In Champions Ascension, you enter the world of Massina where you can explore, battle and earn rewards with unique NFT champions, called Prime Eternals. We did a ton of research before we jumped into the game, and there is just **a lot** here to wrap your brain around.

There are 3 different NFT collections, Prime Eternals (the main champions), Elemental Eternals (cheaper champions, less rewards), and Pets. You don’t need any of them to play the game though.

We hopped into the open Alpha last night and you’re slapped right into the town square of Massina, reminiscent of Stormwind in World of Warcraft. I didn’t have a CA NFT at the time so it put me in as a street rat that looked suspiciously similar to Aladdin. Almost immediately I was greeted by @Squiddy who strong armed me into doing ‘Drunk Racing’, a minigame where you run around the map quaffing beers and your controls get more scrambled as you go. I’d played this game a lot in college so I was a natural but still only wound up in 2nd place.

We decided to check out the minigames. Crab Racing was fun, but the only thing you could do was flip your helpless crab back over after the table got knocked and it was me, boat and 18 bots. Still very fun!. Boat ran away with the win. Then we hopped into Dudo, which was a dice/guessing/gambling game that was surprisingly fun (When browser version?).

We hopped into matchmaking but it couldn’t seem to connect us with anyone. Maybe it was an issue with the server being a little light and MMR being too strict. However we were able to send off some Friend Requests and do some friendly battles.

Combat was a lot more than I originally anticipated and there’s an entire guide for it, but the core is 4 main categories. Weapons, Parts, Family and Essence. Family, essence and weapons are pretty standard character ability fare with a mix of rock, paper scissors but parts make it pretty interesting.

Parts are fixed, but they were mixed and matched on a character at mint. You can purchase a character that’s more well rounded and not put at a disadvantage in matchmaking, or if you buy one that has all their parts in line with your champion’s core Essence you also achieve a higher ‘purity’ rank, which increases the effects of your Fury of the Champions special. This is a pretty fun component to scour the market and find the right fit for you.

There’s also, light and heavy attacks, ranged attacks, dodging, blocking, parrying, feinting attacks to round it out for combat making it pretty dynamic. My controller is sub-par so i was using keyboard. After losing some battles, I found the block key, remapped and then started getting the hang of it.

Combat starts with a Bruce Buffer ‘LETS GO’ that really amps you up and is a best out of 3 to determine the winner. I could definitely see some trash talk going on with Voice Chat enabled.

Because we were doing friendlies we couldn’t get into the new 3v3 Mode but it looked pretty god damn fun.

In Summary; keep in mind this is a PRE-ALPHA, but it is one of the more filled-in worlds within Web3 gaming. The community was very helpful and supportive. Massina felt busy despite the low server count, the mini-games were fun, especially with friends.

The combat was dynamic and had all the elements there for making a good fighting game; easy to jump in and play, but with an exponentially difficult learning curve for competitive play.

Our only complaint is that the combat was not quite as responsive as it felt like it needed to be for a fighting game. There are a lot of combos that stun lock you for just way too long. When I think of these kinds of games I think of Super Smash Bros Melee or Street Fighter where we’re seeing parries, counters, blocks in the millisecond range. We landed on the word ‘snaptuitiveness’ and will be filing a trademark asap.

Thank you to the Champions Ascension community for answering our barrage of questions in the discord and to SQUIDDY for being so welcoming as well. We look forward to seeing more progress on this one as we were pretty impressed.

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