Anime fighter BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle will punch onto Steam in June

You might know that Japanese developer Arc System Works is bringing 2D fighting game Dragon Ball FighterZ to PC later this year. But it's also working on another anime fighter, BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, and has just announced that it will land on Steam on June 5.

A new trailer, above, gives you a taste of what to expect. You'll be able to tag characters in and out of fights in a shower of blue lightning, fireballs and big hair-dos. It will launch with a roster of 20 characters pulled from four different franchises: BlazBlue, Persona 4 Arena (a fighting game based on the JRPG series), Under Night In-Birth, and RWBY.

The developer also revealed that Blake Belladonna, from RWBY, will be the first character available as DLC. The first of many, in fact, with 20 characters planned for DLC in total, doubling the size of the starting roster.

They'll largely arrive in sets of threes and you'll be able to buy a season pass-style bundle if you want to pay for them all up front. I have no doubt some fans will want to nab them all, but there's something about locking half of all the planned characters behind an additional paywall that doesn't sit right.

Arc System Works opened up a North American headquarters in November specifically so it could make more games for Western audiences, so expect these two fighters to be the first of many new games that pop up on Steam in the coming years.

Thanks, Gematsu.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.