I think 2D fighters can kind of get away with it but not so much 3D fighters.
My reason is just the sheer amount of strings you have to learn to defend against in 3D fighters, not just the “good” moves as such but also the ones which you always get told “don’t risk this, a good player will launch you for free” can down right deadly and coming into the game with say TTT2 and trying to learn to defend against that is daunting to say the least.
On the flip side with 2D fighters, you still have to learn the matchups but “This guy has a good anti air”/“Don’t try to meaty against this guy”/ect. feels a lot easier to get into then learning “After 2 jabs with his right hand he can do this low kick or go into a mid which then goes into…” for every character.
They don’t play exactly the same, but they are slightly different variations of the same thing. And like I said Gouken and Sakura should not be on that list.
I never said they play the same. In fact, I said the exact opposite. I wasn’t being sarcastic at any point.
I’m tired of people saying they’re clones, when they’re not. Just because a character has a DP and a fireball doesn’t make them a clone of another character.
And you’ve really never heard people put Gouken and Sakura in with the shotos? I certainly have… On these very forums.
I’ve heard DUDLEY is a shoto clone too… I wasn’t about to go that far… His rose isn’t exactly a hadoken.
VF5 is balanced because the diversity of characters is relatively low compared to other fighting games. Characters share similar templates, and there’s not a huge gap in character variety. It’s not like SF where one character can have a fireball and another doesn’t, another has teleports, command grabs, dive kicks, arms reaching across the screen etc, that largely dictate their play styles. GG would be another, albeit extreme example. It’s why partly why I find Virtual Fighter boing, even though it was one of the first fighters I’ve played.
There’s a template using the universal aspects of the game(where the balance comes from), but the characters don’t play anything alike and that’s pretty aparent just by looking at their movelist. There are tool sets and moves that dictate a character as well, it’s just theirs more room to be open and not as rigid as the examples you gave.
There was an El Blaze army (5 or so I believe, but it was enough for some people, lol) at Sega Cup and not one of them played like the other. This also happened with other characters, as people were exchaning tips during mirror matches, having their matches watched by someone who used the same character etc. Everyone at the tourney showed up with diverse tactics and their own bags of tricks. So there was a lot of “shop talk”(which happened as well when I was playing online) going on as you can approach the system and character in many different ways, which is still a topic of discussion in the pockets that do play VF in the U.S.
Depends…? Skullgirls could have technically benefited from being theoretically bigger because clearly Skullgirl has underused amount of background characters. Where as games like Tekken could definitely use a trimming of characters. It’s impossible for a game to have 100% balance, but I just want the game to have enough game play diversity and quality skill.
SF2 being another example. The tier lists aren’t very compressed, you’re not given a lot of options in a variety of situation, there’s a lot of broken and cheasy shit in these games, but every single character on the roster has a specific purpose and role to play in the game, and caters every variety of individual player preferences, styles, and strengths/weaknesses.
fuck no, there should be a fighting game with 100,000,000 characters, that way it will take people a hundred years for anyone to find out everything about the game.
We need 31 flavors of just Ryu. Evil Ryu, Shadow Ryu, Kid Ryu, Pocket Fighter Ryu, Asura Wrath Ryu, 8-bit-Ryu, Why do we have a 2D Sprite in a 2.5 game Ryu and So on…
Not to mention Cyber Akuma, Mecha Zangief, Shadow Charlie, Shadow Chun Li, Fat-and-Balding Vega, Skinny Rufus, Fat-and-Nasty-MegaMan, Movie version Guile, Seth Killian, 3 different Jill Valentines, That female Goku that only appeared in Marvel vs Capcom 2, Non-prison Uniform Cody, US President Haggard, Phoenix Wright, and Scrooge McDuck
If a game has less than 12 characters, I’m not even looking at that shit. If the game has more characters than MvC2, I’m hesitant to try to learn it seriously. There is an upper and lower limit to how many characters a balanced game can have. Less than 12 and the game gets old fast, no matter how varied the cast is. More than TTT2 and the game sees decreased adoption because of matchups. A practical limit would be 15-35 characters. No more, no less. That’s the sweet spot. You get the ability to keep the cast small and well balanced, or larger with more clearly defined tiers.
Also, the larger the cast, the less likely you’ll have a completely diverse cast. With 30+ characters, at least on character will almost always play like someone else or have the same/similar moves (Ryu/E.Ryu)
The only SF that honestly felt like it was full of shotoclones was EX1. And even then, I thought Allen Snider and Kairi were amazing designs (Kairi more so post EX2) so I wasn’t even mad.
That said I find it surprising that current gen Capcom doesn’t do more to differentiate Ryu and Ken in terms of movesets. In the Alphas and CvS2, Ryu and Ken felt leagues different, especially with Ken building up all these cool extra special moves like his roll, Ryuubi-kyaku, and the crazy kicks. SF4 kind of stripped all that away leaving Ken as a far less interesting character. Obviously Ryu and Ken don’t necessarily play alike, but a little effort on the developer’s side to give the characters more unique stuff would go a long way.