BlazBlue producer: "Now is the time for fighting games"

Street Fighter IV has opened the way to a resurgence of the fighter genre, according to Arc System Works' Toshimichi Mori.

"Thanks to Street Fighter IV, people are playing fighting games a lot more than the past," the BlazBlue producer told Siliconera.

" ... Games trends are cyclic. RPGs, for example, can be really popular at one time and then come back later on. Action games, shooting games are like this too. Now is the time for fighting games."

BlazBlue doesn't have the immediate recognisability of Capcom's fighters, but it's a highly-respected franchise among genre fans, hailing from the same stables and sharing many similarities with the Guilty Gear series.

"We have been making fighting games for a long time and we’re always going to compete with Capcom to make better games," Mori noted. "We hope the players will enjoy the all of these games."

The latest games in the BlazBlue series is the upcoming 3DS and Vita title, currently called BlazBlue: Continuum Shift II Plus.