I’m a big fan of Street Fighter 3 Third Strike. In fact it’s the only game in the Street Fighter 3 series that I own(Sega Dreamcast version). I’m no expert level player, but that game is just loads of fun and when my friends or my young cousins drop by to play games, Third Strike is always popped into the Dreamcast.
But whenever you mention Third Strike, some of the biggest gripes some veteran players have are: The cast was too weird; The game wasn’t balanced; and the parry sucked. My question is: Why is the parry hated on so much? I kind of get the balance and the cast gripe but the parry was so innovative and cool to me. Now, like I pointed out earlier, I wasn’t a high level player but I loved the ability to be able to parry.
The parry, in my opinion just adds another level of excitement to the game. If you choose to parry instead of block and your timing is off, you not only will eat some damage, but the momentum might swing in the match because you weren’t on your game. But if you’re on…
I saw a cat literally move the crowd by parrying Ken’s EX mid-air hurricane kick. He lost the match, but he moved the crowd and got a few phone numbers from some females who were watching the match. Now, I know he’s got to love the parry :razzy:
In fact, just about all of the best Third Strike videos featuring crowd reaction will feature some awe inspiring parrying. Daigo’s match against Justin is one of the more famous ones, but I found this clip on You Tube yesterday: [media=youtube]gv8WWE6nDns[/media] It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen done in a match.
But for the folks that hated the parry and are glad to see it gone in Street fighter 4, Super Street Fighter 4 and possible Street Fighter 5, could you explain why you thought it ruined Street Fighter 3?
For the most part, people hate parries because it apparently eliminates zoning/footsies and makes everything into a series of guessing games. It apparently made zoning with fireballs obsolete, as well as give players the impression that “they don’t need to block when they can just parry”. It also makes jumping a lot safer to do because anti-air moves can get parried, unlike in past Street Fighter games. You can essentially do whatever you feel like doing in 3rd Strike because of parries.
Basically, one lucky guess with a parry could turn the tide of the match completely, especially with certain characters like Makoto, Urien and Oro that could kill you with one opening and two full bars.
check out domination 101 for a breakdown of one of the reasons the parry was detrimental. in short, it nullified the projective zoning game that was a staple of the street fighter series. fireballs used to present a threat that was either blocked (you ate chip damage), jumped over (leaving you unable to block), or countered (leaving you unable to block since you were performing a move after your opponent’s move, something that they may have been expecting you to do). with the introduction of the parry, chip damage was no longer a threat, jumping was safer since you could parry in the air, and you didn’t have to counter anything…just swat it away with basically no recovery time. the game went from using the entire screen and stage to getting in your opponents face…and even that turned into one huge guessing game since BnB combos were exactly that, your opponent knew when and where to parry. you were left walking in and out of footsie range, neutral jumping and tea bagging to bait and counter.
even super arts could be rendered useless against a parry-master.
check out youtube vids of high level players just empty jumping in and out, baiting a counter, teching throws, hit-confirming supers, and then repeating the cycle.
lol Naw dude, it was in the mall in Aiken SC and the guys playing were college age(I guess) and there were some girls watching the match. The cat who lost did move the crowd, man. There were oohs and ahhhs when he pulled off that parry and he did get a couple of numbers from the girls. Now, did he seal the deal? I don’t know…
I think 3rd Strike has more of a meta game than people like to admit. It’s not the same as SFIV or SF2 or whatever but if you don’t have good footsies in 3S it’ll hurt you just about as much as any other game. Remy can still whore fireballs at a lot of the cast especially since he can put more than one fireball on the screen.
So, you’re saying that the parry drastically changed Street Fighter’s game play–and not for the better. Staples of the series up to that point were nullified by anyone who mastered the ability to parry.
Everythng TheRetroKid said was correct. People don’t hate on parries because of parries, they hate on Third Strike parries because they were too good. New Generation and 2nd Impact had the right ideas, in that parries were good, but not amazing. They could set up for a counter hit, but they didn’t leave you at a big frame advantage afterwards like in 3s. In 3s, parries were so good, they basically took everything that made Street Fighter what it was, and threw that down the drain. The game became poking to hit confirm into supers, and that was it, simply because a fireball or any obvious attack that could apply pressure would just be parried. That’s the reason Chun is so fucking good in 3s. She has many high priority pokes that can be “easily” hit confirmed in to super.
