i'm honestly of the opinion that what you say isn't just due to your failings as a player, but are in fact flaws of the game's design. many people will say this game is way too "complex" or "intricate", but this isn't complexity in the same vein as other fighting games. what makes it feel so difficult is how little you can actually do in the game unless you have completely optimized your offensive flowchart with extensive labbing. once you've done that, the game kind of... doesn't really have anything else to it. the slow movement on almost every character means the neutral state ends the moment someone calls an assist, and combo resets endlessly put you in true unseeable 50/50 RPS scenarios which are completely in the attacker's favour and really do not have much defensive depth to them no matter how much you practice. at the end of the day, rock paper scissors just isn't a very deep or complex game unless you're a poker player staring right at a person's face trying to read their intentions. most proper fighting games that are taken seriously at a competitive level (street fighter, tekken) have so much player-to-player interaction going on in the match that isn't simply a pre-scriped outcome of a combo/reset that the player labbed endlessly to get off. while skullgirls is a really fun game to lab and be creative with setup-wise, it is extremely discouraging to anyone who wants to have any other playstyle or play in a way that is adaptive towards their opponent's habits. i say this as someone with experience and skill in skullgirls and lots of other fighting games. if you want a game with really interesting interactions between offense/defense, i recommend looking at tekken and how its movement system leads to tons of nuance in how to deal with moves on defense.
I remember playing KoF 99 on playstation and it mapped specials and supers onto your shoulder buttons. When playing with friends and such, I noticed no one was spamming moves or anything like that, but placing the moves they wanted at easy access that were more difficult to execute (like raging storms) onto the shoulders. I honestly think thats the best way to do it imo. You can map certain moves you like to have easy access to onto certain movements but only have a limited number of them. This also increases your strategy as to which moves you want simplified and which ones you would want. This also makes chaining and combos and such far easier and more personal. I remember playing one of the guilty gears with stylish on and just going 'wtf am I doing!?' half the time.
interesting take, personally i dont agree with is as the only fighting game I play with this feature is DBFZ and I have no issue with it. I suggest to get your timing down better as thats fixes by combos from dropping when the scaling is high.
Using consistency is a bad take when you consider that in most games, some non-projectile normals have different hit-stun/block-stun based on the position of the characters.
You consider blocking down time? I consider it very active especially when the person you're blocking is going for crazy mixups and you just block the whole thing and get a sick punish
As someone who has been getting people into the game as a master plan to introduce them to other fighting games and finally have someone to play them with, bbtag has proven itself to be, despite its nasty reputation, an absolute blast for everyone I've introduced it to and is simple and engaging enough to stoke improvement. The only other game I've been able to introduce people to like this is Soul Calibur, but that game has its own problems onboarding people after a point. It has the accessibility, but the complexity is just a little harder to dig out without some help.
one of the games i use to make this point, at least from my perspective is FFXIV. in its early years it was pretty complex, and had a bunch of dumb shit, but they really started to find their stride and the culmination of that manifested in the Stormblood expansion. I played during late Heavensward and throughout Stormblood's life cycle. Stormblood was so much fun. As a beginner player it was fun to just press shit and get through dungeons, raids and trials. the story mode was decently solid (by xiv standards. compared to other games it was still very good) then, when I wanted to start actually learning the game I was met with a deep system that offered player creativity and expression through it's system/class mechanics. i fell in love all over again. in order to clear the harder content in the game it required you to play at the top of your performance. then shadowbringers hit. I love shadowbringers and Endwalker for where they brought the story, but the gameplay completely lost me. the homogenized everything, made it so simple to do stuff that previously took several hours of practice an awareness to do. it got rid of the expression to appeal to a wider audience. I eventually quit after savage raiding in the 2nd tier of endwalker. the game just was not giving me what I wanted out of its gameplay anymore. it is absolutely possible to allow your casual players to clear the content that they have the bulk access to while still offering the hardcore players the shit they like to do. something I've noticed over the years is an increase in entitlement to access specific content in the game by everyone who plays it. i just don't think that should be the case. there should be hard things to work towards that you have to spend hours in game practicing in order to achieve. new generations of players want everything that they want, but don't wanna put in the effort. there's been so many controversies in the xiv community about stuff being too hard for them (even after the simplification) and also the devs putting cool shit behind hard content. the fuck am i supposed to have then? i agree that the skill gap should be a lot wider to allow everyone the stuff they enjoy most about any kind of game. as it stands right now, what i enjoy most about fighting games is all but dwindling from the newer titles that release in the modern era. in order to have the fun I want to experience, i gotta go join a discord server to coordinate matches with people in games where there's less than 500 people online at any given time. it's heartbreaking.
also my statements about newer players are so entitled obviously does not apply to everyone. I'm all for accessibility in games, and bringing in new people to experience the stuff that I have so much fun with in different aspects. I just wish that the stuff I really loved doing didn't have to suffer because of it. when things were to hard for me, i came back when I was ready or accepted that it wasn't for me. when shit released that I didn't like, I passed it up and stuck with the stuff I did like. not everything is going to be designed for you, not everything was meant for you, and that is okay.
Yeah, I agree. The game is fun to play but the resets are just so annoying. Having to guess on what attack the opponent will do is ridiculous. They could do a low attack, an overhead attack, a grab, or a freaking crossup. In which you basically have a 25% chance of getting out of the combo like what the heck was autumn games thinking?
