I wonder if anybody else in this topic can co-sign the Divekick sentiment. I don’t have the game and never showed any interest but who else can confirm an aspect of mind games with this title?
He was absolutely getting outplayed, especially in the later games, but that has abolutely nothing to do with his fundamentals. If PR Rog beat Ricky 3-0 in SF4 with all perfects would you say he has shit fundamnentals or would you say PR Rog was just the smarter player? That’s a silly attitude. Also, BALA lost more games than he won in the set, so I’d say he didn’t get bailed out of anything.
Takuma is a high damage character, his design is to hit hard, that’s what he gets to make up for his complete and absolute lack of defensive options. It’s comparable to Akuma in SF, except Akuma has no flaws, just low health where KoF doesn’t generally balance by health and everyone in XIII has the same health. Comparatively, MadKOF was playing what was at the time considered a low damage team because optimal damage for Kim and Chin had not yet been found, but all of the characters have a plethora of tools to control. It seems like BALA was getting by because of the combos because MadKOF was not capable of doing xomparable damage with his team, but it was simply a matter of team composition choice diffrence. BALA was going for hard hitting powerhouses like Takuma and Shen who lack tools while MadKOF was playing low damage highly versatile characters. In the end even against the hardest hitting characters in the game BALA could not overcome the mental fortitude, reads, and decision making of MadKOF. Fundamentals beat combos, and they always do in KoF. Even though basically all characters can ToD if you have the meter for it, you still need to land that hit, and people put a lot of weight on HD combos in regards to the design of the game, but in reality you get maybe 2 HD combos a match. Combos cannot save you, you have to be the better player.
100% damage or stun is what Takuma does. He’s like the SF3 Makoto of the game, in a way.
In other words, educate yourself about what you’re referencing before you talk shit.
It doesn’t bother me that some new guy can learn a combo instead of fundamentals. It does bug me that learning long and sometimes situational combos is a prerequisite to being able to play. It means experienced players just curb stomp new guys, because odds are experienced players know the combos and have better fundamentals. So a new guy notes that someone a random hit into 50% and declares fighting games are too hard and never comes back.
Modern fighting games are shooting themselves in the foot by putting up that initial barrier of entry. And as a side effect, it turns fighting games from a genre everyone plays, to something more akin to Starcraft where the best play, and everyone else watches streams.
My biggest problems with combo oriented fighters is 2 things really.
1)I’m either too lazy or just don’t have the time to put in 10,000+ hours into hammering out a long string combo in training mode over and over again toil I get the muscle memory down to the point its instinctual in an actual match. Coz that will be the ONLY way to win in a combo focused game.
2)even if I didn’t have problem #1, there is something inherently wrong with being the better footsie/spacing/punishing dumb mistakes/smart/savy player…
and losing the match to a player that doesn’t have the basics and fundamentals of any fighter down yet, meaning his footsie sucks, his spacing is bad, he does reckless unsafe jump ins, he throws and spams specials out like a nutty fruitcake, but he gets lucky just once with a jump in or whatever and starts the 35+hit combo touch of death combo because that’s the only thing he bothered to learn.
that just goes against God.
throw in a couple comeback mechanics and you end up with a shitstorm of mindfuckery that leaves you shaking your head in disbelief that you did everything right throughout the whole match but one mistake caused you to die.
Aaaaaaaand yeah, the retort would be "hey, just hammer out those high hit count combos yourself and you’ll be fine"
yeah,
but I just don’t wanna grind and grind away x & o amount of hours memorizing factory made combos.
that’s tedious and boring.
I’m not opposed to high hit count combo oriented fighters just because I’m lazy for training/practice mode…since I enjoy Guilty Gear and Melty Blood but at the same time those games have an equal balance between their focus of footsie & combos.
You don’t necessarily need to do any combos to win consistently in those games if your footsie/spacing/defense is really strong.
But there are others like Marvel and Tekken & KoF13 where if you fuck up once and the opponent has their touch of death combos memorized its pretty much game over.
EDIT:
my biggest problem with modern fighters is how much anti-airs suck.
Each iteration of Fighters seem to have weaker and weaker anti-airs. Less damage, less active frames, more start up and recovery frames, with smaller hitboxes…while jump ins, hop ins, overheads, and aerial special moves keep getting buffed out.
That just teaches new players, younger players bad lessons.
Mostly that they should jump around like a Mexican jumping bean, like a reckless nut, and that its A-OK coz the reward is greater than the risk.
Jump around, nutty, reckless, scrubby, with abandon, fearless of any and all anti-airs, get mad punished for said reckless behavior with properly timed & spaced anti-airs, hope you get a lucky shot in due to one whiffed anti-air, get that shot, and begin cranking out that 30 hit factory made touch of death combo you spent 100 hours memorizing in training mode that does massive damage ftw.
that’s just plain dumb.
That’s modern fighters.
This is one of the greatest fighters of all time. Really sad it never took off here in the west, I loved playing it on GGPO.
I think that the games you listed in the first post are super high execution anyway…
…No, Youtube, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!? That CV has the best song choices I’ve ever seen. Gonna have to ask Maj to upload it to a video site that’s not as fucking stupid.
ah another srk thread of vague ideas thrown around by random guys
The only current game that I think is far too combo-focused is Marvel. It’s pretty much just 100% damage combos with mindgames only coming into play whenever someone drops something or makes a dumb mistake. I don’t enjoy that kind of game design at all, and while I can have fun watching a back-and-forth Marvel set between two high-level players I’ll simply never be able to play it beyond just messing around.
