I think the quadrant is an interesting idea, but the first question that comes to mind really is "easy/hard to learn/execute relative to what?" You mention how most character have a win condition that is easily accessed. But wouldn't that also mean that it's difficult as a player to get survive on defense? Hence making it harder to win. (I just found it odd that the character spread doesn't have the center of the graph as an average) I can't speak for every character, but as an Anji player I have to dissagree on the overall position he's been placed at. For the learning difficulty aspect: Now that damage is lower in season 3, it's very important to learn optimal combos which all require dash kara cancels. You can argue that it's still not mandatory to play the character, which I can agree with, but I still would have liked that to be mentioned (I'm sure other people might think the same thing for the character they play) And for the winning difficulty aspect: You mention a criteria for the difficulty to reach the win condition being how you can discourage your opponent from picking the options you don't want them to pick (AKA: conditioning type beat)... But every single one of Fuujin's follow up except for the low loses to jump :P and only the P and S follow up beat mashing. + every character that has acces to a reversal can mash it during Anji's blockstring and either be stuck in blockstun or interupt his sequence. Point is, Anji's offense is really interactable, and now that he doesn't have the threat of a big counter hit, the risk/reward is even more favored towards the defender. That being said, it is still true that Anji falls in the category of "If he has 50% meter, he will kill you" Anyway, my comment is getting pretty lengthy :P Overall, really interesting "tier list", I just wish a little more time was taken to elaborate on individual characters.
It's dope, makes people realize that high execution doesn't always mean a character is mentally draining which is great because I think those kinds of nuances about difficulty are very often overlooked.
I've always liked these 2D style tier lists a lot. As someone whos not good enough at the game for tier lists to matter the extra depth makes comparing my main to other characters more interesting.
Pot for example has a very simple gameplan on paper: poke with big buttons, force the opponent to the corner, make them scared and do big grab. However it takes a great deal of understanding of the opponent's tools since you need to know their poke ranges, what they like to do for footsies, how they like to do wakeups, etc. etc.
Bedman might look weird to get into, but his goal and way to get to that goal is reasonably simple; "Play neutral with your big buttons, get a knockdown with an error, and run your shit." Big problem with Bedman imo is that he is one of those "snowball characters" that uses mix to keep their offense up, except he does it worse than anyone else because almost all of his mix has simple answers, is slow/reactable, doesn't beat blocking, or doesn't lead to good damage even when he plays correctly. His ability to instantly turn the tide of the match into hard favour is very below average due to his slow command normals, very low damage off of his standard starters (his Beyblade does less damage than j.H, yeah) and lack of cohesion between his j.K and his j.H/j.D, with j.D being a contender for worst air normal in the game lol, however; I'll never switch off of him though, his story and visuals are amazing, hes the best character in my heart no matter how little damage he does lol
He has gotten a lot better this patch. 8 way dash and guard crush goes crazy. You’re right about the simple answers part though, holding block on him isn’t tough if he doesn’t have meter. j.D/2K 50/50 is actually pretty damn good when you get it, and every overhead in j.H can catch people off
I can see why we moved past the quadrants tbh. 2 characters cant share the same spot and it gets muddled very quick at a glance. Still, it makes for good video content and discussions
Yeah tier maker is actually really bad for this. MMcafe has a ton of space, but they don't have Strive atm, so I asked the folks at toptier.gg if they could add that
I much prefer the quadrents because learning a character only to find out once you've mastered them that they're mentally tiring or have a very samey gameplan it can affect your motivation to play the game. If I'm coming home burnt out from work I'm more likely to feel like playing May where I have a basic, effective gameplan instead of Asuka where I have to actively adapt on the fly with card draws. It's always good to have more info and I appreciate it!!
Axl gets crazy mix from rainwater into forward moving PRC, I can’t even remember all of the ways in which you can mix. He also gets tons of damage from 50% tension he can use it for time freeze super which does tons of damage and corner carry. I would say his whole game plan outside of zoning is to build at least 50% tension.
Maining Asuka and Jack-O', I mostly agree with their placement. Though I had a harder time learning Asuka than Jack-O'. For Asuka you really gotta sit there, learn all the spells and test cases, test them out one by one, figure out which you want to use, in which situation, and then learn the execution.
I mean most tournament players just use test case 3 and try to get the spell that auto refills your spell slots and the one that gives you positive bonus for your mana bar. Doing that is still kinda hard , I main asuka and jacko as well and jacko was way easier to learn
I know it's not really a direct parallel, but it's good to think of ease of use as also determining how consistent a character is. Misinputs and obvious mistakes are inevitable, you see them happen all the time even by top players in important sets. The harder a character is mechanically, the more often you will misinput or make a mistake.
Bedmans win condition is to get a knockdown with an error installed and go into error chain blockstrings that lead to strike/throw and high/low mixups that loop.
