All Fighting Games Have Cheap BS and That's Okay 

"You Capcom players dont know whats it like to have broken characters" *I M M O T I V A T E D*

Walking cat is broken

At my local, a lot of the people that played Dragonball did not play Marvel 3, and my time with that game clearly gave me a different perspective from a lot of the other players in my area. In season 1, Android 16 could kill a character in 2 hits, and the first hit left you in a pretty scary mixup. No argument that that was one of the strongest things in the game at the time. But coming from Marvel 3, I was elated, because it meant I had a chance to get out after the first hit even though the chance was pretty much left up to a guess. The damage in Marvel 3 was so high, that many characters could kill without X factor off of a jab (and pretty much every character could kill off of a jab if they wanted to burn lvl 1 X factor), and then your incoming character was in a terrible mixup scenario that felt worse than anything that 16 could put you in. The fact that DBFZ resets to neutral when a character died only furthered my relief when I switched to that game. There's still a lot of stuff in Marvel 3 that gives me PTSD, but at the same time, it was a fun game, even with all its bullshit. And Dragonball is a fun game to me even with its bullshit, but it feels a lot less bullshitty to me than Marvel 3, and so far, I do think I appreciate that tremendously.

I feel like there is a difference between "Cheap BS" and degeneracy like Alien, release Bardock/Android 16, Ayane in DoA 4, DLC dude from SFIV whose name I can never seem to remember that needs to be paid attention to. There will always be cheap/annoying crap in fighters, but when you get stuff like Bardock/ GT "Pay us $4.99 to increase your Winrate" Goku it gets out of hand.

Fighting games with cheap BS is one thing, but when DLC characters are as objectively degenerate as Alien was it makes the game feel a LOT like pay to win and that's NOT ok.

I remembered pre-patched Android 16 that shit had me scared because one screw up and it was over lol.

I remember Wii U Pokken Tournament and Shadow Mewtwo's ridiculously easy blockstring infinite. That got patched right quick. It's every game, bro.

I think the key is to have particular options in the game that make you feel ok with getting hit with something because you know there was an option you could have done to stop it. Not all fighting games are like this.

Talking about how BS fighting game characters are is probably one of my favorite FG topics, even if it’s my own character lol And the best part is, you can bring that up in ANY game and likely multiple characters will get brought up, even ones that aren’t even necessarily “top tier”

This is a great topic to discuss.

My favorite will always be Karai's 0-death that's literally just jab. And is also an infinite blockstring lmao.

My best friend will only play a fighting game if it has a cheap bullshit character he can play, the kind that you need to have a firm or advanced grasp on the game to beat consistently. Once you get to that point he stops playing. Also can I get some sauce on that shirt?

This man Sajam knows all the fighting games. All the versions too =p

The DLC model has made character balance an interesting topic, since DLC is largely profit-oriented. There are two main schools of thought: 1) DLC characters should be strong, that way people need to buy them. Kokonoe was insanely good in BB Chronophantasma. Even people who didn't want to main her needed to buy her so they could lab out their solutions to her BS. 2) DLC characters should be weak and made stronger. This is basically SF5's approach. You get the initial wave of people buying a character based on aesthetics, then another wave later of people buying based on functionality.

This reminds me of Fox Shine in Melee but because it's such an integral part of the meta, nobody really ever complains about it.

All you need to know about UMVC3 is that there was at least one team composition capable of getting a guaranteed kill on all three characters on the enemy team off of one clean hit if the player executed correctly, and these teams were not even close to being the most busted team comps in the meta. Because there were other teams that either never had to get a clean hit or were so much better at getting hits that it was easier for those teams to do it three times than for the kill-whole-team-off-one-hit team to get one.

Ya'll remember Brawl Meta Knight? General Zodd? Blazblue Izanami?

Release Leroy, because there's no way he isn't getting the hammer

New just chatting screen is FIRE

With the ability to patch games and for devs to collect active feedback came a demand for balance alongside a refusal of homogeneity. People want the devs to make large rosters of unique playstyles that are equally viable and it's just not possible during the dev cycle of most games (although many people will argue KoF13/14 have excellent balance). When discussing the pre-patch era, it's easy to dismiss games for their balance flaws because players took the game beyond the intention of the developers and impose their own rules/constraints. While watching this video, I noticed myself giving a lot of passes to older titles because I didn't find out about the competitive environment until they'd already eliminated the non-viable portion of the roster (ie 3S, MvC2, Melee).

