Wall bounce and suction are pretty interesting ideas, wish they played around with them more and gave to more characters.
They went wrong when they forced character who wouldn’t work into the game and then butchered the rest of the cast because of them. Everyone is so meh.
Whoever thought long stages, slow walkspeed and invincible backdashes would be a good idea together was an idiot.
Focus attack was terrible idea because you can tell a lot of the thing people complain about were precautions to avoid focus attacks from being OP (wide reversal windows, bad dashes)
Link last normal to cancel into special. Why why why! What an unnecessary barrier.
Well that isn’t true at all. The focus system has very little impact on the game compared to parries in 3s.
I personally have nothing against parries but it is one of the most powerful if not the most powerful mechanic in SF history.
It’s interesting you would mention multi hit moves since you can’t focus multi hit moves like parries can.
Just food for thought.
Absorbing is free but it can be busted. Parries have zero drawback. After the first parry you can continue to parry or block. You can’t really blow up a successful parry (I know Oro) but you can blow up a successful focus.
That is the big difference, while a focus is easier to execute, it has far less upside and can be easily defeated.
I suspect you don’t play 3s much if at all? You are aware that alot of successful parries during footsies in 3s are option selected. Those aren’t amazing reaction parries. That isn’t amazing timing to counter that low forward. That is an option select input before your poke that results in a parry+punish should your opponent poke into you first.
The reason parries change SF more than focus is because parries have no whiff animation. Either you parry or you block. Now this isn’t true in every single scenario, but you get the idea.
Perhaps if you played more 3s you would understand why people say it doesn’t feel like Street Fighter, because frankly it doesn’t. And really that comes as no surprise as the SF3 series was designed with the intention of departing from SF2. Ken and Ryu weren’t even originally going to be in the game. Fireballs are ass, zoning isn’t very powerful and footsies are…very different, good but different from SF2/SF4 style footsies. Parries may be a factor in the departure of SF3 from the feel of SF2, but they aren’t the reason. The same with focus with SF4.
On the surface SF4 looks and feels more like classic SF than 3s, and it probably is. But it is also a vast departure from SF2 for reasons that have nothing to do with the focus system.
Yeah, this is my biggest issue with SFIV. I can see that the game is much better at high level but I simply cannot stand the game enough to get there. I added several people on PSN to level up in SFIV when it first came out. All for nothing. See that’s what makes SFIV “bad” for me.
To put it simply, it’s about option control. Playing a character in a fighting game amounts to what you can do and what you can’t do, right? Being in control of the pace of the match means you are more likely able to dictate the outcome with having better options (at that point in time), and this is dependent on your position on stage compared to your opponent. A lot of people define matchups as black and white affairs. This character does this and wins, but with traditional spacing based characters, that is not the case.
For example, here’s an almost 3 year old article featuring filipino champ before he became internet famous:
James Chen also showed a really good example of this idea with the cammy vs ryu matchup on ultrachentv, where he showed multiple ranges where cammy either had better options or worse options versus Ryu.
nryo had it right when he said that sf4 became more of a game based on wakeup damage and not grounded damage. I mean, I remember asking dr. chaos about advice for viper and he just simply said…“uhh…don’t get knocked down”. go back to the first page and look at the two videos i posted. one of them is daigo vs filipino champ and another is a ranked match of abel vs ibuki. which video do you think represents which?
You can do this amazing thing where if you make one change, you can make another. It’s almost as if… you make the game more accessible by buffing those two characters, you can give them a nerf!
I played 3s for 5 years competitively and I think it’s a horrible competitive game (it’s pretty fun at mid level though).
Is that it? Please, I do that with every matchup. I look to see where I’m in the advantage or not depending on range. The same applies to the wakeup game. I take into account how much meter either of us have and perform this or that action because of or in spite of those options. For example, I know Chun-Li has a good back dash so I’ll condition my opponent to respect my QBomb, so she’ll stay put. Then, she’ll want to do EX SBK if she’s desperate. Called it and then go into RSF.
I’ll also take it into account when I’m the one knocked down. It’s just reading my opponent which, last I checked, is an important aspect of any fighter. For outside the okizeme game, I’ll be smart with both our options like what’s going on with that first video.
