. Remember! 0:30
21. Memories of once 5:45
22. Bonus Track 8:08

• Disc Two
• Novel Part

1. Intro 0:36
2. Ready 1:57
3. Together 2:20
4. daydream 2:45
5. Alchemist 3:14
6. Another wonder 2:27
7. Bad Memory 1:32
8. Phantom Night 1:45
9. Under the moon 1:57
10. Outro 0:43
11. Character Voice Collection

[edit] Translation

For those people who don't understand Japanese, Revolve Translations has been working on translating the games of the Tsukihime universe. As of this writing, the complete script of Melty Blood has been fully translated, scripting and image editing will begin shortly after Tsukihime's english translation patch is released. So far a patch has been made available for Melty Blood that translates the intitial setup screen and main menu into English (it does not, however, translate any of the story-mode dialog). The online manual has also been translated and is available to view in your browser.

[edit] External links

Official Sites:

• (Japanese) Official website

Reviews:

• NTSC-uk's review of Melty Blood AC for PS2

Fansites:

• Fanforum

TYPE-MOON
Staff
Kinoko Nasu | Takashi Takeuchi
Visual novels (the "Nasuverse")
Tsukihime | Kagetsu Tohya | Fate/stay night | Fate/hollow ataraxia | Fate/Zero