I think the general ideas are correct but the graph would benefit from having more space like you mentioned. Like Chipp is easy to win with, but idk if I'd put him in the same tier of winning as Nagoriyuki, who is not only able to carry momentum to win a round but can steal rounds off of defensive gambles more often. Faust isn't the hardest character in the game, but he is probably harder to learn than a character like Ram or Ky imo. Again, its just small differences but to me that would make it more accurate.
A interesting thing about Asuka is that sometimes people don't know how to play against him, so when the Asuka player shows some kind of control of what they're doing, they get away with some things. Since there can be so many different situations coming up, the opponent might be scared of starting offense. I've been maining him for a couple of months; it's crazy fun and really not that hard, you just have to get used to his gameplay and, mainly, his inputs. And also get destroyed on those first matches because your mana management is wack.
I like that placement for anji. He’s pretty limited and telegraphed, but he just builds meter and runs offence. He has a flowchart, albeit a pretty mediocre one but can sometimes get a read and delete you. I would like to see one of these where the axis of the quadrants are. “How hard they are to play” and “how hard they are to play against” for example, Potemkin is easy to play, but enacting a game plan against him is even easier. Happy chaos is hard to play, but it’s even harder to actually enact counterplay to his options.
Thank you LK, for validating my uphill struggle as a Pot main. It is so painful having to outplay a character rather than the player. Losing a turn at round start to faster buttons or jumps ins with massive reach/disjoints only to then be looped in the corner for back to back walls is a nightmare. Then if by some miriacle I get to play the game and run my mix if they guess right once I can be blown up and put back in the loop blender. However its not all bad. Pot buster is life and landing it adds 10 years to your life span. Also the little things like armor on a full screen low in slide head is nice. Flick is also a fantastic tool, as I've seen tournament players get zoned out by projectiles and I just think how glad I am that Pot just does not have to deal with that bs. Garuda is a good and dummy easy tool to have but I don't think its all that scary anymore with all the meter avaliable now to FD it. I think people get hung up on Pots one move damage and forget that other characters can do the same or more damage in combos for a lot less with a better mix on top(Nago.)
i feel like every character with auto rc 30 second long strings with several built in 50/50s like zato, asuka etc.. should be like 25% closer to easy to win with and all the neutral heavy 3-4 hit block string dudes should go 25% towards hard to win with, way to many no mix dudes in easy to win with
The only discrepancy I have is anji, he's absolutely one of the easiest to learn but I'd say he near millia, while his air control is good I don't think he has a consistent enough win condition.
Do you believe if someone can auto pilot while playing Happy Chaos, that person can succeed at Celestial challenge? A lot of players on floor 10 know how to play neutral against him so I think you need a certain amounts of FG fundamentals at this stage along with some character knowledge. You can definitely steamroll someone bellow floor 9, but you'll have a hard time if you only know how to manage resource, do combos and mixup.
My guess would be Really Easy to Learn, Slightly Difficult to Win. Left / Right on this chart is affected by balance so characters can move around with time.
As a chipp player he's such a cheap character to win as with all the shenanigans he pulls off, but Sol just makes me wanna turn off the game instantly.
As a fighting game noob I find Testament one of if not the easiest character to learn in Strive as she quite literally has the simplest and easiest button inputs in the game (I just can't with half circles)
Testament is pretty easy just because that's what half-screen buttons get you, but setting up their pressure right and confirming when you get a hit is still pretty tricky just because they're a little more spacing dependent than say Ram or Nago. They're not the easiest character simply due to the charged/half-charged moves, teleport, and stain state specific combos, but they're certainly in that tier still because even if you ignore those things your payout is still pretty good.
@gwen9939 as I've played I'm now having to lean more and more on stain because her combos can only do so much without it. Stain may be really powerful because it basically makes everything plus, but getting it off is a lot harder than it looks and to compensate Arc decided to make almost her everything negative when stain isn't up.
Yes faust is hella easy cuz his difficult good stuff is locked behind bullshit matchups so youre relagated to boring ass item throw off any knockdown, scarecrow prc command grab or crossup, and maybe a mix loop if youre lucky. Aint no reason to learn anything but combos with him cuz opportunities to set up shit are few and far between in an actual game.
