Not really in favor of this being a general direction.
IMO, “american made” shouldn’t imply a certain gameplay direction, since that’s quite limiting. String based should basically be just NRS’s trademark, though NRS themselves need to clean up alot about their system (such as their use of 3D hit detection in a 2D game).
All the string based stuff is incredibly tedious. Looking at the movelists in Injustice just makes me not want to touch NRS games.
IMO, string based means that you tend to place a premium on memorization over simply playing the game. Aside from having to memorize moves, the fact that these games tend to rely alot on frame data means that you’re focusing on one of the less visually interesting parts of fighting game neutral (the whole math side of things) than the more visually interesting parts of it (space control).
It wasn’t my intention to say that american fighting games should take one gameplay direction over another.
I don’t understand why strings should be an NRS trademark when multiple games use chains, links, juggles, etc. IMO, strings are derived from chains (or maybe I have it backwards?). Both allow the player enough leniency to input button sequences to perform combos.
Difference is that chains cancel the normals recovery into another attack, usually offer more leniency than strings and has rules (such as BB or UMVC3). Strings, on the other hand, wait until recovery frames finish before next attack, and can perform whole on whiff (not restricted to a rule).
One might think that strings limit the player by providing a list instead of giving the player “freedom”, but if all chain starters were listed to their greatest possible ender, it would only be 10-15 like strings.
Strings don’t have to be “dial-a-combo or or bust” either. I feel that there can be some leniency between button presses that can possibly allow for easier confirms and/or frame-traps.
It’s about the design decision at the end, and I do see how strings can be equal interest to other combo systems.
Except you kinds did imply this.
And I never said that it should be only NRS that does it. Rather, I said that it should be what NRS games are known for (which doesn’t mean that anyone else can’t do this - Arc already did this for Ram in GGXrd).
I’m not saying that should take a direction, but predicting that it could take a direction.
But the bolded part implied that you were saying it should be NRS trademark. I’m not trying to argue about it. Clearly it is a misunderstanding.
This part is interesting. Most menus for movelist for such games actually list combos first before special moves (mortal kombat included). IDK, maybe if it was switch players mindset would switch to trying the game first before diving deeper into the movelist to learn combos?
Don’t forget Rumble Pak is still a thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUP6h5x5bHQ
They might be going back to 2D too.
Why is it tedious?
I always found the string combos to be not only a headache but also a stupid shit to do when thinking about balance.
So far every NRS game ends with characters that suck gorilla balls because they have terrible strings and/or have so few that they can’t simply compete against the characters that have better and/or more strings than them.
Add the stupidity of the crouching normals leading to nothing, your only way to have a mixup is if NRS is kind enough to give you at least one string with a low hit on it, if not you are fucked, and that is only if they don’t decide to take away your low hits on a patch like they did on MK9 with characters like Smoke or Nightwolf.
Another thing is that many of the stings feel counter intuitive when doing them, at least for me.
Edit
Another thing that i find annoying from the strings as donw by NRS is that even if the frame data says that you in theory could link something into another thing, in reality that shit will never work because they have some wird shit going on with how the game works.
Eternal Champions! I win! 
From my limited research, NRS’s engine doesn’t do combos using traditional hitstun. Instead it seems to be based on whether your character has returned to neutral (meaning only stuff that can be cancelled into will combo) combined with special capture states (freeze, spear, etc.) and juggles.
Which is if another game does use string based inputs, I hope it is considered from previous games what makes strings work and what areas can be improved.
“Where” the game comes from shouldn’t matter. The most important thing is how the game is itself.
Going from your post i get the feeling that you want to see more decent fighting games with the American/Western art style.
For this this happen America would have to stop obsessing over FPS games so much, but due to cultural differences that probably wont happen anytime soon.
Yeah that’s mainly it. More western styled fighters with western themes. But yeah you might be right. Fighters just seem to be Japan’s thng while FPS’s are America’s thing. Still nice to see MK still thriving and new devs like Lab Zero and Iron Galaxy throwing their hat into the genre. But who knows? maybe the success of MKX could inspire some American Devs to try.
Because it makes people do unnecessary work. I love soul cal and I used to love Tekken. One of the big problem both of those games have is just having movelists padded with a bunch of bullshit. Thankfully NRS gave out frame data inside the game for Injustice; thus making this less tedious. But you are still showing players a bunch of shit that isn’t all that intuitive and expecting them to do something. Another huge problem is that sometimes strings don’t look like the button inputs (this, IMO is the worst shit you can do in a game).
Part of fun would be to see what is it that all this shit does. The reality is that i’m looking at this list going “what the fuck is wrong with this character that he needs all this shit to function?” Then I have to go through that whole list just to see which are the ones that are worth while in the first place.
After all is said and done, that entire list wont’ matter because I won’t need it. how do we know that this will happen? Because it is exactly what happens in both Tekken and Soul Calibur. People go through all the crap, find the worthwhile things and forget the rest. This means that the practical movelist, the things a player is going to use, is way smaller than what the character actually has.
4-5 target combo on a character? Neat. 10 and over its just randomly worthless. Also see Ramlethal in Xrd; that chick has 10 billion strings and people don’t even half of them.
Out of all the strings my character in MKX has, I probably use only 4 or 5 of them. The rest are pretty useless.
I main Sub-Zero in MKX and out of all his strings I don’t use two of them. 3 if I’m using Cryo.
Thank you for explaining, and after reading this, you’re right. It’s a big design issue that needs to be addressed. Why does a character have to about 100 different move options, use only a 4th of them in practicality and the rest are extremely situational ( or worse, gimmicky) moves?
I believe this compounds if another game does adopt string based input for competitive play to take a look at what worked with the concept and how to improve in these areas.
Same thing goes for Soul Calibur too. Every character has about 5-10 useful moves out of 50 or so they have.
If NRS really wanted to break ground with Injustice, it would’ve stolen Metly Blood’s chain system. In MB, instead of going in a straight sequence of A->B->C, you could do all three buttons in any order you wanted. this means that your character has all sorts of weird chains and to mess with the opponent. Had they done this and let you chain into command normal, Injustice would’ve probably been really crazy without needing the millions of target combos it has now.
This way you could still give a character useful command normals, all the giving beginners a way to push buttons that isn’t entirely convoluted but which gets better when you take it seriously.