@@TheDancerMacabre Man I gotta say I felt the same way at first, but after attempting to main Robo Ky for like 50 hours online, I can genuinely say that I'm glad the other character I'm seriously interested in (Zappa obv) is S Tier. Zappa is so sick and I'm glad he's as good as he is cool.
Getting a random summon is a weakness until you identify what you have. All you need to do is hit Zappa once to remove a summon. Continuing to poke Zappa will keep him from getting his better normals, Axl generally does a good job at this. +R, the summon tiles make it easier identify what Zappa has quickly and the sword doesn't have a hurtbox anymore either along with the increased lagtime, putting him at a higher tier (with some other changes).
Honestly, there's no reason to believe that any character will be cut. None of Guilty Gear's (or any of Arc-Sys') characters have been cut from any previous iteration to my knowledge, aside from Dr. Baldhead, who was replaced with Faust.
The most notable buff (or rather change) is the increased or additional lag on all the sword moves. In previous versions of GG, the sword would lag a bit during some attacks. For instance, after hitting with the 2HS, you could do the sword swipe directly after and the swipe would attack much higher in the air. Now, all regular sword moves and the sword swipe have this property. The other sword moves will reset the sword position. The other change is a nerf to sword damage in ver 1.10 IIRC.
No, execution isn't difficult except for a few things. Some of the FRC points with the sword change depending on if the move hits and how it hits. Using the dog in conjunction with Zappa also takes some getting used to.
That's not to say you always have to find people. Getting used to reacting to the random summon in Arcade mode against the CPU will help when you are without warm bodies to play.
I'm not from Australia, and that has nothing to do with my assessment of the likelihood of Zappa being in Xrd. The story behind my username is a long one so I'm not gonna go into it, but it is like ArcSys to preserve all playstyles, even if story makes it a barrier. They did it with Kliff and Justice, they're doing it in Chronophantasma, and I see no reason why they won't do it again.
His normals aren't the best, you might not have the spirit you want at a given time, centipedes aren't a reliable reversal because you could randomly get a spirit when waking up. But yeah, in +R he's one of the best characters so he has no glaring weaknesses.
In retrospect, this one was really, really weak. It's extremely shallow for most summons, since it doesn't really give any help with what he's supposed to do. Sure, ghosts are good for zoning, how do I zone with ghosts? When some characters get videos at 10+ minutes, I don't know why a character with as many different tools as Zappa gets one that's shorter than 5.
This episode very problematic because Zappa is like 5 diff characters + match flow between them. So every layer of detail you decide to add, means X6 actual content. So the video can EASILY go above 20 minutes, missing the point of a simple introduction.
None of it, it was completed the day before +R hit Xbox360. It just shows the length of a completed Zappa tutorial. I'll get to make one for +R around June.
It's Guilty Gear, so execution is certainly a part of the game, but Zappa isn't nearly as hard as say, I-No or Eddie. He is more of a setup character. You have five different gameplans depending on what your situation is (summonless, ghosts, dog, sword, Raoh), meaning you'll get better quickly if you regularly play against people as opposed to being a lab rat in training mode.
All his summons aside from Raoh (who is someone you need to work to get) are pretty situational, the summon he gets until he has full orbs is random aside from a timer mechanic that isn't easy to make use of in a real match at all, and even once he gets Raoh, his hurtbox is made quite a bit bigger.
