The Fighting Game topic

I mean, they don't do it any more (the last character I can think of that was a walking stereotype was Rufus, who is an example of the stereotype being so ridiculous that it works as a joke). It's just that most of their most iconic characters are as such and have gone through the years unchanged

Menat kind of is but is a good example of it enhancing her design rather than drawing away from it. Her walk is legit great and her accidental Jojo reference is funny.

A lot of Street Fighter characters are pretty much just one note jokes and not a whole lot more than that. Abigail likes cars and is an idiot. Birdy likes food and is an idiot. Hakan likes oil. Zangief likes Russia (and wrestling!). El Fuerte likes to cook, etc.

I'm not expecting all of them to get super fleshed out and in depth but a lot of them don't even have enough basic personality traits strung together to even qualify as characters half the time. I get joke characters, too, but when half your new characters are one note jokes I think it's a bit excessive.

As I said, I think people tend to be more forgiving of the characters where other members of their home country have been added later, like the example I gave of Zangief, Necro and Decapre (and arguably Kolin, although her slightly silly default outfit feels like a step back in this regard :V) thus offsetting their stereotypical nature somewhat. Plus, I think most folks know that the more stereotypical characters were very much products of their time, and focus on the better aspects of them precisely because of this.

Haven't folks been making similar complaints about Tekken? Maybe not 'all the new characters are jokes' but more like 'every character who isn't a Mishima is either completely irrelevant or a butt-monkey'? It feels more like a multi-game trend.

edited 10th Apr '18 6:30:41 PM by PresidentStalkeyes

Sadly a lot of SF characters are being one-noted these days. Birdie only became like that in 5, in alpha he wasn't nearly as stupid and a lot of side adaptations make him a honorable brute or whatever.

SF 5 made Zangief worse too. In fact SF 5 messed up a lot of characters. Even Ibuki manages to be unlikable :/

Speaking of, I feel like Ed should've been a southern boy. He kind of looks like he would but then kind of isn't. Also lose the Nazi-esque crap.

Not exactly for Tekken

It’s just story is basically Mishima soap opera so characters not related to that mess naturally don’t get much attention

There’s plenty of cool new characters that represent diversity and plenty of joke ones too

On Street Fighter rep I wouldn’t have expected a character like Juri for Korea. I guess most complaints were about powerlevels and having a Korean he a psychopathic villain

Tekken's actually pretty good at giving at least a fairly large chunk of its side characters their own subplots and things to do. Eddy is as secondary as they come but had a legit ongoing plot all his own up until 7 put pretty much everyone outside the immediate Mishima drama sphere's stories on the backburner.

More and more do feel like they've been reduced to just being jobbers and clowns, though. Paul had a real story prior to 5 turned him into a moron.

I loved that we not only got a Korean character who was a woman and not a good guy, but legit one of the coolest antags in the series and easily one of the best SF characters ever. Despite being yet another TKD user, she was still fresh and made quite an impact.

Juri is the only good SF character since 3, imo.

I have a feeling such a change might be an inherent drawback in long-running fighting series of consistently bringing back side-characters and contriving reasons for them to continue entangling with the plots of the week long after their original arcs have concluded. You can't show them succeeding too well or having too much to do, lest they overshadow the main character(s), and eventually as the series progresses and the cast becomes bigger and bigger, the older characters who aren't part of the main story are only really kept around for popularity's sake, which means writers won't want to mess with their established personalities too much - so instead they go the opposite direction and inflate the traits they already had or build them off of some Never Live It Down moment, and it kind of snowballs from there.

Obviously I'm not suggesting any of this is good, just theorizing.

edited 10th Apr '18 6:31:50 PM by PresidentStalkeyes

What ever happened with Chaos Code? It certainly seemed to fade into obscurity. I gotta say though...Hermes as one of the worst outfits I've ever seen on a female figting game character. It's like the most tryhard fanservice outfit ever, but lacks cohesion and just comes off as laughable. I'm not as turned off from fanservice as some critics, but this one just feels tacky◊. She's a witch BTW.

It got ported over to Steam

Animu fighter that isn’t really popular in the first place, I’m not gonna assume there’s good net play community

been wondering this for a while - are there any fighting games out there that flip the Comeback Mechanic trope on its head, like Under Night In-Birth does with its GRD system? ^note long story short, if you can pressure your opponent better than they can pressure you in a 10(?) second interval, you get a command that cancels anything and gives you free meter on top of that based on how good your pressure was i've always been itching to play that game solely around the fact that the GRD system even exists.

Negative penalty in Blazblue arguably qualifies. And in CT bursting I think put you in danger mode which turned you into glass.

A lot of Arc Sys games penalize you for turtling too much, and KOF XI had a weird system where, if you ran down the clock, the most aggressive or technical character won rather than who had the most health.

Guilty Gear has a smaller screen and retreating too much will lower your meter gain. Game heavily favors offense.

