Arc System Works has announced the details for the North American BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle open beta. This announcement follows the Japanese beta announcement back in April, and the announcement that PSN pre-orders, which were supposed to go live on Monday, have been delayed.
The North American PS4 beta is largely the same as the Japanese one. PSN pre-orders will become available on May 9, with the pre-order exclusive beta access starting on the same day and running until May 12. Following that, the beta will be available to everyone from May 12-14. Everyone will have access to all 20 base characters, the online casual lobby, tutorial and practice modes, and VS CPU. In addition, those with pre-orders will have access to offline 2-player versus throughout the beta. Once the beta period ends on May 14, the game will become an offline demo, with everyone losing access to the online lobby. Those with pre-orders will retain access to all 20 characters, while everyone else will have their roster cut down to only Ragna, Yu, Hyde, and Ruby. Everyone will retain the same offline modes they had access to during the beta.
Today’s announcement only applies to the PS4 version of BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle. There has been no word about whether western players will have access to any similar beta/demo on Steam or Switch, while Japanese players will at least be getting a Switch beta as well as PS4.
This is not the only BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle news to come out recently. The game was featured in a recent issue of Famitsu, showing off newly-revealed characters Hakumen, Naoto and Vatista, as well as announcing that the game will feature instant-kill Astral Heats for all characters, usable when the opponent is on their last character and the user has level 4 Resonance Blaze with 9 meter. The official Japanese site has also been updated with the new characters and the date for the next ArcNama stream, set for May 18. The full game is set to launch in Japan on May 31 and North America on June 5, on PS4, Switch, and Steam. PQube is releasing the game in Europe this summer.
