No game is balanced by those standards. Show me a game where it isn’t the same handful of characters winning the tournaments. It’s balanced in the sense that characters that are considered lower tier actually have a chance against the upper tier. Example, watch the FFA ranbats on denjin video and it opens with an Alex vs Yun match.
Anyways, 3rd Strike proves there’s elegance in simplicity. Over Super Turbo, they only add a few things:
More than one super
EX moves
Dedicated throw command
Special cancels
Parrying
Sure, 12942384927 hit combos are fun, but they less fun the when you see them for the 35082750982375908th time. If you try using the same trick over and over again, you’re going to get parried. You need a varied bag a tricks, your going to have to be fast, and you need to be able to read and fool your opponent.
It manages to stay entertaining because there’s lack of a sense of monotony.
Im not sure who the fuck your playing but the 3s players where i am from are all chill as fuck. To be fair, usually the socially “awkword” scene is the guilty gear people. Ive seen some really fucking weird people that play that.
To be fair I wasn’t even playing 3rd strike. I’m just unhappy with the caliber of people I’m playing with right now. I’m glad that you guys have a good scene and cool people to chill with. The people in Winnipeg were also nice to play with, I love me to trash talk, I just don’t want to deal with personalities. To be fair, I just think this city sucks.
I have my reservations about 3rd strike but it is a fun game to “watch” people play.
PARRYING. There’s the big one. Multiple super arts? Wha? There’s generally a one best art for every character, very rarely do multiple supers come into play. Dudley is the only character I’ve seen regularly bust out all three of his (some people have taken to using Rolling Thunder vs Yun because you can stuff blocked Genei Jin stuff with it).
BALANCE. 3s is not balanced. The tiers are fairly wide, not as wide as 50+ character games, but wider than Guilty Gear, ST, etc. Ken, Chun, Yun, and Makoto very much dominate tournaments. In ST, you see some of the same, but then you see a lot more random other characters, like…what was it, 3 Cammys in Evo 2006 ST? Or was it 2005, I forget, but I think there were 3…
Also yes, the Guilty Gear people are social pariahs for the most part, but hot girls dressing up as [insert scantily clad GG girl here] is win.
Because its style AND substance. Its deep enough for all those hardcore fighting game fans, but its pretty/flashy enough that casual fans will enjoy it.
Plus, its pretty balanced compared to something like MvC2 with only a handful of characters are actually used. In 3s, I’ve seen just about EVERYBODY('cept Sean) used at a very high level.
Its just a whole lot of fucking fun. That why people play 3s: Its really fucking fun.
Who cares? It’s not like determining which game has better balance will somehow make a game subjectively better. I don’t like ST because it’s archaic and has some really shitty holdovers that could be fixed (REVERSAL THROWS/TICK THROWS/THROWS RULE TOO MUCH/SOMETHING ABOUT THROWS), and it’s not good looking at ALL.
I think a lot of people get into it because the learning curve isn’t as ridiculous as other games. You can get by in 3S a lot quicker than you can with Marvel or CvS. Plus more scrubs play 3S too, so you’ll be able to beat somebody pretty quickly.
3S also lacks a lot of the more subtle notes to SF that are a lot harder to understand. Because of this, players that would normally get worked in more traditional SF don’t have that issue. That’s not to say that 3S is necessarily easier than other SF games; it just doesn’t have as much of an emphasis on the more existential aspects of SF.
I will say that at the highest levels of play, 3S does seem like it would be fun. At low, mid, and intermediate levels, the game just seems like shit to me though.
