Wind and earth join the fray
I am a little surprised that we have not yet properly talked about Rivals of Aether on Destructoid. Aside from a brief mention among dozens of other games, we have not looked at the 2D pixel art Smash Bros.-like fighting game. Every time a piece of content would hit the tips inbox, I would think, “This looks cool. Surely somebody will write about it.” And then it gets buried in piles of new emails forever. Shame on me.
So we have some catching up to do. Rivals of Aether is an upcoming fighting game built by Dan Fornace, whose work we have seen in the Game Boy style Super Smash Bros. demake Super Smash Land. Wanting to work on a game that could actually be marketed and sold, he began creating Rivals, which features similar mechanics to those found in Smash Bros. but included original characters and environments.
Previously, we had only seen two characters: the fire elemental lion Zetterburn and water elemental mammal Orcane (seen in the video below). Today Fornace revealed two more: wind elemental bird Wrastor and earth elemental beetle Kragg. The character bio page has another square for additional fighter(s), with the message “Who’s next?” Considering the connection of each fighter to a particular element, I think we can expect the usual light/holy and dark/evil to show up, but I am half-hoping this goes Captain Planet-style and the fifth character represents heart.
Rivals of Aether is expecting to release in 2015 for PC and Xbox One.