Situational blocking animations- instead of holding your arms up and shaking like 90% of fighting game guard animations, the fighters actually swayed and dodged attacks. If you pressed block quickly, you would dodge/sway and earn a faster guard stun recovery (advantage). If you were slow about it, you would get pushed back and lose that fast guard stun recovery (disadvantage).
So, in short, faster reflexes gave you an advantage.
Cool tackle/ground fighting mechanics- After tackling/mounting someone (like in Tekken), you were in a grab state similar to a beat 'em up. You could:
A.) Do a finishing move (like an arm breaker) and release your opponent.
OR
B.) Press punch, hit your foe once, remain on top of them, and choose A or B again.
However, punches could be reversed, putting the person being pounded on top. So, if you got too greedy with punches, the opponent could reverse and THEY would have the choice of A or B. If you were risk-averse, it was best to go for the arm breaker fast and end the transaction. If you were feelig a little froggy, go for a couple punches THEN the arm breaker for more total damage.
aw man KENSAI was the shit!!! i remember steven segal and this girl that all you had to do was press one button over and over and she did like a 20 hit combo!
Big agreement. Tobal 2 never came out here, and I actually imported it. It looked great for its time, the animations were great, the fighting system was a great mix of Tekken and Soul Blade elements, and it was packed full of cool secrets. The best was the quest mode where you could capture and then use all sorts of different, really bizarre characters - 185 in total (although admittedly quite a few were recolor/resized).
Given the thread title though, I think the only way you could call it a failed experiment though is if you count not bringing it to America as an experiment!
You mean Saya Tsubaki(sp)?. If I had to make a tier list, I’d say she was probably pretty high up. She had the unblockable “Slap Frenzy”…crazy unpunishable Lei WuLong-style sweep…high priority and speed in a fairly sluggish game…
My favorite character was probably the “poor man’s Hwoarang”…a.k.a. Heinz. His attack reversal animations were awesome.
Thanks, I completely missed this and it looks tight.
On Topic, I would say Enhergiz, which borrowed Tobal’s engine if I remember correctly. It had potiential and the goofiness of it was refreshing, just needed a lot of work.
There’s also Destraga. Interesting idea with magic based combat on large fields and could be revived as a 4 player party game to rival Brawl, just needed to fix some of the balancing flaws or flesh it out so the game doesn’t grow stale.
Svc chaos had so much potential and the sprites were beautiful but the only problem is the majority of the cast were broken as hell ie: infinites, able to kill in very few moves, nearly impossible to escape traps/setups, and stuff that made it all into a battle of who can get there cheap shit out first!
The game is still fun as hell I liked the 4button layout I played nearly 10000 matches on xbl when it came out I even figured out how to beat god of cheap infinite super meter shin akuma with violent ken:rock:
SC2 (xbox) is hella underrated imo it’s a great game and deserves a scene, I don’t know why it never caught on.
Eternal Champions… while some of the characters may seem generic, they all had unique backgrounds, interesting stories, and the premise, each fighter fighting to regain a chance to relive the life that was taken from them before their time. The game has a lot of potential to pull fighters from all over history and different locations. The Eternal Champion himself was pretty cool too. Significant gameplay features:
-Had a meter to prevent special move spam
-simpler move inputs
-a unique training mode reminiscent of X-men’s danger room
-biographies for all the characters.
It, like many fighters of it’s time though had balance issues. But I still think it’s a good concept, and deserves a revival.
Do entire fighting series like Eternal Champions count as failed experiments or just failed games? I’m a bit confused here.
When it comes to games that fall into failed experiment territory, the first game I thought of was Samurai Shodown 3. It is still the definition of failed experiment: SNk had near 2D weapon fighting perfection in SS2, and then they fucked it all to hell for no apparent reason with SS3. SS3 was an utter abomination, and while they corrected the most egregious flaws with SS4, it was really just putting lipstick on a pig. After bumbling through the terrible ideas of SS3 for another few games, we wouldn’t start to get back on track until SS0, some 8 years after SS3 stank up the place.
Other games that came to mind are VF3 (just based on how they backpeddled in VF4), Tekken 4 (ditto), and SF3 series (the series pretty much convinced Capcom to not make another SF game for over a decade).
G.O.T.
SFA3 World Tour was far from a failed experiment. It was hailed as an absolutely fantastic addition to an already heavily stocked game. I don’t know why they haven’t brought it back in some form; perhaps it’s because it requires too much work.
LOL im shocked people knew that was even in SS2. Anyway, parrying was somewhat introduced in World Heroes 2 which came out a year before SS2. It was too easy to do in WH2 so we tried to make it a little more skillful in SS2. Parrying on SS2 was a definite fail but fantastic idea :arazz:
SS2 still had plenty of fighting game innovations to keep people happy. :wgrin:
yeah there are life bars, but argh i just want a game like this, maybe i should look for some player reviews. its like the 4th game or something there must be depth there