One of the reason why I started to learn doing my own game is to play other fighting games with my own twist of simplicity. I do not mind DPs, QCF and Half Circle inputs but I like to see Basic Auto-Combos that don't deal alot of damage but makes you feel satisfied. I can see most casual to even non-gamer people who just like to play for fun would just mash buttons and that's totally fine. But it's when they start thinking about "I want to do something cool" they are free to do so. Most fighting games today expects you to already know alot and that's where casuals to non-gamers stay away from it. BBTag has been one of the few test subjects I'm learning, absorbing some of its mechanics while making my own. I think auto-combos makes new comers feel welcome while simple combination of Specials will make them feel they need to use it soon enough if they got bored with the auto-combos.
As a long time SF fan... I think the original Blazblue was very hard to pull off complex combo's in my opinion. I am not a fan of auto combos though... I think the original Marvel Vs Capcom and Marvel Super Heroes had it right. Street Fighter 5/6 were great too. I think oversimplification is a double edged sword with pulling in new players but putting off others.
I came from playing Mortal Kombat and when I played this game 2nd January, 2023. I couldn't and can't stop playing. It gets frustrating with the resets and sometimes I do wish I never got into it, but it has become one of my favorite fighting games because I can have a frustrating one sided set and next meet someone who's evenly matched with me and we have a long set and all that frustration disappears and is replaced with a drive to get better. I've also met some friendly players who helped me out a lot and while I'm not very good, I'm pretty decent with it. The game will make you fume and as a player considering to buy the game you'd have to understand the game has been around for a while and long time players are insanely good and losing your first matches will definitely turn you off but if you pull through you can have a great time with other players. The game will pit you with someone who is way better than you or sometimes worse but if you're lucky you'll end up with your equal and you know the rest and you have fun.
I'm glad this video was recommended to me! I thought I was the only one with this opinion. I really dislike how long you spend getting hit in this game with little counterplay. It's too close to touch of death for me, particularly when you're playing a solo character. I also dislike how hard Peacock can zone. I'd even try to play Cerebella to reflect projectiles but at fullscreen the reflect is reactable. I'm glad people who like Skullgirls usually really like it because it's just about flawless in all other areas as a competitive fighting game
I one day decided to pick up Blazblue Chrono Phantasma because I was interested in experiencing the story and playing as the characters. I had watched ALL the cutscenes of the previous two games (cause they weren't available on PS4 and my PC at the time was a steaming pile of garbo) so I was hyped to properly dive into the series...I shit you not I got stuck on the tutorial. I needed to perform a half circle for Ragna to do some kind of dash forward or uppercut move and no matter how much I tried I could never pull it off consistently. I maybe did it 1 or 2 times by mistake, confused and dumbstruck. In the end I used the auto combo system to just finish the story content. Now I am BY NO MEANS experienced in fighting games. The most I have been involved with them is owning Smash Bros Brawl + playing Tekken and Soul Calibur at my friends place. Still Jubei said the game gave plenty of time to pull of that move and I just COULDN'T. Idk maybe I am just ass at traditional 2D fighting games (I am), but as basically a brand new player that half-circle seemed like an impossibility. I wonder if that game had a "close enough" system, but if it did...ha, yeah I might just suck. That was years ago so Idk maybe I'd do a smidge less terrible or maybe even worse!
expected to think this video would be dumb but I was surprised. still don't agree necessarily. All fighting are full of arbitrary information, anyway. there is zero way of telling whether a particular move will juggle in enemy in street fighter or hell, even if a move hits low or overhead. And in the blazblue example, you can still do basic stuff easily enough if you just keep it simple enough.
sometimes simplifying to close enough to make things easier can lead to things being more annoying. I main arcana heart, who play a lot of characters, and its really annoying how it often does 623 or 214 when i try to 22. cuz for some reason the game reads something as close enough. weiss has a 623 and 632146 command grab, and i find i often accidentally command grab because the game reads 6321236 as close enough when i want to dp and accidentally over rotated. nazuna has a similar opposite issue where i often try to 641236x and get her 623 motion. I am glad that you dont have to be perfect with double half circles in newer games though, since that motion was hell in old games.
I hate hitstun scaling too and prefer hard limits on combos, despite feeling scaling is necessary for most games. As a beginner, try learning a few combos then just going for mix ups if the exact same combo scenario doesn't pop up. For example, I have no idea what is the optimal BNB for Xrd Venom after a jump in. So, I hit a jump in, do a few jabs, walk forward, then throw/go low/instant air dash cross up or whatever. -You could also play a different game if you find it as annoying as I do.-
Sick video idea and performed extremely well! I actually prefer the more basic combo systems built around mix-ups or character limitations. Like how all Smash games limit combos by increasing knockback(despite the goal being about ringouts) or how MK4/PSASBR have hard combo limits but high hitstun.
idk if its just me but i felt this aswell when i made my first scripted talking video, i tried to sound enthusiastic when i said things but it ended up just sounding slightly aggresive, and this reminded me of that. good video tho.
I honestly thought you were going to say something corny like, "it's not that I hate Skullgirls, I just hate how it ruined every other fighting game for me"
As an arcade stick player, I actually find half-circles to be easier than the Shoryuken (623) motion. The reason is that a half-circle is a smooth motion; there are no abrupt changes in direction. On the other hand, for a Shoryuken motion, you have to go from forward to down abruptly, and that is jarring to me. You either have to wait for the stick to return to neutral, so you can then do a QCF and get the input out, or you have to manually maneuver the stick to go from forward to down to do the input. Either way, it doesn't feel "smooth." The upside is that I still can't do Shoryuken motions on demand despite playing on a stick for almost a year now. If my character has a DP, I just don't risk it anymore because I know I'll fail and then eat a meaty into a long combo. If there's any motion input that I wish death upon, it's the Shoryuken motion. I honestly think fighting game devs should replace it with HCB (half-circle back).
