I don’t really think Elphelt gets outright better mixups by entering shotgun stance, rather she gets better pressure and corner conversion options. She loses her overhead, her regular throw and the ability to jump by entering the stance, but in return she’s granted some of the best close-range normals in the game, and a (very slow) command grab to compliment those normals. Then again, Elphelt isn’t really a mix-up character. She’s more of a “jack of all trades, master of… actually almost all of them”-type of character.
Leo, on the other hand, goes from having relatively linear (though rewarding) offense to becoming a mixup-monster by entering Brynhildr-stance. If you want an example of a stance-based mixup character in a 2D fighter, he’s probably one of the best ones.
I think trying to say “all stance characters are X” is a fool’s errand. There are stance characters whose point is to give you a tool for every situation, but each tool only works for 1 situation. There are stance characters who goal is to find a way into the stance at advantage because their stance has good mixups or lockdown. There are stance characters for whom the stance is a resource to be expended for mobility, pressure, or damage.
Elphelt and Leo are definitely of the “stance as a reward for getting at advantage” characters. You generally don’t want to get into stance in neutral but instead once you get that knockdown or have them respecting your pressure. Gen is an example of a toolbox stance. Valk is of the stance as a resource.
I can also admit my obvious bias towards preferring the “stance as toolbox” type of stance-changing character given the example I posted above in spoilers in my second-to-last post.
I also forgot about the status ailments in P4A! I think most of them weren’t very noticable (looking at you, poison) but silence was easily the most useful. didn’t play around with it that much.
In the same vein, you have divekick where scoring a headshot “dazes” the opponent, reducing their speed and jump height at the start of the round. That made getting head shots a little more rewarding.
I’ve only really played Baiken in reload, and that was a long time ago, but her tactic was to “Punish on guard.” I do recall a group saying that Baiken was crazy unfair tier in some of the later XX revamps because of how useful and strong her kit was.
I think it depends on how easy it is to do and how the game is played. I personally like fighters that reward aggressive play styles, and to give a player the edge just because he/she blocks a move only serves to slow the game down. It’s hard to be aggressive when you’re actually taking a risk with all of your attacks. On the other hand, reckless button mashing should be punishable. If a character has a kit that doesn’t let them properly punish this kind of behavior, a punish on block ability could round them out.
I actually found Hakumen from blazeblue to have an interesting “parry” function. The player can’t throw out a parry during a block string, forcing them to make a choice between the lower risk guard, or the higher reward parry. It’s also very easy to punish random parrying. Despite all of its risks, it worked on almost every attack in the game, except attacks where the opponent was at a distance, like a long normal or a projectile.
Testament from guilty gear also had something like that, but I think it only worked on mid-high attacks.
I don’t hate them, but I’m not sure I’d really miss them if they were gone. I haven’t seen those types of moves used with great frequency.
Hakuman has the most bland and boring to use counters in any game I’ve played. They’re one of my favorite mechanics but I would much rather play Axl with Heaven Can Wait if I wanted to counter stuff. “Here’s a whole button devoted to counters! But they’re shitty, horribly punishable, and you’ll almost never use them!”
When Tekken 5 came out I decided to take it seriously. I’ve never been more involved in a scene than I was for T5 and DR. As I got better in the game I realized something that nags at me still. When a character throws, you can see the placement of the arms during the startup and know what button(s) to press to break them. When I first learned of it I was dismissive. I felt it was prohibitively difficult so it would hardly come up. So of course I was wrong and top level players were hardly getting thrown. You ask any fighting game player what throws are for, the number one answer is “to counter blocking”. What’s the point of throws if you can still be defensive as hell and break throws without changing pace? The top level meta for throwing in Tekken was “do a throw so that when the opponent breaks then the throw break animation will put me in a more favorable position”. If the opponent happened to not break then the damage was a bonus. Seth Killian told us about how scrubs think cheap tactics violate the “sanctity of blocking”. I feel that the sanctity of throwing has been violated here. At first I focused on the fact that the placement of the arms meant you couldn’t really mix them up. What really matters though is that you can react to the start up period. I heard that in T7 they made it so that 1 and 2 throws can be broken with either input(break 1 by pressing 2). That was what I wanted back in T5 but now I realize how little that changes the actual effectiveness of throws. If you can break them on reaction then it defeats the purpose of throws IMO.
