I played the game last night and…Sigh
I didn’t want to say this. Actually I didn’t want it to be true…Capcom Fighting Jam is total shit. The name of the game shouldn’t even be Fighting Jam…it should Capcom Fighting Scam.
From the screenshots I saw previously, I really didn’t think the aesthetics or lack thereof in this case would actually bother me. Of course this was before I actually sat down in front a flatscreen Sony Wega and played this game. I can say this with truest honesty that I’ve never purchased a game and been so mortified in my life as to how it looked. My face literally contorted as to how bad this game looked.
All the sprites are from different games which is already common knowledge and I knew that beforehand in watching various Japanese tourney vids from Carol and other arcades. That’s not the biggest problem of the MANY graphical sins Capcom committed in this game. My problem is the fact they didn’t even think to try to clean the resolution on any of the characters. Even Ingrid looks outdated. Her animation is smooth but why is a new sprite still so pixelated? Maybe System 246 isn’t too user friendly for 2-D games, all I know is that it came off as if there was no effort to even make this game slightly pleasing to the eye.
And sadly enough even though the graphics have been bitched about for so long in other threads, after acutally playing the game there are still some things that have to be addressed. The backgrounds. You know its bad when not only do the backgrounds for the most part don’t even match ANY of the sprites, but when they actually start taking artwork from the different series, cropping the images lowering the res altering the channels of the picture so you can’t see all the detail from the original and pasting it to the background merely to add a background character, so they don’t have to draw one…If you want proof, go the “NEW YORK” Stage and just sit there for a while and look at the background. If you have any of the artbooks or have at least seen:
-Conceptual Designs for Characters in the Alpha Series
-Actually Character artwork for Character Selection in Sf3 Third Strike ( Looks at artwork for Ken in 3s and then look at T Hawk in the NY BG in CFJ )
-Cover Designs for Alpha 3
-Sprites from MVC1 (Seans sprite for Ryu’s intro)
Another note, Demitri’s Midnight Bliss Transformation Super is pathetic. They don’t even animate at all, they’re just still sprites. Play VS and look at the difference between the Supers and how bad the new incarnation is.
You can see how much Capcom really put no effort into the aesthetic of the game. This is only 1 stage I picked apart so I don’t have a clue of what else could be pointed out. Besides the graphics, CFJ has a major problem that affects the entire presentation. CFJ has really a shoddy,sluggish feel to its gameplay. This could be attributed to how a game feels in its early stages of play to a new player but it really feels sluggish, moreso than any other Capcom game I’ve played for the first time.
The ST System is quite contradictory in the fact that most characters have supers that are from more recent versions of the characters and the fact they have more than 1 super is beyond me. Most of the ST characters don’t really feel like ST at all they feel more like CVS2 characters with roll,dash,low jump, and super jump turned off. They have bits of ST stuff but not really much.
The 3s system feels very “trashy” and not well thought out at all in comparison the original counterparts in the series. Parry feels “P-groovey” which at least in my opinion is sad within itself but was something to be expected since CFJ doesn’t animate the same as 3s which is also probably why “Red Parry” was removed as well. At least speaking for Urien he feels very “sloopy” when played. His Chariot Tackle slides inexcusably across as if he has no control of himself making the move very loose and giving it extreme lag which I guess in turn was to make sure that “Partitioning” was removed from the game. I can look at that so say there was effort to make sure he wasn’t too broken. Super Cancels are now Manual Input only, meaning you must input all motions to Super Cancel. You can no longer Cancel from a qcf+p move into a qcf+p and get super, which honestly wasn’t that broken of an advantage and now thats gone for the 3s characters. It seems as if in an effort to make things different in this case Capcom took components of the games and made them worse.
The Custom Combo System if anything, just seems like a really watered down CVS2 A-Groove System with implementation of percentage distribution ala A3; couple that with the fact that no one in the Alpha group has an actual roll, not much can be cancelled to create a high possiblity to discover useful custom combos which at least at the moment makes CC’s useless outside of Rose and Karin for now. And if its anything like the Damage Scaling of CVS2 for A-Groove less than half of the Alpha roster will have good CC’s. Link combos feel more like Chain Combos because you have to do them so slow, and there’s no “tight” feel to its execution. The big appeal of the game is supposed to be the diversity of the different systems from each respective game, which has become a common staple in most of the recent Capcom games released under NAOMI hardware (CVS,CVS2). The issue with this is that with each respective fighting system a group of characters from that game are restricted their original game which only leads to contrived gameplay without much potential for any competitve growth at least in that respect. Lack of system is just another let-down that I experienced in playing CFJ. Overall, the gameplay is something that really isn’t too intriguing not just for a rainy day casual gamer but even for most SF veterans. One of my biggest “line’s of defense” when debating the validity or merit of CFJ was that:
-" No other company has been able to capture the feel of SF in their games and thats why I always played Capcom fighting games…"
That sentiment has changed in the fact that CFJ honestly does not feel like any SF game at all. The Default Speed of 3 actually feels more like Normal or Speed 2 of CVS2 which is slower than CVS 2’s default speed. It really feels as if no effort was really put into this game at all, not just graphically but concerning one of the most important aspects to any video game,especially SF…the gameplay. You can put all the graphical faults to the side and not even be concerned with how it looks and still see that the structure of CFJ is really weak and if anything this game will be forgotten in a matter of months. This is CVS1 Revisited or better yet the “Mario Party” of SF.
In the end, I really tried to stick up for Capcom’s “newest” installment and hope that this game would be good. I really didn’t even want to make this post because well it doesn’t match how I felt before I played the game but I have to be honest and join the many who are eating crow now because they realize the game sucks. The only saving grace for me was since I traded some games in I only paid 10 bucks for it, but in a way I still want that 10 bucks.
Derek Daniels was right.
Inkblot was dead-on.
David Dial was right.
My gf was right too ( won’t be living that down for a while)
There’s no other way to say it, this game is trash and I really don’t see anything happening competitively in this game to change the majority’s opinion of the game. I can’t say that CVS2 has ever looked so good to me now.
-Nokato Sakurazuka
