Nah. That’s just a casual thing to call a game a button masher. Casuals call every game a button masher. I think every new fighting game has been called a button masher by some lower level player. Especially people who don’t play fighting games always label them as games where both player tries to mash the buttons harder. Which is not how fighting games work.
It’s just more people having trouble adapting to new games. Just like older SF players had trouble adjusting to SFIV, same thing with another new game.
Alpha 2 and 3rd Strike were both games where you had to press buttons a lot or generally throwing buttons on the screen was a regular habit. Either for meter building or just because you had OD buttons that could out poke and whiff punish a lot of other buttons. Alpha 2, like SFV has no focus or parry so buttons are free to reign in that game. SFV also goes back to not giving you any universal options to deal with buttons.
Heavy pushback on specials has been a pretty regular thing for SF games. Especially the older ones where most stuff was safe on block or had heavy pushback to make it safe. In SFV most of the special moves are negative on block and only the ones with pushback are anything close to safe. Whiff punishing is more difficult in V due to how the hurtboxes retract and the shorter buttons, but everything else about SFV is more unsafe and risky than other games.
I don’t understand this “heavy pushback on specials” thing. Because in sf5 that’s the exact opposite of what’s happening for the majority of specials.
There are outliers like birdies headbutt and Alex’s spaced elbows… But the story of sf5 is moves like rashids l mixer and Laura’s l shoulder and chuns ex legs. All -2 point blank, amongst many other specials that work the same way.
Nobody parries Mika’s drop kick. Nobody DPs Mika’s dropkick. Nobody jabs Mika’s dropkick. Everyone gets CC’d by uncharged and presses buttons after charged. So I guess I’ll continue to spam this move.
SFV is definitely too read-heavy for my liking but exaggerating the problem to this degree just makes your opinion sound less credible IMO. There’s certainly a shitton to understand about SFV at the highest levels, as evidenced by the fact that the top players are placing with relative consistency. You would see much more variance in tournament results if the game was anywhere close to as random as rock paper scissors.
That said, competitive RPS is actually a thing and you can actually get good at it! Like I said, there’s a lot more variance than you would see in a legit fighting game, but the takeaway is that almost any game with 2 players on an even playing field will have some sort of high skill cap to it.
Serious question; how many of you have actually ever played rushdown? Like, actually play that style against someone? More than once? Because whoever is coining the concept of rock-paper-scissors as random strikes me as knowing fuck all about playing offense in general.