I’ll try to outline my issues with SGs and compare them to UMVC3 then so you can get a better feel for where I’m coming from:
- Immediately restood at the end of combos. There’s no teching out of dropped combos and no rolling / recovery because you don’t have the chance, you’re instantly restood where the opponent wants you. This is more similar to Akuma’s Vortex where he has control of the situation and you’re forced to guess. This coupled with:
- No throw protection. You can transition from being comboed / pressured to being thrown instantly at any time.This is especially hard to deal with when the assist characters are layered on top of the point characters and you can’t see whats happening.
- The majority of throws lead to a full combo without any resources spent, and no assists used. This is true for SOME marvel characters but it’s much easier to avoid throws in Marvel as well and the combos usually don’t lead to as much damage.
- 100% combos popping up all over the place already. Marvel took a while to get to that point but skullgirls has 100%'s going pretty much week 1. It’ll get worse and more consistent as time goes on.
- Invincible assists. This is a matter of preference but I HATE invincible assists. Atleast in Marvel they were close range and you could avoid them but in SGs, double’s butt provides the lockdown of something like Jam session, with the invincibility of Haggar’s lariat. It’s a brain dead all purpose poking / pressure / lock down / reversal / anti air / anti ground just straight up retarded move that dumbs down the game.
- Push block doesn’t work in a lot of situations. In marvel push blocking atleast works like it’s supposed to but in SGs half the time if the opponent’s state changes, they don’t even get pushed away, but your character is still immobilized in push block state regardless. It feels like it just doesn’t function like it’s supposed to. A good example is painwheel going into flight mode canceling push block. She can basically attack and if she gets push blocked just fly and cancel the push. The offense in SGs is BETTER than the offense in Marvel and yet the pushblock is worse.
- Long story short, the offense in this game feels brain dead and just too much in favor of the attacker.
- Assist characters also take regular damage. There’s very little threat to calling your assist whenever, all the god damn time, because they barely take any damage, and if they do get hit, most of the time they’re just soaking up hits that would have connected with the point character anyway, so it’s a win win.
- The combos in that game are too god damn long, and I come from Marvel. They’re also not even thoughtful or hard to do. It’s literally just do a chain, do the same chain again but starting with a different normal. Do this as many times as you can, then do a super. Some characters have 15-20 second combos of JUST THIS before super. And after super…
- Characters can combo off DHCs, but this resets the damage scaling and IPS detection. Once people get this down 100%, I think every hit will be touch of death.
Seriously, it’s a long list. I know Marvel isn’t without it’s flaws but it feels more well designed and there’s less stupidity going on in every match. If people don’t believe me then I urge them to pick up skullgirls and find out for themselves.
But anyway, on top of all this, I do feel the game is going to die. 8 characters and an art style that doesn’t appeal to many people in an abusive system that will turn a lot of people off just isn’t a recipe for a game with a long life.
Brent: Calibur is partly because there’s no scene for the game but I really really dislike guard breaks. Your guard gauge does not recover unless you go like 30 seconds without blocking anything and that’s pretty much impossible in Calibur. You pretty much are going to get guard broken every single match against some characters and there’s just nothing you can do about it other than try to pick the right time to be guard broken so maybe you don’t get rung out when it does break. I wouldn’t have an issue if the guard gauge was recoverable at a reasonable rate, but it just doesn’t. I feel like the system was there to punish overly defensive play but instead it just punishes you for blocking. I liked it better in 4 because atleast in that game when you got guard broken you really deserved it because the opponent over extended and really made you block a ton of shit without retaliation, and even if you were in danger, you could go on the offensive and get your gauge back.
I don’t want to lose games to people where I didn’t make any mistakes and just had to take my routine unavoidable guard break from blocking back and forth moves as you always do in soul calibur.
It’s been eating at me for a while but after playing doug and eating like 3 guard breaks in one match, I just said fuck it, I’m done. It wasn’t really the losing that bothered me, I expected to lose since Doug plays it regularly, it was just reflecting on the matches and realizing I just don’t enjoy the game or what it offers.
Anyway, sorry for the long post, just wanted to explain my thoughts.