Why SHOULD her playstyle have to completely change for XIII?
Why SHOULDN’T she jump above the health bars? She’s already threatening to do so in games like CvS2 anyway (shit, even in '98, Beni and Choi could get some almost screen-clearing air), and it’s not like she’d be any better for being able to do so. If the camera can’t keep up, then that’s the camera’s lookout. All I know is I’m aiming a wall-jumping boot for a motherfucker’s head.
The HOPE with Mai is that with XIII, any new characters SNK introduces that weren’t already in XII (and will hopefully include Mai, among others) they’ll take time out to add either more moves, or more carefully considered moves to keep the characters from being as bare-bones as most of the XII cast.
Shit, I’d even settle for a Kacho Sen/Ryuu Enbu Mai, as long as (a) the rest of the game was interesting enough to merit playing, and (b) her footspeed and jump arcs are still fast as fuck. It would be NICE if they kept her Musasabi no Mai moves (particularly the charge versions; now that Choi is retired she’ll have to pick up the slack of running away to the wall), but even with just fans and flame twirl, I can see a curly mustache emerge with the aid of KOF XII CD mechanics. More importantly, I hope they’d give her her air throw with the same juggle properties as Clark (the wonderfully loose “if they are in the fucking air, you can grab them” system) – jump D, close C, stand CD xx Ryuu Enbu -> instant air throw (at least in the corner) = now THERE’S a sweet fantasy.
But yeah, her movement and jump arcs, I think, are the key aspects to her playstyle, and coupled with normals and even a bare-bones special moveset, I think she’d already be more interesting (at least to me) than most of the cast of XII. She can join my Leona and Clark as the New Maikari Warriors (aka Team Ralf’s on Vacation).
Bullshit. Mai’s breasts ALREADY defy gravity, why shouldn’t the rest of her anatomy?
i was owning motherfuckers hard wit mai back in 95 and 97 & 98. she doesnt need anything new. if shes the old mai with maybe a tweak or 2 and a moveslist where shes a cross between rb and kof 97 mai.
Yeah, sorry for the nerdout, I just get kind of trigger-happy given that most of the Mai debate DOES kind of polarize itself to “omg where are my anime titties? this game r suk” vs. “lol butthurt fanboi don’t get to beat off to his shitty fanservice character, fuck Mai”. Mai always feels to me like one of those characters who is either undersold or sold the wrong way (the NEED MOAR TITS FOR MY GIRLS ONLY TEAM angle). I get that Gravelneed’s joking and I’m not trying to rag on him, I just feel like some things need saying regarding Mai that too often go unsaid.
I like Mai because I picked her on a whim in 2k2, beat some (scrubby) ass, went back to '98 and CvS2 to learn a bit more about her, and I kinda fell in love with her fundamental design. It really perplexes me that SNK doesn’t do more with her, both because of the fanboy dollars she commands AND how different she plays from most of the rest of the KOF cast without having to do anything especially mechanically weird like Leona or Angel. She has those rare mechanical qualities that I can’t really get in any Street Fighter character (a fireball character with a fastfalling Vega jump and a couple of strange but functional normals), and so it does kinda bother me when neither her or Jenet are in a modern KOF (they play differently, certainly, but they always had a very strange analog to me. It’s not so much that they both had big tits and tiny outfits as that they had more-or-less the same normals with different specials; I always felt like there was a very comfortable mechanical translation between playing Jenet and playing Mai.)
I also kind of get the impression that despite not really being a SHITTY character in KOF (I can’t recall a KOF game in which she was low tier), Mai always struck me as oddly underrepresented in serious KOF play. You see more of her in '98UM than you used to due to EX Mai, but otherwise it’s hard to come up with more than 2-3 notable Mai players (Ching Lung in '98 and Rai in 2k2, is that the same Rai who played K-Groove Mai/Hibiki/Sagat in CvS2?) amongst the whole KOF playerbase. (Obviously, you see more of her to begin with in CvS2/the Fatal Fury games, but in KOF proper she seems an oddly rare pick to me.)
SNKP should official declaration that their online modes are working for japan only, a fact that they need to stop hiding from overseas consumers in order to redeem themselves.
Actually I’d say their online is region based so I’d put that on the box. People from California can play with people all the way to around Texas, New York is essentially up to the east coast, and Florida can play with itself. The rest of the country is fucked until SNK gets off their ass and stops using region based online gameplay.
I wonder if it would have been better for SNKP to have simply omitted the online functionality for KoF 12 rather then give us the half assed end result. Would it have been a better business move to have no netcode over bad netcode?
No, I don’t think so. It would have taken away something for people to bitch about, but then people would have complained about there being no netplay and how hard it is to find comp without it. In this day and age I’d say you either need good netplay, or just don’t bother putting the game out at all
Nobody’s saying that KOFXII is a great game. It’s just that it did have some good aspects that you simply can’t ignore without looking like a moronic hater.