There has to be a line drawn between, the game itself having cheap BS or it being tied to a few characters. If you have a game where *everything* is cheap then sure, anyone can complain all day but they also have the ability to do some BS with their character. When it's just a handfull of characters, at most it's fun for the person with the cheap character...at worst, it turns people off playing if you see the same chars online, in tourneys etc. Also, at what point do you say its okay/not okay? If you see something close to an infinite, are you more likely to say "keep it in cos stuff be like that" or "it should be nerfed"?

Leroy is no where near as cheap as any of the other mentioned tekken characters. He's definitely very strong but he won't take major nerfs to bring him in line like it took those other characters. Plus he's fresh and folks don't want to lab him.

Core-A-gaming has a video about balance where he basically mentions how difficult balance is when you're aiming for character and attack diversity which makes sense. Obviously devs should balance as much as possible, but bs characters are always going to exist

I feel like character strength and people's preferences factor into it. If you play strong characters with strong tools all or most of the time, you'll not notice how bs stuff is compared to other characters. But when you spend a while in low tier hell, you'll suddenly start seeing the bs more. Whether you're okay with it is up to you

When is Sajam gonna play more Punch Planet?

Damn I wanna make another video about this but I feel like there is no crowd for it

The issue of DLC characters in this generation of fighters makes me really think that the old school/ArcSys way of versioning is just better for our games. It allows the community to REALLY learn the game and more accurately pinpoint what needs to be changed and what isn't as strong as we initially think. Of course there will be exceptions, but it's really not fun learning a game for months on end and have ONE character come in and completely flip the balance of the game on it's head simply by existing. By contrast, everyone hates spending money and waiting for months for your favorite character/s to arrive, just for them to suck; making you regret buying them or the season pass etc. Having all the characters available from the get go really allows the degenerate and weaker aspects of a game to be more defined. I also think it makes the player base level up more and not just rely on the next round of patches to do the work for them.

Reminds me of Riptor's flame carpet tail stab setup since you can't really do too much about that either

Pre-patch MKX Alien would be the first thing I see opening this video 😂 but honestly pre-patch Tanya was way more broke imo

Okay but why is an honest character like Abigail in the thumbnail though...

Super Turbo had the famous Akuma versus Zangief matchup, 9:1 in Akuma's favor. XD

That riptor loop reminded me to kof 99 kensou and kof 2000 vanesa lol. Kof has a lot of bullshit broken loops and broken characters as well like 98 o. chris

Came to realize over the years that the majority of characters I end up playing have some sort of cheap shit attached to them, especially if they turn things into a 1-player game in my favor.

I think there's a big difference between "strong for their game" characters who are overtuned or stronger than the other chars in the game, and chars that are actually, literally, broken or completely balance warping. Think like HnK Toki/Rei, or SBX Mori, chars who are literally so strong to the point of warping the meta and most match ups to "How well does your character fight this one char." Compared to Rei touching you once and converting into an infinite practically guaranteed, getting put in a 50/50 situation where you will still be able to play the game after, sometimes multiple times, really isn't that bad

Damn no one mentioning MK9 Kabal

Power Rangers Battle for the Grid is a great fighting, except all of their dlc characters have been busted on release.

1:23 Bayonetta

Definitely this. Smash Ultimate is a monstrosity in terms of how degenerate it could be, but people act like its the only game with BS. I love the crap out of it and people look at me like I have five heads, I find it super hype and cool when it needs to be and funny when it wants to be. Snakes frame 1 combo breaker, Joker Arsene, Palu Nair, Pikachu's landing animation, and GnW's entire character, all mega stupid. But I take all that for what I consider to be the most unique and fun fg experience I've ever had.

The funny part about this discussion is that MOBA's and Overwatch have this same exact issue but at least they use PTR servers to address it. While PTR's aren't a silver bullet it's at least a path to improvement as they identify some balance issues before they hit the main game. This or something like it needs to be considered by fighting game developers going forward if they ever want to tackle this problem in the future.