I'm also reminded of Street Fighter Alpha 3's Guard Break system, where you have a 'Guard' meter instead of (or in addition to, I can't remember) a Stun meter. Blocking attacks wears the meter down, but it refills by itself over time. If you let the meter empty all the way by blocking too much, however, not only is your guard broken, opening you up for a free hit, but the Guard meter is shortened, meaning it takes less to Guard Break you again, which to me sounds like a pretty heavy penalty for overzealous turtling. Activating 'Saikyo Mode' handicaps you in various ways, including giving you a pathetically short Guard Meter by default, so you can barely block anything.

That makes me wonder, though; are there any Fighting Games which heavily favour defence? Somehow I get the impression that players mostly prefer offensive games.

edited 15th Apr '18 5:18:44 PM by PresidentStalkeyes

A lot of fighting games have tons of defensive options. Guilty Gear's drowning in them between perfect guarding, pushblock, parries, bursts clashes, etc.

The Alpha series had the Alpha counter, Street Fighter III its universal parries, IV had the Focus Attack, and V... doesn't really have anything as far as I know.

And playing 'lame' as it's called by running away and chipping away at your opponent's health is a tried and true tactic even in hyper offensive games like Marvel if your character has the kit for it.

True. I should know a lot about playing lame.

V does have stuff like that, but it varies based on the character's V-System, which means not everyone has them - Ryu and Alex can do 3rd Strike-style parries (with V-Skill and V-Trigger 1, respectively), while other characters have instant counter-attacks like Vega, Kolin and Abigail. The only thing shared between all characters is the V-Reversal, which honestly I find unreliable as a defensive option, since they can easily be blocked. But as previously implied, I'm not that good.

edited 15th Apr '18 5:35:21 PM by PresidentStalkeyes

maybe i phrased the question wrong or something. getting penalized for playing too defensively shows up in a lot of fighting games, as you guys noted.

you know how some people give mechanics like X-Factor flak because, despite being a Comeback Mechanic, it's often more useful to the pros rather than the audience the mechanic was intended for? UNIB was basically like "yeah, you guys have a point, so we're giving the winning side X-Factor this time". i'm wondering if there's other fighting games like that, that follow that particular train of thought, because i can't think of any.

honestly, the closest thing that comes to mind is probably Killer Instinct, and that's probably not saying much - you get a smidgen of extra Instinct Mode meter every time you successfully pull off a combo breaker. other than that, it acts like a stock standard comeback mechanic, like the Revenge meter in SF 4 or V-Trigger in SF 5, filling up when you take damage.

Dunno if anyone's heard of Blade Strangers, or even Nicalis in general, but they're a Japanese publishing house known for milking porting Cave Story and a few other indie titles to everything under the sun.

They now have a crossover fighting game game featuring several of their characters.

And Shovel Knight.

And Isaac. http://www.siliconera.com/2018/05/10/blade-stragers-next-guest-character-revealed-isaac-binding-isaac/

It's getting a little weird. Some gameplay footage otherwise:

edited 11th May '18 12:43:52 AM by Hashil

Another thing against the whole accessibility craze - fewer buttons makes fighting games harder to play, not easier.

Some more relevant examples include Dragon Ball Fighterz and Blazblue Cross Tag Battle, both of which force you to fight their auto combo systems as much as your opponent once you get past relying on them.

edited 5th Jun '18 7:33:10 AM by Hashil

honestly, i think that would be the problem of the auto combo system then, not the lack of two extra buttons. i could see why that would be the case, though. i've heard people say The Division is harder to play on console not because of the usual "controllers are for retards" argument, but because the lack of buttons on a conventional controller makes something as simple as throwing a grenade excessively complicated.

DBFZ gets a pass, imo, on the auto combo thing, because treating it like a conventional Guilty Gear game would just piss off the demographic coming into the game from Xenoverse, where they expect all the fighting to be handled by one button. (i might be mixing this up with the Naruto fighting games, so correct me if i'm wrong)

i feel like BBTAG got shafted with its control layout because that's probably the only way Arcsys could think of to reconcile three different games (and appeal to the last demographic who's coming in from RWBY that probably doesn't play fighting games at all). the bizarre part is that (iirc) Under Night In-Birth also uses a four button scheme, which means they really don't have an excuse with them...

Cross Tag really could of benefited from Capcom Vs. SNK's Groove system - something that tailors the game's subsystems to something you'd be more familiar with - have a Blazblue Groove, a UNIB Groove, a Persona Groove, and than a Cross Tag original groove, ie what everyone has to use, that the game defaults to in case you're new and don't care.

As is, I've been told everyone just feels weird to play and no one's familiar, so it's the worst of all worlds in the name of being accesible.

edited 9th Jun '18 8:56:24 AM by Hashil

You're one of the few between the guys here who seem lukewarm on the crossover, unlike the others.