French-Bread

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For the food dish, see French bread.

Soft Circle French-Bread (フランスパン, Furansupan^?, known as Watanabe Seisakujo prior to 2003) is a dojin soft company that specializes in 2D fighting games. They have worked particularly closely with TYPE-MOON, a former dojin soft company themselves, to turn TYPE-MOON's visual novel series Tsukihime into the Melty Blood series of fighting games. One of their current games, the scrolling brawler Ragnarok Battle Offline, a homage/spoof of the MMORPG Ragnarok Online so impressed Gravity Corp. (the original game's designers) that it has been given an official release outside of Japan.

It is believed that the name change was to prevent confusion with multimedia company Watanabe Productions.

Their games include:

The Melty Blood series of 2D fighting games based on Tsukihime
The Queen of Heart series of 2D fighting games
Glove on Fight: another 2D fighting game
Ragnarok Battle Offline: a scrolling brawler based on Ragnarok Online
Bike Banditz: A shmup
Rosa Chinensis Four Hand: a curtain fire shmup based on Maria-sama ga Miteru
Lillian Fourhand: Nuclear Sœur Fighters: a scrolling brawler/shmup based on Maria-sama ga Miteru
Drill Milky Punch: a multi directional fighting game based on Muv-Luv
Air Fli: a Flicky clone based on Air
Demon Hunter Mai (2000): a scrolling brawler based on Kanon

[edit] Criticism

Prior to their current identity as French-Bread, they became notable for disallowing content from their games to be used for other game engines, such as M.U.G.E.N and Knuckle Fighter X. One of the games they tried to protect is their Queen of Heart series, starting from QOH98 to Party's Breaker. While it is understood that this was done to protect their intellectual products such as sprites, this also made them a subject of heavy criticism, due the fact that the character sprites they made are also based on copyrighted characters, and that they heavily borrow resources such as sounds from other existing games, and package the result as their own dōjin product. Critics argue that they have no right to restrict usage of their resources when they themselves borrow materials.

This changed however, when they teamed up with TYPE-MOON to produce Melty Blood. Initially, they asked that sounds and voices not be used in conversions to game engines, but in later releases, beginning in Melty Blood Re-ACT, no such restrictions were enforced anymore. It is speculated that TYPE-MOON, known to be generous to fans, asked them to drop the restriction altogether.

As of now, no restrictions about conversions of their products are known today.