Vortexes, while they can be boring, are still reads and you have to make the reads necessary to get into them. It may look different, but a read is a read.
The difference? Simple, there’s no way to make ST’s DP safe. That alone turns that 3f DP into a powerful escape tool that has to be well thought out to be properly applied in a pressure situation. Translation = not braindead. Plus the 1f reversal window makes sure that to do that the player need a certain level of skill/dedication.
In SF4… well, if I have to explain that… I don’t even…
The problem is NO mixup ever working. An empty jump vs. a safe DP is not a mixup, at all, you’re resetting the situation at best.
Anyways, I won’t extend myself into this. My opinion is there, doesn’t mean I hate SF4, I’m just answering the OP. Besides all the BS, I still have fun with 4, I’m not an ungrateful bastard and I appreciate the push it gave. I play on tournaments and practice to stay sharp and improve, like everybody who’s in this community to compete should. But it’s time to move on from fault mechanics into a more solid stuff.
For one, of course there’s a system of interaction between the person knocked down and the player initiating mixup. If there wasn’t then the game would end the second someone got knocked down.
Two, okizeme is a product, or state of being that came from actions prior. It’s like a stun state or juggle state, the person putting his opponent into this state will yield additional reward (aka more damage, depleting the lifebar which will lead to a win). The difference between okizeme in the other two is that okizeme is a variable in terms of reward.
Three, no…they’re different. The presence of mind is completely different. I mean you’re showing it yourself saying vortexes are boring. You have your set of options on wakeup and your opponent has his. You already know what will happen accordingly, because it’s simply isolated to what your single action is and what your opponent’s single action is. And if you’re playing a vortex character and are successful, then the “turn” repeats. A ground game cannot be isolated to “turn interactions” because it happens in real time. Why do you think all these street fighter players walk backward and foward constantly while keeping a distance from each other? Because unlike okizeme, they’re changing they’re options constantly by shifting range and the pace of their movement patterns, the variables constantly change (the simpliest example is, throwing a fireball and fadcing it. now you have to deal with the opponent and the fireball). Consequently the judgment calls have to be more acute than just…attack, attack, bait reversal. I mean if you honestly think they’re created equal, then why do SF matches begin with both characters half screen away from each other? Why can’t fights just be an exchange of wakeup options from the start?
Four, The Breaker, the user who I was originally talking to, argued that Fuerte’s value was in the fact that he had no reliable way to achieve reward (aka mixups). Even he wasn’t arguing that mixups were somehow the deepest shit possible. If you’re offended or something, imo fuerte’s an appropriate “wild card” character given the overall state of his tools and matchups.
I think focus fishing can be obnoxious for characters that don’t have a fast long range armour break, and I’d prefer it if it was more about baiting laggy pokes than fishing for crumples with level 1 focus.
But to say they have a big effect on the footsie game is obviously wrong just by watching people play, it’s not even used all that much.
As GEMS said some DPs in ST are safe on block which, if you only played SF4, may sound horrible BUT…
With the good walk speeds, being able to do walk up throws from a larger distance, and having your long pokes be more worth using compared to jabs/shorts, longer blockstuns and the bigger pushbacks in ST- All of these mean that the hit exchanges are usually done at a much bigger range. So if you like sticking a DP out in most scenarios you end up whiffing as long as you don’t happen to catch a limb, which means you have to commit to an exact timing (and drop your guard a bit before that to do the proper motion) you think an attack would come out- Not an easy task and gives the attacker more room for options to keep attacking as long as he can mix his patterns and timings. Even if you are at point blank range, you go back to the bigger range after one blocked move because of the pushback.
In SF4 once you are at point blank range several exchanges must be made before you are pushed back enough for your DPs to start whiffing. And until then the only real solution for a reversal is d/b.
For me, SF4 is the series that got me interested in competitive scene of SF. I’m just a casual player that rarely play AE but I love watching high level tournament videos and it definitely helps me a lot on how fighting game should be played generally. The only thing that I don’t really like is the Ultra mechanics. I’m not saying it’s bad but some characters that have tons of way to land it somehow has a little bit of unfair advantage compared to others who doesn’t. But hey, complaining doesn’t really help right? So I will say just deal with it.