I searched the name of a high level Tekken player and this is the first video I got. The only throws that weren’t broken in this best of 3 set were the throws that whiffed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyAto67zDG8
I’ve seen this in other series but not on as great a scale.
it seems to me (I don’t know about Tekken, mind you) that the normals (in the example above) are better mix-up tools than the throws (seeing which landed more times), though going by your description, throws would serve to further improve the other mix-up tools (rather than going for the throw itself as a mix-up).
in most games (can’t think of an exception), the throw possibility is a reward to the attacker (for being able to get in), and depending on the reward from the throw itself, the defender is rewarded for being able to break it (for example, in DFCI, the one doing throw rejection has frame advantage, throws in this game lead to sub-optimal but still moderately good combos, and there’s throw rejection baits in this game). In some games (like AH3 and NPB), there are more mix-up tools than throws (so depending on the strength of said other tools, throws can be weaker, design-wise, and vice-versa), and in the case of NPB, throws are easy to reject, but can’t be rejected if the defender tried to use an universal shield mechanic (Vanishing Guard) meant to either block an universal guard-crush mechanic (charged E normals) or to put both players at neutral (with frame advantage for the defender) to attempt to mess the attacker’s blockstring timing and hit him/her out of it. In some games (AP, Garou, KoF 2002 UM, MB, SFA3, Yatagarasu), the guard crush bar (or indicator, in Garou’s case) can serve as an incentive to not block too much.
Tekken’s throws are really weird. They’re really good up to a certain point in the player progression, and after that their value seems to drop dramatically. But the thing is, from my experience, it’s pretty rare for even mid-level players to ever reach that tipping point. Even amongst the locals that are actually good at Tekken, there’s only one guy that manages to break throws on a regular basis.
Note that I’m not a Tekken player, so please correct me if I’m completely wrong on this, I’m just going by observation and experience.
No, you’re right about that. It’s mostly limited to the high level players. Does that make it OK? If everybody could do it then the game would clearly be broken. But if only EVO top 32 material can do it then does that mean the mechanic is fine?
I think I know what you’re getting at. When it comes to these kind of things, I worry more about what’s possible than what’s probable. When SFV’s no chip death from specials mechanic was revealed, I came up with a doomsday scenario of both players being on the last pixel in the last round and they both turtle up. As far as I know it hasn’t occurred yet but I still stand by it.
How different is that from games with chip? Approaching someone when you’re on chip gives them a chance to do a yolo DP for instance. There are great games like UNIEL that don’t have any chip deaths, or others where chip outs are far rarer than SFV like GG.
Parries are really cool. It’s great that we still have this mechanic represented even in modern fighting games
Jam’s parry in Xrd
Ryu’s and Alex’s parry in SFV
Low parry in Tekken (are there high parries for certain characters?)
Ryo’s parry and Angel’s/Geese’s counters in KOFXIV
I think MKX also has some parries?
I feel like the high risk high reward mechanics should be in every fighting game, it pushes the tech and mindgames forward and introduces a new element of strategy to one’s gameplan, plus it’s really hype to see as a spectator as well
I;m not sure we can even ha
[quote=“The Damned;10974349” what do people think of a character like her who essentially gets “stronger” by blocking, at least in terms of the moves they can possibly do?
[/quote]
robo ky is a character who benefits from instant blocking as he gain additional tension meter from it. You think have character like baiken who can do various guard cancel.
Assassin (fate unlimited codes) had command side step,
C-Moon Ries (MBAACC),
Chaka (Capcom JJBA)
Kudlak sin (Chaose code)
Batsu (TvC) (though its just re-adaption of rival school tardy mechanic
outside of that I cant think of to many character who get stronger from blocking with out revolving around strong universal defensive mechanic.
I’d note that parries and counters are pretty different mechanics. As a rule of thumb, a Parry grants frame advantage, while a Counter has a canned followup. Parries often (but not always) have no whiff animation while counters do have one.
