In the newest PSO Live Stream event, Sega announced new collaboration content with the Guilty Gear and Blazblue franchises, prominent fighting game IPs that belong to Arc System Works. Of course, Sega is no stranger to collaborating with franchises that aren’t in-house as far as Phantasy Star Online 2 is concerned.
However, a fun fact: Guilty Gear was owned by Sega for a couple of years following the merger of Sammy and Sega. While Arc System Works developed the Guilty Gear games, Sammy owned the IP. In any event, years later Arc System works would reclaim the IP and eventually develop the Guilty Gear Xrd series. And in the meantime, they launched another popular fighting game series called Blazblue.
Blazblue itself was party to a collaboration with Sega’s Border Break a year ago. The campaign was stylized as “BB X BB.” By visiting the respective game websites at the time of the collaboration, fans could unlock special items or treats for each game. It’s hard to figure out what prompted such a collaboration as the franchises are noticeably dissimilar, but in the end perhaps nothing gets in the way of true love.