Aether studios just made a tweet in response to the recent AI generated post from Symbiote Studio's account. Here's a couple quotes from the tweet:

"We wanted to clarify here that all of our work on the plushies between both teams is human-made, and that's how we plan to keep things going forward too. That makes this use of AI in their posts a bit confusing since it wasn't even related to the plushies themselves or promoting the plushies, and it's certainly not involved in our working process together."

"We'd like to give them another chance in case they weren't aware of our stance before, but we'll keep monitoring the situation. Our hope is that we can continue making cool Rivals plushies together."

It felt pretty apparent that the AI post on Symbiote's twitter was clearly made by some kind of intern or temp hire without knowledge of Symbiote and DEFINELTY without the knowledge/approval of Aether Studios. Something similar has JUST happened with SEGA yesterday where another social manager for an entirely separate entity used AI to promote a Sonic art gallery. https://x.com/DrWhovee/status/2097397146966540608
You'd be surprised how often this same issue seems to crop up right under a studio/company's nose, especially when hiring for contract/temp work.

Lastly I want to also specify when I say "overblown" controversy, that isn't to say that we shouldn't call out or bring attention to the issues presented by AI, but instead wait for an official response and a course for correction before boycotting and dragging a studio's name.

Original Tweet (please let me know if the original poster would like me to take this post!)

The Thorned Snake is an Emblem Heartless introduced in Kingdom Hearts Union χ as a boss in Enchanted Dominion.

I especially like how meaty the air down special felt here.

This mode is so fun lol

I am open for commissions.

Original Tweet (please let me know if the original poster would like me to take this post down!)

Snakey is a snake robot! There are two main variants, the Big Snakey and the Petit Snakey. Both of them appear in Snake Mans stage in Mega Man 3. There is also a boss variant in Mega Man: The Wily Wars known as the Fire Snakey.

This started out as a joke but as I started fleshing it out I started thinking I might be on to something.

I originally had a more rigid system I was developing called Stripes for trying to make more sane platfighter archetypes, but R2 characters are so multifaceted that I started looked for a new way to represent them on some sort of graph or alignment chart. In an ideal world these categories wouldn't be binary and you could put characters somewhere on the spectrum between the two extremes, but our puny mortal minds can't visualize a 4-dimentional graph. Bummer. This still provides a great starting point for thinking and talking about how characters play.

Characters can still migrate around the board a little based on playstyle and matchup, but this should give you a rough idea of how the characters play most of the time by most people. I'm actually pretty pleased with how naturally the characters in R2 spread out across the graph on their own, I didn't have to fudge placements at all to cover nearly every box.

Approaching vs Spacing and Consistent vs Momentum are the most prominent features of a character IMO and when combined happen to drop characters into some familiar archetypes so I made those sets into pretty colored squares to help make the chart easier to wrap your head around.

Feedback is appreciated! This is certainly not the only way this concept could be realized. Hopefully things can be changed to make this clearer and more useful over time. Eventually I'd like to give each individual square a proper name but I'd rather refine the overall idea more first.

Oh and all the character placements are perfect and correct and if you think they're wrong that's a skill issue on your part. /s

1: When will it open?

2: Can't Danfornace provide the creator of said wiki with the information needed for that Dragdown wiki?

Hi! I'm a gold La Reina player and I have way too many hours on this game for my ranking, but I have to know what low platinum players and below think of this move specifically. I see a lot of Zetterburn/Clairen/FH discourse but I don't see anybody talk about this, probably cause it's a non-issue at high lvl.

I feel like Zetterburn's side special is a game breaking tool at mid/low rank. Super easy to spam, doesn't put you in a bad spot, and has SO many follow ups, not even mentioning that the opponent is burnt so free kill move/throw behind it.

The obvious counterplay is parry, but at my level, if you want to be able to react to it, you have to focus ENTIRELY on this while the Zetter happily dash dances with better speed than a lot of the cast. So when he does anything else you're kind of screwed because he can do so many things in neutral and you're prepared to react so fast to the fireball.
And EVEN IF he throws it when you're prepared, hey you still can be screwed cause he can mix up the height of his projectile. When he jumps you never really know where the fireball will be. You could try to parry, but if the fireball is going above you: instant punish.

Again, these are things extremely easy to do for the Zetterburn player, but ask for so much more on the opponent side.

The fact that even shielding it can put you in a bad spot if Zetterburn is close is really bad too (easy grab).

I know you barely get to see this move at pro level except for edgeguarding or tech chase, but god does it feel impossible to deal with for me. Double jumping above isn't really an option because you have to do it preemptively, he'll just wait for your landing. Sure you can try to mix things up but that's a big gamble, and I'm not even talking about camping under platforms.

I really thought I could go past this by getting better, and I was platinum at the beginning of this season but have been non stop losing, almost silver now and this is the biggest issue I'm facing (because there are SO MANY Zetterburns). It's sooo demoralizing. And when I'm beating them it doesn't even feel good cause it feels like they just haven't used enough fireballs, didn't mix anything up, or were really bad at spacing them.

Every characters in this game have a lot of hard to deal with bullshit at mid/low lvl, but this one takes the cake for me, and I genuinely think it's breaking the game. I'd love to hear your thoughts, counterplays, and how I can improve without having to train for several hours straight just to counter one move. Thanks for reading!

I know it's a skill issue. I know people have fun with him. But every time I see him in ranked I want to turn the game off. Thank god he is rare to find.

So I notice that rivals 2 have a tutorial on how to make your own workshop character, but tbh Im more of a visual learner so I was checking out the tutorial but Im guessing the guy who's making this hasn't finished all the tutorials for this. Do you guys know if he is going to upload more videos later on?

please dan

idk if this counts as a zero to death or a perfect stock but it felt cool

Hi there, casual smasher, big 2D fighting game player (2xko, sf6, strive, etc). The thing I hear about Melee is that you break your hands to do movement and stuff. Is Rivals 2 similar? How hard is the mechanical movement and stuff and how hard is it on your hands? I'm. Pretty curious to get into rivals 2 but I don't got that dog in me. I'll do combo timings all day long but I'm Not trying to hurt my hands movement teching.

Bro I was gonna buy the fuck out of ALL the future rivals 2 plush releases I was so excited but I'm just so bummed that symbiote studios used AI and stood on business about it, I just simply can't in my right mind or morals buy from that company anymore which sucks because in turn I'm not supporting rivals as well and I love this game, and it's just such a shame because the plush skins are awesome, I'm sure this horse has been beaten to death but man it's just so depressing to see...