Tag fighters are back, baby. Or at least they're going to be back. At some point. After a verifiable dearth of the things for a good long while, Riot came out swinging in February 2024 by renaming Project L to the still-questionable 2XKO and revealing that it was going to be a 2v2 dukeout.
But just like buses, bad things, good things, and celebrity deaths, it turns out tag fighters also come in threes: Summer Game Fest saw the reveal of InvincibleVS—from a brand-new studio formed out of a lotta Killer Instinct folk—and Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls from veteran 2D fighter studio Arc System Works, the latter of which is going extra balls-to-the-wall by making its game a freakin' 4v4. That's a lot of characters to lab.
Are any of these actually out and playable yet? No (though 2XKO is almost there) but it does give fighting game fans a whole lot to be excited about. The sudden uptick hasn't gone unnoticed by the FGC either, and IGN recently asked 2XKO lead Alex Jaffe what he thought about the sudden resurgence. Jaffe joked that the game was already "the old new kid on the block" despite not even being released yet.
"Honestly, it's exciting in a real way, because everybody on this team loves tag fighters, and there were a real jerk of options for a while," He added. "And we're making this game because we think that this is one of the most mind-meltingly enjoyable experiences you could have on planet Earth.
"And so we're genuinely psyched that there are more options out there and that there are going to be more people playing tag fighters on account of multiple games coming out. And it's really cool just seeing them, everyone's taking very different takes on them."
Jaffe, who was at EVO alongside a playable version of 2XKO, even managed to find a little bit of time to sniff out the competition.
"The Tōkon folks were super nice and welcomed us in to play this morning," he said, noting that he had "a great time." Jaffe was also quick to note: "The game's very different than ours. The pacing is different. The way team play works is different."
That doesn't particularly surprise me. Like I said, 2XKO works in teams of two while Tōkon has decided to double its team size in comparison. That's gonna create some pretty different pacing—how much health everyone has, how long rounds take, strategy and synergy—I would have been more surprised if the two were identical.
Continuing his diplomacy, Jaffe said "I think there's room to enjoy both of them, or just different audiences that will like different ones. So I feel great about that. I haven't got to play Invincible. Yeah, super excited to play that."
Now I'm not much of a League of Legends or superhero girlie, but I'm still pretty damn excited to dive into a new generation of tag fighters. I'm sure for some it might even be their first time giving the genre a whirl, and Jaffe seems jazzed about that possibility.
"I think it's inevitably going to bring a lot of people into this kind of peak experience," he said. "So we're excited, and we want people to play our game, and enjoy, and in general, to play tag games to enjoy them."
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