Yeah, some people said MKX had neutral or whatever, but it has a similar problem that DBFZ does. You have shit that closes the gap in an instant (in a way that makes every dash in SFV look tame in comparison) and then once people are hit they are put into a combo movie. Which of course that combo movie is preceded by block movie. Supposedly adjustments have been made so 50/50s are more unsafe to perform.
Which means lots of movie and less playing. I like NK11’s approach with shorter combovideos.com and no instant transmission run. Enough to give it a run.
It was more than that, it was also that there was very little counterplay other than just to both go yolo with you giant, fast, safe, unreactible mixups that also lead to full combos… and you could give armor to all of it for cheap.
For as as many tools as even DBFZ has for getting in, at least there are options to blow them up. (What @reticently said above).
Like DJ said though they did a lot of patches so it would be wrong of me to say that this didn’t change.
@FlyingVe kind of touched on it, but I know a lot of folks don’t think the NRS games have a lot of depth, and I think it’s because there’s always something or a combination of things that are inevitably too good, which means that the best answer in many scenarios becomes pretty binary.
MK9 had stupid armor and horrible input/reversal window, which meant countering offense and defense was about fighting those and not a player
Injustice series is a turtles (pun not intended) paradise with no proximity block or strong movement to counter walking back and slamming advancing chars with huge normals or dumb projectiles. You fight the nature of the game as much as you do a character
MKX has the dumb armor back, plus run makes every mistake, small or big, into an invitation into severely good mixups that do huge damage. The input window was fixed, but getting someone off of you with safe armor and run was easier said then done.
Now with MK11, it appears that no character will have that dumb armor, you have a low risk /low reward invincible wakeup to use for getting out of pressure, the inputs are fixed, and movement has been normalized so landing a poke or safe knockdown special won’t immediately lead to 50/50 town. The strong mixups are all there, but you have to really get in close to use them, and with the way bar works, you can’t loop high damage /+ on block safe specials more than once or twice. It’s very interesting to see where it will end up.
Sometimes I feel like making another edition of that but not sure if I could get enough new things to fill it. Tried to cover all the basics with that one
MK9 was made a little understaffed, so the game had a host of input problems and bugs. An example: in MK9, doing a d4 will sometimes just be read as stand 4 if the other player is doing something. There was also a particularly generous window in which inputs are stored and buttons can be pressed to get moves, so a character like Rain, who had a fairly useless combo ender upkick at DB3 and his prime combo starting Roundhouse Kick at DB4, would run into a lot of problems because his combos typically started with the string 43 xx db4, but you’d get the upkick all the time. The biggest problem was that there was no buffer system in place, so inputting a jab to get out of pressure was not only insanely risky, but jabs were punishable on block, which made it extra hell. I’m sure most beginners played one Johnny Cage or Kabal player and wanted to throw the game in the trash.
As time went by and they got more staff and more time to make the games, all of those problems disappeared. The games now have a “Release Check” option to turn off the generous, negative-edge-like button depression, and there’s now a buffer system in place. The one thing left, however, was that inputs got stored hella for anything. If you have a special that is a 4>6 input, holding back to dodge something and then walking forward and hitting the button could get that special pretty easily. The same thing could happen from crouch for 2>6 or 2>4 inputs, but it wasn’t as noticeable in MK as it was in Injustice because of the block button.
MK11 now has an option to toggle how often the inputs are held: long, medium, and short. From what I tested, you can basically make it so inputs are barely ever stored and you will probably never run into the problem again.
Thats what I thought. I’m glad the changes to the buffer are happening as that has always been a source of aggravation with those games. It always seemed like an unnecessary complication to have to fight those control quirks.
Also, I wanted to say thank you for taking the time to provide the detailed answers to my questions.
