The surprise hit fighting game Fantasy Strike, which recently went free-to-play this year to the joy of every fighting game fan out there both casual and hardcore, is getting an update this month. 

The big one is the character roster balancing, nerfs, and buffs. Most notably,

• Setsuki, arguably an S-tier character, suffers a few cooldown and startup with some of her most-used moves like her Air C and Super.
• Players are not cured of Argagarg’s poison if they pick up a Lum cherry or Lum cake. Ditto for Argagarg’s bubble shield; it doesn’t disappear when you pick those consumables up. You have to make the effort to land a hit on him to stop these debuffs & moves.
• Onimaru gets a buff, like a higher anti-air priority for his neutral A and armor break for his Parry.
• Quince’s air Super no longer auto-corrects to face the opponent.

Other additions to this patch include Dummy Recording for practice mode, the ability to gift items to other players, some UI cleanup for Event Mode, and a few others:

• All four survival modes now give the player +2 starting hit points.
• In “Cruel 10” survival, when you face metal Quince, the announcer no longer says “Metal Boss!” three times as loud as it should.
• In practice mode, the character-specific tab (with options for choosing Lum’s random item, staying in Midori’s dragon form forever, etc) now has small portraits of the appropriate character next to each line item. (A bit of polish to help you quickly see who the line item is for.)
• In menu screens, the outlines on character graphics are thinner than before. These outlines were always a bit too thick on menu screens, we finally adjusted them.
• Geiger’s pocket watch on character select and VS screen is no longer offset to the wrong position when he starts his “selected” anim while still sliding in from offscreen. This means his pocket watch is no longer in the wrong position just before you face him in arcade mode. It’s also no longer in the wrong position on the 2p character select screen when you quickly go from another character to Geiger then press Accept twice.
• [Steam] Fixed a crash in the button config screen when you place the P1 cursor on a keyboard key, then press P2 keyboard left or right.
• When you use a macro (such as B+C) to do a move, there always was and still is a slop factor of a couple frames so you can press B then C or C then B (rather than both on exactly the same frame). This means you can see a frame or two of that move before the macro of B+C is recognized. Now, if the frame or two of that move was an armored move and if that move actually gets hit (so the armor did something), you will no longer be able to get the macro’d move from that input. This has very little effect on anything, but it does prevent Rook from using the A+B throw macro if he pressed “B then A” and had the B Landslide (armored move) get hit on that specific frame. He can no longer absorb that hit then throw with the A+B.
• Fixed the ranked score screen failing to start the countdown for the next match when you’re in master league.

Stay tuned for a Fantasy Strike review later this month on Kakuchopurei. In the meantime, here’s our guide on how to play well in this fighting game.