I’m torn on it really, they’re fun to do sometimes but some games just take it to the extreme. Some games, if you’re stuck on the receiving end, you’re usually stuck there taking hits and waiting for your guy to finally land on the ground and then get up, and you can’t do a thing about it.
I struggle with execution-heavy games like KOF XIII and I don’t like long flashy combos in MVC3. Just doesn’t seem right.
I personally enjoy SF4 (even though some of the higher damage combos in there can be tough too), SF2 and 3S… I don’t need to pull off crazy combos to win a match on those games. Feels more like an ACTUAL FIGHT to me.
Playmore did say they wanted to make the ultimate Samurai Shodown (in addition to KoF). And based on the Pachislot trailer they released a couple weeks ago, they seem to be taking it back to SamSho2.
And yes, next-gen Samurai Shodown is exactly the game that would appeal to people who don’t want unnecessary execution (a la, the mass public).
Every time I see someone call KOFXIII execution heavy I die a little on the inside. Sure, KOFXIII can be a real challenge to your memory, remembering which move comes when in your much too long combo. But execution heavy? Come on! You can buffer basically anything but normals for like 60 frames. And there’s hardly any relevant normal links in the game…
Yes combos are maybe getting a bit too long in games these days. But I think there are games that give you interesting choices in the variety of combos you do. Do you decide to give up some damage for HKD? Do you reset? Do you maximize, do you spend that extra bar for a little bit of extra damage, and regret it later? To provide for such interesting choices the game does need to be a little bit more combo heavy than most games.
What really annoys me is when characters have moves that are literally only combo filler. Moves that have absolutely no use except for comboing into them to add damage. KOFXIII is a pretty bad offender, for example K’ qcb+K moves actually used to be useful for block strings, not just for HD loops, timing them well would actually make them 0 on block. Now, no matter how well you space that shit, your frame disadvantage is as if Dictator sweep just got blocked point blank.
Edit: nm, old post is old.
I think when people say that they are referring to some of the super move inputs, which hearken back to a time before streamlined QCFx2 universal commands for supers in fighting games. Between that and people just being used to the super leniency for inputs in Capcom fighting games, KOFXIII seems more relatively demanding in terms of execution.
Also, the sheer number of movement options in KOF is higher than the average 2D fighter. I guess you could lump getting all of those down consistently into the “execution” category as well.
IMO the typical SNK super motions always felt more ‘natural’ than the typical Capcom ones. Double quarter circles can be a bit rough when canceling them from certain normals, where as something like QCB,HCF feels a lot smoother.
fighters can’t really lean towards one direction or the other, combo oriented\footsie oriented. If a game is too combo heavy, footsie is heavily reduced turning it into a “we’re only going to aim for combos” scenario game. If a game is too footsie oriented, combos are heavily reduced turning it into a really slow paced fighter like with the sf2 series.
There is a nice middle ground where combos aren’t retarded cheap and that is what make’s footsie actually relevant. If combos are OP, footsie becomes a bastardized variation of what it actually is. I’ve personally never seen a game actually do it right as long as I’ve been playing.
personally, I think combos are retarded necessary. How many boxing\mma fights have you seen where the fighter solely wins with pokes? most of the victories are established through footsie that leads to damage opportunities, for fighters that means combos.
what I believe they can do with combos is make them harder to pull off, allow repressure for free but do less life overall while beefing up counter hit\punish damage on the footsie end. Good part is that if you try to big combo off counter hits\punishes it can just be scaled so the combo isn’t severe. This evens out the playing field between poking\combos quite significantly so neither is dominant yet both are relevant. The trick to making it work is finding a nice ratio of pokes to combos so you don’t lose the SF meta people like and you don’t lose the combo damage\execution marvel players like.
I like combos and footsies. Which is why the games I like to play the most tend to have both. Even the games that aren’t as “combo centric” still have their token character that’s all about swagging on you after they hit you.
Then prepare to die some more. KoF is execution heavy… I would like for it to stay that way.
Someone mentioned the different types of movement options, that in and of itself makes the game reliant on execution. Regardless of how strict the commands are, the pace of the game is so quick that the commands take some time to get right consistently. This has been KoF since 1996, and the game has the kind of flow that people like because of it.
XIII does have the HD combos, which is really good for what it tries to be. That said, It does have it’s disadvantages (raising the perceived game entry point to an unnecessary level). This can be removed without any severe ramifications.
Anyway, games have become combo oriented and it isn’t a bad thing. What I would like to see is more variance between games in regards to the spacing-combo dynamic. Very few fighters this passing generation put a solid focus on spacing (the fundamental aspect) over combos (the part that looks cooler). This leads people (beginners) to believe that combos are what they need to learn in order to know how to play. Then when they learn that they can’t do it, they give up and play something with gameplay design that’s easier to understand (they would play older, simpler fighters if the presentation was pretty enough). A game that can make spacing look cool (SF2, SamSho2, Tekken3) entices players to want to do cool things that are easier to understand. I’m kinda getting off tangent though.
Anyway, emphasizing combos over spacing is learning fighting games backwards. There’s nothing wrong with having games that are combo heavy, but hopefully next-gen has a little more variety (obviously the roots of KI and GG have a combo dynamic, so their next-gen installments are fine the way they are).