Monster: Ancient Cline

Monster: Ancient Cline was intended to be an arcade sequel to the independently-developed Windows fighting game Monster. It would have been significantly expanded from the original game featuring new graphics, new game mechanics, and new characters.

The original game's cast of nine characters were all planned to return, featuring brand-new sprites. While most of these returning characters would have played similarly to their original incarations, many of them feature significantly different variations on their original moves or even new movesets. They would have been joined by six new characters, four of whom had been publicly announced by the time the game was cancelled:

• Origa, an armoured human swordswoman with red hair. She would have fought in a primarily melee style using her sword. She was the first new character revealed for the game and featured extensively in its marketing; she was likely planned to serve as the main character in the same way that Katze had for the previous game.
• Oomizuao, the "shaman of the haze", was a lynx beastman who could summon explosive butterflies to use as traps.
• Enkaku, a wildcat beastman, was a traditional Japanese pyrotechnician who fought by tossing bombs.
• Alto Agrippa, a shaggy dog beastman, wielded a giant axe and had the ability to temporarily bend the rules of the match.

Like the original game, Monster: Ancient Cline features a fantasy world populated by humans and beastfolk. Its gameplay draws both from "anime fighter" doujin games and oldschool games. Its signature gameplay mechanic is its "shift" system, which returns from the first game with similar mechanics. When players choose a character, they also choose one of three special modes for their character that they can activate mid-battle. Shifting into these alternate modes changes all of a character's special moves, letting them opt into a new and more powerful playstyle temporarily. "Monster" is focused on highly-damaging single strikes; "Freedom" allows characters to freely cancel special moves into each other, like Street Fighter Alpha 3's V-ism; and "Defender" (known as "Tranquility" in the original game) grants characters autoguard and other changes that make it easier to defend from an opponent's strikes and break through their offensive. New in this game is a set of three special shift-specific special moves; players can press the shift button while a shift is active to spend some of their remaining shift time on activating this move. Monster's is a low-profile blowback attack similar to the blowback moves in King of Fighters; Freedom's is a homing dash that lets players easily bridge the gap between special moves, like in Arcana Heart; and Defender's is a forward dash featuring generous frames of autoguard.

Monster: Ancient Cline was originally announced in early 2008 and underwent significant changes before it was eventually cancelled in 2010. It would have been published by Examu, an arcade developer known for the Arcana Heart series, and released for their proprietary Windows XP-based eX-BOARD hardware. It was originally announced as a more modest update of the original game and would have featured the original game's artwork, moderate balance changes to the returning cast, and new characters. A PC version was also announced later in the year. By late 2008, it had been reworked into a more elaborate sequel to the original game and this version was shown at trade shows.

It was playable by the public once at a location test which was held in February, 2010. (This is a kind of event used as a part of the development cycle of arcade games. At a location test, a late-development or completed arcade game is temporarily installed in a public arcade prior to a full release in order to gauge player feedback and earning potential. It's not unheard of for arcade games to be significantly reworked or cancelled following an unfavourable location test.) This featured a late-development version of the game with 13 of its 15 characters playable. Following this event, the developer's blog quietly stopped updating and the game was removed from Examu's website. The game's cancellation was never formally announced.