I’m a huge KOF fanboy, but I could sure go for a revival of Last Blade… That series was both an art/music masterpiece, but it also had gameplay that felt different from other 2d fighters. It had a lot of potential.
FF seems to be kind of in the process of being absorbed into KOF, but I guess that’s not really enough for a fan of FF.
I think you can’t grasp the concept of different levels of risk. Poking in ST / '98 isn’t as risky as in MOTW because generally if your opponent guesses right / has godly reflexes and hits your poke you’ll lose some life / momentum (and if he fucks up he can get destroyed by that mistake), while in Garou a lucky JD can mean losing half of your lifebar or more (and guess what, if you fuck up nothing happens! You will safely block if you fuck up. At least in SF3 there’s a tiny chance of getting punished for a missed parry).
And yeah, JD is of course SNK’s response to SF3’s parry. I can’t believe someone can go as far as to deny that.
Yeah, too bad Just Defend came first.
LMAO are you on drugs?
Just defend by its self is less risky than Parry. However, unlike parry, you dont gain a substantial frame advantage. After a JD, both players are pretty much at a stale-mate in terms of frames and you only recover a miniscule amount of health which means nothing when every character has a 30% bnb. So, even with the life regenerated from Just defending, it still remains a low risk low reward option, as opposed to parry which is, for the most part, low risk high reward. The only way to gain a frame advantage off of a JD, is to guard cancel, and thats where the risk takes a massive jump.
Besides a few stand out characters like Rock, Gato and Hotaru, most characters best guard cancels are quite difficult to do and require a fair amount of forethought and predictability on the part of their opponent. Guard Canceling into Kevins qcf B takes a lot of practice to do consistently and is easy for a lot of characters to beat out (toss out another cr.A if you think hes going to GC). Its no surprise that even though it should be considered one of the best GCs in the game due to the potential follow up damage, its rarely used in actual fights. The risk in screwing it up, or having it countered is too high for most Kevins.
Also, you have to keep in mind the high damage output in Garou when weighing risk/reward. You have to account for the fact that everyone in the game has a 30% bnb (or damn close), and can potentially do 70% and up if they have meter or are in TOP. Youll think twice whenever youre tempted to toss out a GC if your opponents been countering them with 30% bnbs.
Guard Cancel counters, like I mentioned earlier, are yet another thing you have to look out for if youre trying to gain a frame advantage off a JD . Every character, besides Griff, has a way to bait and counter guard cancels much in the same way people are able to counter CD counters in KOF, except in Garou, each character has multiple counter options and can lead to dozens of different set-ups. Rock can kara into one of his high counter (low counter against Kevin), Freeman can kara dp A and Marco can Cr. B and so on. Guard Cancels aren’t 100% safe like a lot of people think, and there’s a counter for nearly everything in the game. Hell, you can even bait a GC counter and counter that.
Im not saying Just defend is any better than parry, and I don’t want to start a Parry vs Just defend debate (they’ve been done to death), but when you dig deep into the Garou engine youll see that they both use radically different ways to mitigate damage and SNK used quite a bit of caution in making sure their universal systems didnt homogenize the strategies, or make them over-powered. I’m honestly not a big fan of either system, but there’s a lot of misinformation going around when comparing JD and parry, I just want to clear some of it up.
Also, alluding to FB being as useless in Garou as they are in 3S is just silly. Every character with a FB uses them for both spacing and pressure much in the same way theyre used in other games. They may not be as good as they are in ST, but theyre not obsolete as they are in 3S. Try telling good Marco or Kain players that they shouldnt be throwing fbs because of JDtheyll look at you like youre a damn fool.
Besides what Hatre Edge pointed out, Ill like to mention that 3 of the top 4 characters in Garou (Kevin, Grant and Jae) are all tiered the way they are mostly because of their strong poking game. Hell, one of the reasons why Freeman has been moving up in tiers and usage is because his pokes are so damn good. Pokes can be beaten in Garou just like they can in other games, the difference is, characters have more methods of beating out pokes than just counter-poking. It doesnt make them unsafe, it just means you have the pay even more attention to your spacing. I dont toss out Freemans Far C unless I know Im at the proper distance.
