There are a lot of combos in KOF13 that deal respectable damage without meter or HD and their all very short too. Longer than cr.MK xx hadoken yeah, but short nonetheless. Plus, being a 3v3 game, you’re only going to get 1-2 shots at doing an HD combo and that’s if you didn’t spend any of it at all during the set.
Yeah, I think I can get on board with this statement. It really does strike a nice balance between all of those mechanics and the speed of play is just right too. That being said, I think that the SF4 series holds its own in this regard as well. It’s definitely not designed around huge combos, for the most part, and there are plenty of characters to choose from who don’t rely on combos at all.
Doing combos is the only respectable way to deal respectable damage in a lot of games. That doesn’t make them combo oriented, it just means individual hits don’t mean much, which in my opinion makes a game less random. Of course there’s going too far like Marvel 3 where ToD is so commonplace that the neutral barely exists if at all and the entire situation is a guessing game mess of randomness, but that’s not what XIII is. You do not have meter all the time in XIII, especially Drive. Drive is very hard to get in XIII. You can get a couple bars in a round and have the meter for tons of EX or blowbacks, but you are not doing HD combos often. HD is where the BIG damage is, EX combos and single drive cancel combos are where the good damage is, meterless combos are solid damage. For those unaware, the average meterless BnB in XIII does 200-250 damage, which is 20% or 25%. That is not bad damage, some characters only need to hit you 4 times to kill you with absolutely no meter at all.
XIII is just a high damage game, individual hits don’t do a lot of damage, but everything else does. The problem is that unless you play the game competitively most people only seem to pay attention to the longest combos, which are the HD combos, so that’s all they equate the game with. HD is definitely the worst thing about XIII, but it is not anywhere near as bad as people make it out to be.
He lost momentum because he doesn’t have the fundamentals to win without the combo. With the fundamentals he could win without needing that one combo, and could use other combos in the meantime. Watching him play was like watching Garuda in EX3 fishing for his CP combo. Losing whenever he doesn’t get it and wins easily when he does. As flashy as it is, it isn’t good gameplay.
only difference is that both players can play without needing that one combo. Though it definitely is a tide turner.
Please just stop. You said yourself you don’t know KoF, just stop. There is no way Takuma can play the neutral against Duo Lon or Kim. It’s just not happening. Their normals reach way too far. Literally his best tools in those matchups are jump CD and fireball, and Takuma’s fireball has a lot of recovery in a game with a run and 4 different kinds of jumps and rolls. He wasn’t fishing for anything, that’s how that matchup goes because Takuma’s limbs are stubby. BALA’s fundamentals are great and he was doing exactly what he should have been doing, the reason he was going for big hits was because he had the meter for it when he landed the hits.
I think that when you have little other option but to do combos in order to do damage, the game is combo oriented. You don’t have to do combos in SF2 or SamSho2, or even a game like Guilty gear (granted its not an optimal way to play GG but you could do it if you pick the right characters.) KoFXIII, good as the game is, doesn’t really afford you that option. if you’re not doing combos, you’re not winning games (and if you are, you’re playing bad players.)
HD combos ARE your best option in KoFXIII if you have one available. Yes, Drive is tough to get, but you can have a full drive meter by the end of the first/middle of the second round if you pick the right characters and place them right. Getting meter isn’t as hard to get as you make it sound. And if you’re judicious about how you spend it, you can have full meter by the 3rd.
I agree with you that HD combos are probably the worst thing about the game (they detract from what I think is easily the best current gen fighting game) but because they’re the best option you have to do big damage, they’re necessary to learn.
Takuma is a stubby little guy who hits hard. Kim’s standing D is one of the most abuseable moves in the game, it’s a great poke on top of his other pokes and Kim does great damage with or without meter and Duo Lon is basically a scarier Dhlasim with a nasty fireball and rushdown game. These characters are really good against Takuma.
Takuma can’t fight them with simply using normals. Takuma needs to stay mobile, use jump CD a ton to push Kim and Duo-Lon into the corner, put stuff on the screen and generally not sit there like a rock because he is easy jump bait which is especially bad since he has no reversal against two characters who literally can bully characters to death with pressure and throw mix ups. Plus, Kim has the damage Duo Lon doesn’t have, so he’s even worse for Takuma. This means that when Takuma gets a hit, he needs to make it hurt or kill, depending on the meter he has.