Aoi’s(VF) parries were my favorite especially in later versions and she gained additional stances from here parry stance and could go into different attacks before the opponent even threw an attack.
Fan of Ryo’s(KOF, AOF) because dude can hit like a truck afterwards.
(Yeah, parries and counters are similar, but they are not the same.)
The key difference, at least to me, is that parries usually have a smaller window for success to make up for the fact that they generally allow for you to almost anything you want to at least attempt to punish. Counters, or at least the good ones, generally have comparatively longer windows for success, but only work in set circumstances and tend to have fixed counterattacks that will always come out if the move is triggered. There are of course exceptions to this, but that key difference is part of the reason why parries generally either need to be actual high-risk, high-reward or at least be highly visible. I say “actual” because one of the chief complaints leveled at Third Strike by its detractors, among which I am included, is that parrying there is at most moderate-risk, extremely high-reward.
Given we are talking about this again, I will not that the universal parry system in Akatsuki Blitzkampf blurs the lines here a bit given that you generally, IIRC, only have one direct follow-up–well, two if there was a separate one for being in the air–to a successful parry, but at the same time, unlike a counter, you do not have to do the follow-up. Sometimes it is indeed–or at least was, since I have no idea what became of the series–better to not do the follow-up so that you recover more quickly, at least against projectiles.
Also, I will note that I basically count “clash” systems like those that show up in most of the Guilty Gear games or the Arcana Heart games as akin to parries.
While I currently cannot think of an exception to throw possibility being a reward for the defender either, I would not be surprised if it did exist in some more esoteric fighting game.
Regardless, I quoted this because when I read it shortly after you posted, I agreed with it, but it also immediately reminded me about one of MvC3’s more significant flaws: throw breaks are fucking atrocious in that game. In fact, it has almost the exact opposite problem that Rioting Soul is discussing with regards to Tekken: if someone in MvC3 tries to throw you, then due to the fact that both characters basically recover at exactly the same time and distance if the throw is broken, the defender is immediately put back in the same position and just as likely to get throw or at least hit. In fact, I think it is the defender who gets pushed back when breaking throws as well. To make it even worse, some characters can outright kill you off of throws, so it is not like this is “only” annoying for its poor design. It is often outright lethal.
For the record, I think this is far a bigger issue than the lack of universal air dash that came up earlier the last time I mentioned MvC3.
Hey since @The Damned mentioned it. What exactly is it about UMVC3’s mechanics that turns people off from it? MVC series has always been the furthest thing from balanced among Capcom’s fighters if not fighters in general. But what is it about UMVC3 that makes folks treat it like it’s too broken even by MVC standards?
A lot of people don’t like how the game, at least on the surface, is based around one-touch kills. So it’s easy to complain that the game is “random” since it’s just about getting the first hit and then running mixups into death from there (which isn’t necessarily true, but I was actually of this opinion back when I started playing fighters). TAC infinites are only a part of it, but they’re quite prominent since it means almost every team with the correct support character can kill with a single touch and no meter spent.
X-Factor being the most blatant comeback-mechanic I’ve ever seen doesn’t help either; I have very little experience with the game, but I’ve managed to induce quite a bit of rage by losing my first two characters and instantly evaporating the other team with Vergil. For people who aren’t invested in the game, it makes the game look rather stupid and, again, random. One of our local veterans called it “fake hype” and “all flash, little substance” at a very early point of the life cycle of the game, and tournament support for the game here evaporated after that (to be fair, we’ve never managed to sustain more than two active tournament games here, the community just isn’t big enough).
My two cents about how the game is perceived over here in Oslo.
I’ve never heard anyone call it more broken than the previous MvCs though.
I always thought Tekken players loved the throw break system for the reasons that if you pay attention you can break it which left out guessing? I remember here and even at locals the word “guess” was thought to be the worse thing ever. It was thought that guessing was random. Later it was used for games that people didn’t like “oh they got a lucky guess” and in a game the majority liked it was called “read” , “that was nice read, from x player”.
That’s bound to happen as more people become informed about the hobby, which is nice.