The most balanced fighting game ever

Play Art of Fighting, Use Mr. Karate, That is all.

Was referencing the dive kick, pre-more than two characters.

MKII

SF: Hyper Fighting

vsav is 16 years old and the worst characters in the game regularly get top 3 or win big tournies

no other tournament game allows that much balance for that many years. You can basically play random select and as long as it doesn’t land on mummy, you have a shot to win the biggest tournament around.

obviously, divekick,and wii sports boxing

You say that, but I spent ages happily playing The Way of the Exploding Fist¹

Fighters Megamix was great. But you could play as the car from Daytona USA, so no-one cared if it was balanced or not…

The length of time it takes something to be superseded often has nothing to do with quality (having said that, the upcoming resurgence of NiGHTS Into Dreams is based solely around it being the best game ever, of course :)). I know people who still play Killer Instinct - doesn’t mean it’s not an awful² game. Does the fact that The King of Fighters XIII will (relatively) shortly (assuming past patterns run true) be replaced mean it’s a bad game?

I do see what you’re saying, though - if people are still playing a game ten years after it’s release it must have *something. *Doesn’t mean that the opposite is true, however…

¹Although, in fairness, I haven’t played it for twenty-odd years. It’s probably terrible…
²And it really is awful. If you disagree, you’re just wrong…

How could I forget VS. I should go kill myself for that mistake.

AE2012
street fighter alpha 2

balance doesn’t mean I like playing shittyfighter4.

I think this is a good point. Lately, people just think of balance as “how many characters can win a tournament”, but what about balance between offense and defense, or balance between execution and decision making?

In MvC2 you had the zoning of Cable vs rushdown Magneto, and then Storm and Sent doing whatever they want. You didn’t have to play any certain way. Sure it got kind of tired seeing the same characters alot but is having 5-10 unique characters any worse than SF4 having 7 versions of Ryu and calling them different characers? Seriously a good Mag vs Storm is way cooler than seeing jab jab throw female Ryu vs jab jab throw angry glowing Ryu

That is a life time.

you best be trolling lol milenna and jax were game breaking. On testyourmight.com one of the old game designers went on a podcast saying that milenna was purposely designed to be the best

Well it’s been like 6 years since I’ve played but I used to blow people up with Kitana Jax and Kung Lao. But I learned all 12 characters and each one felt balanced. Even Mileena, You just have to know how to punish her roll and that falling dive kick or whatever. Actually the really only unbalanced charcter for me was Lui Kang since he can zone basically anyone out for most of the match.

its just that OGs want the younger generation to experience the older sprite fighters along with the recent next gen console fighters, and then view both the old & new genration of fighters objectively.
heheh
only for the sole purpose of that objective analysis bringing the 09’er crowd to the logical conclusion that the older generation of fighters are better due to better engines that revolve around the most basic fundamentals of fighting.
mmmm.
and because when we hear the younger crowd calling games like mvc3, sf4, sfxt, tvc the greatest fighters ever made it make us old farts wanna bash our heads through the wall in disbelief.

lastly, play hf, st, alpha 2/3, cvs2, and mvc2 and appreciate the lessons of pure fundamentals those games can teach you.

AND TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION:
most balanced fighter ever:
STREET FIGHTER 2 HYPER FIGHTING
most overheard statement near a Hyper Fighting cabinet:
“there are no strong or weak characters, just strong or weak players”

Ps half the 09ers are gone. Literally 70% stopped playing. We now deal with 11era

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2

if 09ers and later didnt come into the scene acting arrogant and idiotic they wouldn’t be held with such disdain

Spoiler

I was once a 10er idiot

Has anyone ever actually sat down and broken down today’s current crop of fighters by their viable playstyles instead of just characters?

if they did people would be stuck with the starting realization that 3s is not nearly as unbalanced as they talk about it being

d3v, that would be a pretty interesting project. …Not that I’m volunteering to take it on.

Over the years, I’ve accepted that perfect balance while maintaining variety is impossible. That’s nothing new, several people have written at length on that topic well before I ever did. Yet rather than worrying about a fighting game having nothing but 5-5, 4-6, and 6-4 matchups… I concern myself with the following:

1: Is there a character that is clearly far above everyone else, such that they win with casual ease and every single player must ask themselves “why am I not running that superior character?”? If not, I’ll probably sleep well enough.

2: Any characters that feel hopeless (and aren’t clearly designed as joke characters), with no interesting tactics to play around with? Hopefully this doesn’t happen. I’ll let a small number of them slide if the roster is pretty large, though. For example, one hopeless character in a cast of thirty is something I’ll usually shrug off.

3: Does every (or nearly every) character have something fun and effective? It doesn’t have to be the best, just something you could plausibly win with a decent amount of the time… and if you lose, you’re left honestly saying say “Ah well, I got in some pretty good hits of my own, it was at least fairly close. Good game!”

If a game can meet those criteria, I’d call it balanced enough that I’m not going to obsess over the rest of it. After all, metagame exploration often ends in us discovering a game is more (or sometimes less) balanced than we first thought.

Sadly, people tend to look at things from a plain, character based perspective. Not caring on how many valid playstyles the game has.

It can be argued that MvC2 doesn’t meet any of the above, yet it’s still more balanced in terms of playstyles than most other fighters.