Takuma’s entire game plan is 1). Push enemy into corner 2). Bully enemy with pressure and command grab 3). Land hit into combo for godlike damage. Bala used combos that basically did did their job and went for optimized damage. Takuma can get upwards of 700 damage with two meters, Bala was playing the character correctly.
If by the logic of “I can’t win games by doing nothing but pokes and individual hits, therefore combo game,” SF4 is a combo game, the Alpha series are combo games, every anime game ever is a combo game (even Guilty Gear, because even the zoning characters like Axl and Venom have combos you should be doing when you can), most KoF games, in fact most games in general are combo games. Hitconfirms into damage are a part of life, I think you’re letting the term get out of hand. To me, a game that is combo oriented is one where the combos become the game, whether or not you drop combos and if there’s a breaker system whether or not you baited it, whatever. The neutral is replaced by combos, mindgames are not about spacing but about knockdown/incoming situations, the game is about the combos. A game simply having combos isn’t enough, because we play fighting games. People are going to maximize every opportunity they can to win, which means optimizing damage.
Also, as for the Drive meter thing, again, you are not getting an HD combo every round. It’s not possible. So no, I’m not making it harder than it seems, that’s how it actually legitimately is. There are almost never HD combos in the first round and when there are it’s because one dude spent a whole lot of time getting beat on and not landing hits building up bar on whiffed or blocked special moves, or he was stupid and wasted meter. Let’s say it’s a game where one player wins all 3 rounds, so the other player isn’t even a factor. In the first round there will not be an HD combo. In the second round, there will probably be an HD combo. If that HD combo doesn’t kill, the round will go on and the player will build a bit more meter. In the 3rd round the first 30 seconds at LEAST will not have an HD combo because you will absolutely not have the meter for it, but maybe at the end there will be an HD combo to finish the round out.
That is 2 HD combos. When the other player is fighting back the damage you take will get a little more meter and your 3rd character might have the meter for an HD at the start of the round coming in, but other than that, that’s about all you’re getting. HD does not dominate the game like people say it does. Yeah it’s the best damage you can do if you have the meter for it, but you don’t have the meter for it ALL THE TIME. A player doing 3 HD combos in a math is pretty rare, it just doesn’t happen because of how the rounds play out and people generally don’t save meter for nothing but HD combos because that’s stupid. HD is basically the FADC of XIII. How often do you see FADC combos in SF4? Would you say EVERY combo in SF4 is an FADC combo? Of course not, it happens like twice a match. XIII also has the not really benefit of being a 3v3 game. If XIII was played with 2 characters or just two rounds, you would never see an HD combo more than once a match, it’s only because the games are as long as they are that they happen more frequently, more frequently being twice instead.
XIII is more meter management and herp derping with shitty tools outside of meter options compared to a game like 98. 98 is a game with some silly ST-like safe shit that isn’t really that safe if you play really strong fundamentals, punishes aren’t as obvious as they are in XIII. XIII simply doesn’t have the same solid foundation that 98 has. So even if the basics do low damage, as long as they work then you should be able to shut out niggas fishing for combos, much like in 02um. Oh wait, the revamped subsystems and shittier normals allow niggas to fish more or convert off of weird shit.
If people want to play the game and like it, that’s fine. For what it is, isn’t not fun for me. I feel sick playing the game even when I win.
For the most part. The only large strikes for the game, for me, is the noticeably larger hitstun on jump-ins, allowing sloppier early jump-ins convert into death (such as Kula or Oswald), and just general character balance. The reason why zoning characters are bad is because SNKP intentionally made their tools bad, like slower recovery on projectiles and such. Then there are characters like Momoko that can’t tag cancel moves that look like they should. I think the game just needs a UM or something and fix those two things and it would be golden.
I guess hops have a weird momentum compared to 98 and 02, but it still works like KOF unlike the weird arcs and deceleration that XIII displays.
How do you feel about the damage values in that game? To me they make no sense, Terry’s Buster Wolf does pretty low damage for a super while Oswald with BnB Ace Combo hits like a truck.
It’s not even fair to compare XIII to 98 really. It’s like comparing Alpha 3 to ST. I wish SNK would bring 98UMFE to the states, because honestly I’d probably drop XIII forever.
Then what am I supposed to compare within the context of this thread? The main KOF titles are more or less similar to each other, even XIII was made to be akin to 98/02. 02 was made to be akin to 98. Even disregarding how KOF games aren’t really that different from each other after 98 (or try not to be that different), that analogy doesn’t even seem relevant. Alpha 3 to ST is Alpha 3 to ST. 98 to XIII is 98 to XIII.