I never got how nago is " easy to learn " and leo, like they are both harder to learn than ino nago is one of the most complex characters in strive with all his moves and mechanis same for leo these characters are more complex then most the cast they dont just have moves and special they have different states and move sets on their other forms better or worse frame data and their win conditions while arguably better then everyone else, still it takes allot longer ti learn theses characters then lets say may, gio, anji, sin and Johnny they are dynamic characters therre playstyle changes majorly throughout the game frame their frame data, to the move looks and hit/hurtboxes, to damage numbers ect so I agree they are easy to win with but easy to learn?? It feels biased
@@AgatonSax750 why don't you try playing nago I'm not saying she isn't difficult but she doesn't have anything that takes a fat minute to do yeah it would take awhile to be consistent and good but she has really sinple bnb's she doesn't have resource not counting universal resources nor does her gameplan take a 180 all her moves are relatively basic unless you count her orb or air dash I'm not saying she isn't a hard character to learn to play but compared to leo or nago I mean leo almost has as many moves as chip and 2 different stances that play entirely different from one another if I was to pick up ino which I played a bit in xrd her hardest stuff to learn is some of her mix and match up spread 👦
@@AgatonSax750 btw it was never to downgrade ino I'm just saying it's either yall are confusing easy wins with character difficulty or it's just plain bias
nago has been solved, his round start into win routes have all been figured out, his mix and neutral have all be developed, there are guides everywhere, if u find him difficult to learn him u aren't looking at the right resources or are trying to play him too safely
I-No was a lot better in Xrd than she is in Strive. She might be somewhat simple in this game, but neutral is hard to force and her pressure is very flawed even if the mixups are real. Her gameplan and her matchups are a lot tougher than most of Nagos imo.
One think Im not sure LK specified is the level of play his list is geared towards to Unless the “Learn” part of the list means master Which means that the character is played at the top level
In order to learn basic Goldlewis pressure kara BT's are an essential first step. Then you have up BTs that have tiny input windows that like four players in the world can do consistently. One of the highest execution characters in the game. j.D/f.S spam only works at extremely low levels of play, and his f.s just got nerfed. How is he "easy to learn?" Nevermind his terrible defensive tools and size force you to learn to play defense. His matchup spread is probably one of the worst out of any character in the game. His tournament results speak for this, a single high placement at the highest point of his relative strength by one of the best players in the game. I don't understand how he's easier to learn than Milia and the same difficulty as Sin. Seems cap.
@@HellecticMojo Almost every player by floor 10 already knows to backdash or FD GLs pressure to invalidate it. The only means to counter this is with karas. Then, of course, at high levels of play, they'll react to karas with throws. So you'll need to readjust your offense for that. But the very first step in order to apply your offense is to learn kara bt. Otherwise you will not be able to enforce your pressure in any meaningful way against most players, and will be stuck trying to win neutral with his subpar mobility and buttons.
@@HellecticMojo Every character can maintain pressure for 50 meter. And while GL can take more risks for a hard callout for backdashing like that it wont condition your opponent not to do it. The absolute best goldlewis players in the world lose their pressure to backdashes if they aren't able to condition their opponent properly. Just like they drop his execution. This isn't a skill issue it's an aspect of his design. And to be sure I'm not saying GL is bad.
i see where you're coming from, but its not essential. karas are not a "basic" part of GL pressure structure, they're an extra layer to mix in. Otherwise like you said, they'd just counter it coz you're shortening your frame traps. And yeah, 4 people can do standing BT's that start with an 8 input, meaning its a high end part of the character that you can also leave out for casual fun. He's a simple character with a bunch of deeper layers to explore, but those layers are nowhere near required even in celestial, speaking from experience. Literally by playing GL they know not to mash against you, or death. they know to FD, backdash or use the new shield thing. that means easy J'Ds if you dont wanna kara, or just use the appropriate BT like 486/426 or 684. and uhhhhh, white wild assault, bang.
I find Sol to take way more effort than Ram and Ky to win, I feel that he lacks the big range and screen control but could just be my playstyle not fitting him well
@@azuresaiyan9005 more so the excitement. The last 4 DLC characters have been kinda mid, and with games like MK1 and SF6 (and other fighters coming up) I would love if they fixed the online/cross play/net code issues And properly balanced the entire cast Strives been dead since Happy Chaos release and nerf in my opinion, but if you’re still loving the game keep up the grind bro
@@azuresaiyan9005 yeah. The game itself is still playable, but I was hoping for a proper balance patch over the month. Sin for example was and still is kinda terrible. I would of loved had the game been balanced by the time he released. Nerfing the high tiers and buffing the low tiers. The game is fun, but there’s a definite imbalance in how characters are balanced making a good amount of match ups almost impossible for some characters. I’ve played every character The game is good The music is good The art style is fire I just wish by now the fixed the top, mid, and bottom tier making the game truly balanced
Half of your "hard to learn" characters are easier than characters you claim are brain dead easy. Super biased on that part. Ur right about how strong everyone is tho.
When is a real Guilty Gear coming out though? Instead of this game that pretends to "try something new" when it's just a generic fighting game that hypocritical recycles concepts in a different way than before? There are no more unique fighting games and the most unique fighting game of this generation is pathetically Street Fighter 6.
Do ppl even still play this game? Last time i went online last week there was like 20 ppl in the entire tower lol in my region lol. NA west. This game would be so much more fun with more ppl like sf6