BBCF Izanami maybe? That character it's just a do everything type of character from what I understand

Remember kids: Jank Can Be Beautiful

"Current leroy is definitely worse than launch Akuma" I wouldn't say definitely. The thing's that made launch akuma broken are pretty different than what makes leroy broken. Akumas is just locked behind some execution. Leroy is just easy mode, TTT2 combot

Referring to the title of the video, tell that to LTG, The Covenant, or w/e he's called now. Lol

2:03 *Looks at Leroy Smith*

If it was ok, it wouldn't be called cheap BS

Let's be honest, we dont like an honest fighting game. We just want BS that we are okay with.

Third strike has bullshit with yun and chun, but i have fun defending against it because you can choose the level of risk ur willing to take when getting pressured and ull get rewarded accordingly. I don't feel its the same with sfv n stuff. idk, maybe i gotta play it more.. not really super experienced in it yet

Curious as to what is UNIST's brand of horse manure.

Big agree with this. Fucked up bullshit isn’t something that you can escape. But more than that fucked up bullshit is fun af. I’ll never get sick of the fighting games I play because they’re full of fucked up bullshit I can learn about and play around, and that keeps it interesting in my opinion

When I see some characters cheap BS? it's what makes me want to play them. ( outside of the " this chazracter obviously breaks the game kind" ) The first time I saw a 3rd Strike Makoto 100% stun combo, yep, I want to do that, sign me up.

Is that aris commentating mk?

I just don’t see how you can be proud/happy for using some cheap/broken shit lol. Fighting games to me are about besting your opponent mentally and outplaying. Capitalizing on a conversion, confirms etc. To me, that makes a good match to play and watch.

Well at least we don't have to deal with aimbot hacks like in FPS games.

I think the thing people forget is that it's fun to do bullshit full-screen buttons that just kill people, but it's even more fun once you know how to beat them. I started playing dark souls after watching you play and the amount of places you walk around a corner and get thrown in a pit and die or get IK'd by bs armor commands and other things is what makes it so fun and enjoyable when you're able to beat. Plus let's say everything is balanced with a low skill-floor, you have 1 character with 2 strings a high and a low but they both come out i60 and have drastically different animations. No one would play that game, but MVC2 and TS and Melee and all these other games have survived for 20+ years because they're broken messes where there's always new interactions between moves and characters being discovered. No one really cares about balance, people want depth and layers to things: MVC2 Storm is like 3 moves and sentinel punch does like 40% and loops with the drone super and all the broken shit in that game but it's still one of the greatest fighting games of all time because of the options that characters have. On a side note I'm not sure if you've talked about this before but a good thing could be about fighting game design philosophy where when you look at older games like MVC2 and JJBA the characters for the most part seem to be developed in a vacuum unrelated to the other characters but in newer games it seems to be more about like "this move is gonna be -15 and it'll have x pushback/cancels and yada yada" where everything's a lot more homogenized around certain rules like "let's make a cool character that fits these traits" rather than mvc2 where we have a sombrero-wearing cactus and half the cast has infinites or jojo's where you can stop time and do busted tandems that basically one-touch for 1 bar of meter among other things

It’s funny the type of BS I’m willing to put with. In SF, the tolerance I think is a lot lower, whereas in Marvel and DBFZ I’m always down for the grimiest strats I’ve ever seen.

What about SamSho?

Although I do get what you mean, I think I kinda have to disagree. I think some level of BS is fine, but some go a bit too far. I don't go around choosing a game because of the amount of BS I can do or handle, although I have been pushed away because some were just too much for me, for the games in which I still play, I just deal with it because I like the characters, the feel of the game, the mechanics, the combos, etc or just because I can't find any better. The BS just kinda gets in the way of enjoying it, because say you went a picked a character you thought it was cool or cute or something, and then you just have to deal with those who can do invisible 50/50's into setplays, ToDs, half your HP into more pressure, etc etc, or switch into characters that can deal with or use that BS as well, because, even if all characters have BS, some character's are just "I dodge around your attack once" while others are "you just died I guess". I think we are just used to dealing with it, but I think of having to deal with BS the same way as I think having to just deal with bad netplay, it's just there and you have to live with it, it's a decision of the developers to include such things so it's out of your control, even though it could be fixed, your other options are using it as well (picking characters whose bs is just too good / can abuse the system more) or just not playing the game, even if you do like the rest of it, which is not really a good thing nor is it really okay. So, just because it's been there forever doesn't mean is ok for it to be there, some people like me want to enjoy the game and try my best regardless of who I pick, feeling like I'm at a heavy disadvantage just because I'm using the character I love / not using the characters I don't like is not cool.

