I’ve mained akuma for a long time, and i really liked him in IV, but there are a couple of things that i thought badly needed changing.
First and foremost, change his raging demon to work the way it did in older SF games. It should catch at any point in it’s slide/warp across the screen, and not just at the end. The situation where it can “push” you across the stage until it eventually catches you is retarded, and is unique in all the games i’ve played him in.It’s nowhere near as scary a move as it used to be. If somebody pulls it off as an anti air or whatever it should land, because in 99% of games that had it, it was something to be feared. In IV, It’s too powerful when it lands, but is too limited in it’s application to land enough to make a difference against good opponents. In other SF games, If akuma got meter you had to keep the fuck away from him and he could push a big attacking advantage. Now it’s only useful in a very limited amount of situations, and any other time it’s used you can just jump away from it. He’s no more scary in offence or when he’s close to you with meter than when he doesn’t have it, unless you make a really huge mistake or whiff something that he can use it to punish.
I would make the raging demon his ultra only, and change the motion back to the normal lp,lp, Forward, lk, hp, and make it more universally useful once he has meter, but nerf the damage slightly to balance that out. (IMO ultras damage should be toned down across the board, but their usefulness should be levelled out, so that all characters can land them easily enough, rather than the current situation of some characters finding it easy to combo into ultras for big damage, like sagat, while other characters have to work really hard to land one, like akuma).
I would replace his super raging demon with one of his older supers from the alpha series or third strike, my preference would be the Zankuu Shoryuken, or whatever it’s called, like ken’s shin shoryuken, a double dragon punch anti air, but he could also have his fireball super, if the shoryuken made him too much of a turtling powerhouse. This gives him 2 options, and not essentially the same move twice, like the demon is in IV at the moment. 3 Selectable supers like in Third strike would be great, but that might bring up all kinds of balance issues in the character roster.
(for anyone who’s new to SF, this is what these moves used to look like:
[media=youtube]MRI49AMLG38[/media] )
Also (and this is across the board) i think supers should be easier to build meter for, because nobody uses them much in favour of EX moves. They should also be “levelable” like in some other SF games, ie you don’t need to build up a full meter to use a super, the bar is in 3 sections, and once you fill 1, 2,or 3 of the sections by attacking, you can do a different strength super move by using a light, strong, or fierce attack to activate it. This would tone EX moves down a bit and give supers more value and more frequency in the game.
I think teleport is fine, it’s already a get out of jail free card for akuma if you know how to use it carefully and not telegraph it, it doesn’t need to be improved, it’s already one of the best in the game.
Other than that, the only niggles i have are things like the way his red fireballs work. The speed and number of hits should be related to the button you press for the move, slow is activated using jab and hits once but is powerful, medium speed is strong punch and hits twice but is less powerful, fast is fierce punch and hits 3 times but is less damage overall. Recovery times should be a little longer than on his standard fireballs to balance out the extra attacking advantage the moves give him and add an element of risk to them instead of making them his “go to” fireballs, and making his standard ones redundant.
This is all i can think of. I would pretty much leave everything else with him the same, but some kind of easy to use palette editor for character colours like in Capcom Vs SNK 2 that allowed you to custom edit your character’s colours would be cool to put in superIV. You could create your own outfit colour schemes and have them visible to your opponents online. It would add a degree of individuality to character choice that you don’t get by picking from the standard 10 or whatever unlocked colours. You can have a bunch of pallettes saved, and one set as your selectable custom colour from your list of character colours on the character select screen.
I used to have a badass fiery red & grey shin akuma palette that i used all the time in CVS2, i would love to get something like that in online in Super IV.
