Air Dash Online was a fast-paced Indie Platform Fighter inspired by Super Smash Bros. Melee and traditional 2D fighters.
Seeing the potential of competitive Melee-style fighting games as a genre, a team of a few Super Smash Bros. professional players (such as Mew2King and Wobbles) and several experienced game developers/artists (such as Mike Z) founded JV5 Games to create a new game that infuses elements of both traditional fighters and Melee to create the first Platform Fighter that's tournament-ready from the get-gonote .
Several types of aesthetics are implemented to create an original world and original characters. The styles include Japanese, Steampunk, and likely more.
The game was in development for Windows PC, but is currently considered canceled.
Compare to Project M, which was another major effort to create a hardcore Melee-style game, though in the form of a mod for Brawl.
This game has examples of:
- Defeat Means Friendship: Possibly. After the Melee community beat the Skullgirls community to get a spot at EVO 2013, the creator of Skullgirls joined the development team (albeit in a small role) as a mechanic advisor. It's an especially interesting case because very few traditional fighter aficionados would think to collaborate with Smash players, yet they could also provide valuable opinions to improve the competitive viability of the new genre.
- Expy: The characters are based on archetypes established in other fighting games. See the character page for specifics.
- Platform Fighter: Trope Namer. The developers coined this name to distinguish the genre from more traditional fighting games.
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Spiritual Successor: To competitive-style Melee, which is vastly different from the regular randomness-prone Melee that Nintendo envisioned. - Steampunk: Part of the art style, particularly with Lumella's design.
- Taxonomic Term Confusion: From the website: "Through their interactions, they realized the key to curing that disease might be an enzyme specific to a certain species of tiger."
- Tiger is a species of panther, and what they probably meant was "a certain subspecies".