You don't want Fighting Games without cheap BS. Unless you like staring at each other Signed: a For Honor player

_Looks at BBTAG Adachi and Yumi_

Gotta love yohosie

Name 3 characters in either SFV or Dragonball (current patches) that are worse than Sougenmu Zero, Lv3 X factor Vergil with meter (Devil Trigger and Spiral Swords), Astral Vison Morrigan, or Lv 3 X factor Dark Phoenix fr UMVC3.

Guilty Gear X Gold Sol.

Nero from MBAACC

fighting games are a good analogy to war. Everything's fucked up and full of guessing what the other person's going to do. Doesn't matter how big his gun is if he actually knows how to use it and his other tools.

It's not poison dammit its acid

3rd strike and sf4 are the only honest fighters I know cuz LTG won’t stop saying it

bob was way more broken then Leroy ever could be. Leroy is just plus, and right now he’s the hate trend.

"Wagner" I'm not even a Wagner main and that's just not true. She's strong but look who made it to top 8 at evo Enkidu, the worst character in the game. He made it last year too, actually just incorrect. Redblade makes Wagner seem insane because he's good at the game and he's very good with her, that's all

Smash 4 bayonetta even post patch was not ok

Beware Brett, he's going to be all over your ass telling you about Koihime

T6 Bob was bullshit. If he wasn't your main he was your pocket. At least Akuma felt different enough to dissuade everyone from keeping him as a secondary character.

“You Capcom players don’t even know what it’s like to have broken characters...” lmao jojo hftf is a capcom game

Someone really tried to lump Wagner in with that bunch lmao the fucked up part is they said her before seth, and even seth is nowhere near as fucked up as characters from other games

*ahem* Tekken 7 King

Overcoming adversity is what makes fighting games worth playing. If Raging demon was as bullshit and easy to connect with as Ryus CA there would be no joy in it.

Alien poison stacked 3x

Good vid, but Abigail??? You joking? Lol He’s silly, but not “bullshit”

Original BB kokonoe. Please never again

Yohoser, huh? Shout-outs to the bay. I stopped playing SFV not because of the brutal mixups but because the game made me want to vomit. It was trash and dumb to smoke.

Some games have significantly more BS than others but of course no game is truly immune

Soul calibur 6 is the most degenerate fighting game I'm willing to put up with.

This video applies to every GG character they’re all fucked

The entirety of MvC2 is fucked up and that's 100% the reason it's so god damn fun.

Haha for honor

Super Broly is pretty bad rn in dbfz

Rocket Raccoon ?

Mkx had broken characters. But to be honest i prefer broken characters over broken mechanics like in mk11...

GKGT

Fucking Bayonetta ruined smash 4's meta

So long story short, nerf Goku Gt

Just take the Dota allstars balancing strategy. Give every character stupid bullshit. When everyone is busted... no one is...

Notice he didnt mention Smash

D-O-T?

Can you please play games on stream stream and not just discuss

"All fighting games" Not all. There is at least one exception: Skullgirls. Having gone through five years worth of (sensible) patches, it's so well balanced that there is no generally agreed tier list.

Yea but some fighting games can fucking suck.

Smash 4 bayonetta is complete bullshit

No it's not. It's corny for noobs.

I feel like if you aren't doing "Cheap BS" in Cross Tag Battle, you don't excel in that game at all. Defensive options are all crap and blocking is the wrong decision majority if the time.

All games have broken system no matter how many updates happen. Have fun learn your characters go get that W or take the L. But I will say this players who know the broken shit in there games and use that shit to win matches suck ass. That’s me, what do you guys/ladies have to say?