For better or worse is subjective and we could argue subjectivity forever and never deduce anything. Personally, I think that it was a drastic change, and one that required people to play street fighter in an almost new way. For example, look at how one would play sagat in sf2 and sf4…would be even be relevant in sf3 without having to reinvent the way you played him? Should you have to reinvent him? It’s like expecting zangief to be played like a zoning fireball character, some things just aren’t characteristic of what we’re used to. That’s probably why sagat and guile weren’t included in the cast…because their tools and strengths would be nulified with the parry…that or they weren’t even considered.
lol maybe if your doing random jump ins or being fucking predictable.
a common misconception about 3s is that parrying is a guessing game. at high level play parries are more “reads” then guesses. your feeling the person out and looking for patterns. parrying is a way for you to stop those patterns and punish, also allowing for them to switch up their patterns.
this is why 3s, more then most games, allows the better player to win consistantly.
parrying on WAKE UP in most cases is guessing and is just as bad as a wakeup shoryu in some cases, and thats in every SF. im pretty sure everyone has done a wakeup uppercut at some point and we all know about those high risk = high reward situations.
Interesting, that you named three characters that many consider lower tier that could turn the tide of a match if they had two full bars and an opening via the parry. The parry seemed to give those characters the ammo to hang with the big guns. Thanks for the info–I’m looking at Oro, Makoto and Urien in a new light.
The reason Chun is so fucking good in 3S has just as much to do with how stupid her offensive capabilities are as the parry. As a matter of fact I would go as far to say that parry does nothing more but accent her stupidness rather than be a key factor. If Chun Li’s c.MK didn’t give you a year to hit confirm into super and didn’t take 35 percent life away on half the cast and 50 percent away on the other cast with the ability to store two of them she wouldn’t be hardly as bad. Chun is free to being pressured when she doesn’t have meter and the only reason she is feared even when she has meter is that her super just knocks off an insane amount of damage for no reason when other supers with longer 1 bar based bars struggle to do the damage hers can. On top of the fact that she can stock two of them. Option selects using parry helped to accent Chun Li’s game but it was more so Chun Li’s footsies that have hit boxes that were basically designed to shut down everything in the game. Only like 25 percent of the reason Chun is good I would say has to do with parries. 3S Chun would be stupid without parries in most any other SF game.
I think if characters like Remy were more fleshed out and Chun was less stupid people would see more dynamics to the game. If you ever watch a Remy vs. Dudley match in 3S Dudley is known for being able to shoot through fireballs and even he pretty much has to turn on the SF2 against Remy and block and take his time. Especially when Remy is the only SF character that can have 2 or 3 fireballs on screen at once. If Remy’s fireballs built him meter on whiff he’d be buff as fuck.
About Urien…Urien is more so a character that would have a hard time without parry. The one real normal he can use to set up huge damage like Abel in SFIV takes an unusually long time to activate and leaves him open to get a can of whoop ass if blocked or whiffed. Being able to buffer parry off his c.HP gives him the only real chance he has in a lot of matchups to really put anything serious together. c.HP without parry would be like Abel’s c.HP…mostly unnecessary to use by itself. Especially since Urien was designed to be more of a SF2 style character with little to no real hit confirms and sub par block strings. Even with that Urien’s footsies were still pretty solid though but in a game where hit confirms and punishing predictable footsies with parry is common c.HP is pretty much his saving grace.
Hace, but is she in the same class as say, Ken, Chun or Yun? I’ve always been told that Makoto was lower tier, but I’ve seen that tier lists are just opinion and not fact.
Who the *&^% considers Mak and Urien “lower tier”?! (sure, not top 3, but “lower”?)
And parrying changed the dynamic of the SF series to be sure, but dont let the haters hate, 3S has a fantastic level of competition, and is a great game in its own right, SF4 is different, SF2 is different, heck the Alphas were different, CvS2 was different… you get where I am going with this?
In reality, pretty much every SF based series has had some pretty signifigant core gameplay differences, yet most of them are very well made games, with different goals and playstyles, A2 had a defensive based mechanic called the Alpha counter, instead of just nullifing an attack like a parry, it would actually hit the opponent back, etc. (at the cost of meter) SF4 has the Focus system, and gives you Ultra when getting hit, etc. HDR/ST is uber big damage with heavy zoning gameplay, etc. Dont even get me started on the complexitys of CvS2…
All the main SF games (CFE sucked, A1 was pretty weak, the weak SF’s are culled from the pack pretty quick) have pretty dramatic differences in the core systems, yet they all can be played on a very high level competition wise, I figured people got over the parry hate years ago, guess not eh?