But I agree with you about the breakshots (which I think is what youre talking about), I honestly would have rather seen Garou implement RB style breakshots, or made GCs cost meter to use.
PS: While JD is relatively easy to do, easier than parry in 3S, you also have to factor in the speed of the game and the mix-up options most characters possess. Try JDing a good rush-down Marco or Hoku for more than 3 second. Looks easy on paper, but in practice its no walk in the park.
Blocking is your friend.
That’s why I said “really good” AND “competitively viable.” Nothing about 2K2 is actually “good.” I would argue this to death but all the KOF fanboys don’t get it.
i honestly like 2k2 better than vanilla 98, just because it has top tier chars (angel & may lee) that are waaaaaay fancier/trickier than anything else in KOF
98um > all though
and i’m more or less with cronopio on this one
FF was SNK’s most direct answer to SF, but that changed once KoF came into its own. However, I should point out that this didn’t happen immediately: SNK had more success with Samurai Shodown 1 and 2 than they did with the earlier FFs and KoF94, primarily because SS1 and especially SS2 were examples of SNK doing something that was both different and good, as opposed to just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. But after they tanked SS3, KoF became their new signature series.
The interesting thing is, as far as I’m concerned FF only got good once it stopped playing like FF, i.e. with MOTW. MOTW doesn’t really play like a Fatal Fury game - it’s more of a SF/KoF hybrid, and plays so much better for it. Real Bout 2 I suppose plays the best out of the FF games that actually played like FF games, but I don’t think it’s as good as Garou overall.
Unless they’re planning to bring out MOTW2 that continues what MOTW did, there’s no reason to revive FF.
Also, Just Defend > Parry, though that has as much to do with the overall games those systems appeared in than just the systems themselves.
There’s no comparison between RB2 and Garou. Completely different games so to say one is better that the other is inadequate.
As some guys have said, FF was the flag until KOF came out.
And the reality is that every other game except KOF is dead. RB2 came in 98, Garou in 99, SS5 is the newer one with 2003 as release date. Do not misunderstand, I mean “dead” because no sequel has come since then, not because nobody play them.
But I think SNK is preparing something. What game? Mmm… my two cents go for… man I don’t know.
Malfreds:
You’re right in that Garou and RB2 play very differently. But they’re two games in the same series, so I think they can be compared.
Plus, it’s not just that they play differently, but that Garou plays differently to RB2 and all the other FF games, which all had similar trappings. Garou chose (wisely IMO) to jettison these trappings in favour of stuff that was better, albeit more familiar (i.e. more standardized button setup, no more stupid line sway, and no more ludicrous special/super motions). In other words, Garou got rid of the stuff that was uniquely “Fatal Fury” that I disliked.
Technically, Samurai Shodown has been hanging in there (,er you do know that three SS games came out after SS5/SS0, right?). but after the disaster of SSS, I think SS might be down for the count.
I just played Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 for the first time a few days ago(I know im late to the party) and I have to say I really love it, I would like to see something like that attempted again.
Yeah I know.
A new RB game with RB2 style added with some RBS stuff and why not, maybe something from RB1.
funny you say that i think snk should go all out do like alpha 3 put every character from the ff series in a rb2-rbs engine like groves
actually i was thinking the same thing, back in 98 when rb2 got released.
also whats up with people claiming motw isnt as FF as RB2? wtf, motw is more ff than any rb game actually. just check out ff 1, 2, s and 3. only thing 3 and the rb games got in commen are the chain combos. in all actuality motw only lost planes and gained jd, which was a far smaller thing than the step snk took from ff3 to rb1.
you right people got it twisted the fatal fury series was the answer to street fighter 2
the realbout series was the answer to the alpha series
trivia : did you know that snk was originally gonna name fatal fury realbout:karate:
Freeman is hot shit.
yeah i did btw, :china:. theres even a bg in FF1 where they show real bout in the bg plane. i totally forgot about it and relearned that shit AFTER playing RB later on. RB3 would be great, with all the old characters returning, or a MOTW where they have some of the old cast returning (yamazaki, joe) andf lots of new characters (gaots dad) and new sprites (KOFXII route).