It’s whatever. I think that point lends back into “general character balance.” The damage values on individual supers aren’t directly affected by universal sub-systems or such. It’s just up to the devs to put damage on Terry’s Buster Wolf or Kyo’s 182 Shiki so that there would be a reason to using them other than Power Geyser or Orochinagi. It’s also up to the devs to decide Ace is metered or meterless, if it does a lot or little damage, and how it connects. Kinda like how it’s up to the devs whether or not Gato should juggle the way he does with stomp-to-jumpkick option or should have anywhere juggles with his super, decide how slow/fast Athena’s Shining Crystal Bit spins, or the range Momoko’s cr.B reaches.
Part of the reason why 03 and XI is wack at times, or 03 being full on wack, is that the dev crew at the time was pretty much new. Sure SNKP was back into the hands of the original president (who then stepped down, then stepped back up, and who knows who is the current head now), but many of the people that left SNK didn’t return. So it’s a bunch of noob devs that loved old SNK games but were a bunch of greenhorns with “limited talent.” Seems like they could do well for themselves now except for that whole fiasco that was pre-Climax/Console XIII. For the most part. Samsho Sen was boring and who knows what they would do if they bring in Mark of the Wolves 2 or make another Samsho.
It’s a crapshoot with them, but to some certain degree they seem earnest.
What he said was “Either Bala has horrible fundamentals, or Takuma has horrible fundamental tools. Either way these games revolved around one player getting one lucky shot to drain a life bar in one combo”. I’m not even sure why you’re bringing up Takuma’s defensive tools here. Even if we assume that his defensive game is shit, you basically confirmed that for this one matchup at least the entire thing revolves around whether Takuma can land one combo:
So yeah, that matchup is entirely combo-oriented, at least from Takuma’s side. This is as confirmed by you. If you want to claim that KoF is not combo-oriented you’re going to have to do it by talking about other matchups, because the more you talk about this one the more it sounds like you’re proving ShinjiGohan’s point.
If this will be a real 3D fighter … like Tekken or DoA … I will cry out loud … also it looks like it will not have the unmatched oldschool SamSho flair all the SS1-5S had … that is really a pitty.
KOF XIII was/is a great game overall … doing something similiar with a new SamSho would be perfect … but unfortunately it seems like that it will not happen … 8(
So because there are matchups that are entirely momentum dependent that makes the game combo oriented? I think you’re saying both are the same thing which is kind of ridiculous to begin with. Takuma doesn’t need to land an HD combo to have the momentum, he just needs to be the aggressive party, combos have nothing to do with that.
It’s not even momentum-dependent. Everything said in this thread points toward him building up to land one big combo. Either that is correct, and he is combo-oriented, or it is not, and these guys are wrong:
How can he be aggressive if he is unable to play neutral? Just go HAM? From the way you describe it Takuma has shit tools, so how is he generating pressure?
Takuma doesn’t have to build up for a big combo, that’s what he does, it’s what his character is, he hits like a truck. That’s the point. He doesn’t need one big combo, he doesn’t need HD mode, his damage is just crazy high all the time. Meterless he can kill you in about 2 hits if he does the good combos. Him being a high damage character doesn’t make him combo oriented, he’s just a high damage rush down character like Akuma or Seth or Abel, etc.
He has shit DEFENSIVE tools and he can’t play footsies with characters who have longer limbs than he does. That doesn’t mean his entire character is shit. His B fireball is a solid poke and knocks down, D and EX kick fireball have super armor, C Ranbu is a solid anti air that gives a hard knockdown that lasts so long you can run up and pressure afterwards, even get a safe jump, his j.CD is basically the BEST in the game that basically no one can challenge (it’s even better than Karate’s), and of course all jump CD’s universally knock down and have a fuck ton of block stun, so if someone blocks one you get a free pressure situation, which is horribly not in your favor because of Takuma’s very low to the ground hop, command grab he can get a full combo off of, good sweep, etc. All it takes is one good read, one hopped sweep, one successful blowback, one good j.CD and Takuma is in your face and looking for blood. And of course once he gets that momentum in his favor and is pressuring you, all it takes is one good hit and you’re losing 50% minimum, which after fighting in the neutral for some amount of time will probably mean you die.