Game: BlazBlue Series

[Xelbair]

Well - compared to most drives they are hard to pull off correctly Archie - i know that HCF+D is great one but it has serious disadvantages. usually close range are 2x QCF + button and are easier to do in pinch, that's the first bad side. secondly you can fly through it - if you start jump dash when it starts or soon after it you will fly out of its range - damn annoying - even when sword clearly should hit.
her ranged sword spam is good, but well - most of her combos that i know(no tension/whatever required for them) can deal more damage than this. Its much more worth to save tension/bar/whatever for cancels and first drive.
I have to admit that her Astral Heat is damn awesome - frame of invincibility when using this allows to pull it off even in most hardcore situations(for example Hakumen used his drive to counter my sword and was charging at me i pulled out astral heat when he was near me and it worked - happened 3 days ago when i was fighting with my friend - we had so low hp that one hit would be enough to kill (GG veteran)) Range is very short but still it is useful.

Why the fuck we are discussing boring SF in BlazBlue thread?

[Ryllharu]

@DS:

I suppose I haven't been clear enough in my regular bashing of SF on the channel. For that I apologize. I don't care about the number of characters, when I bash SF, I bash it because there isn't any innovation in the franchise.

If you're counting number of characters, BlazBlue is a step backward from Guilty Gear. The roster went from 24 in GG:Accent Core down to 12. Which is completely meaningless because of the way BlazBlue characters are compared to most fighting games.

The Drive system, that dedicated button, makes each and every character in BlazBlue play completely uniquely. There are freezing drives, straight up attack drives, life drain drives, movement-based drives, puppeteer drives, counter drives, and more. One character doesn't even follow the correct Heat/Tension/Super gauge system, his just fills at a constant rate, with boosts by proper counters.

You've played the game in the arcades, you should know. Only Mu and Lambda have very similar movesets, but given the difference in the way their drive attacks work they still play completely differently. I can use Lambda/Nu with a fair amount of effectiveness because she plays similar to my main from Guilty Gear, but in no way can someone go from Lambda and play Mu effectively.

shameless repost:

BlazBlue is much more complex than fighters like Tekken or SF, and even a lot more sophisticated than Guilty Gear.

The game somewhat necessitates the need to main a character. All of them play so completely differently because of the Drive system. For example, Taokaka requires a lot of practice to learn how to fake out and dance around. A lot of her moves simply won't hit purely on who the opponent is (height and stance). She's really fragile, so you have to never be where your opponent expects.

The wonderful thing about that is there is a character who specializes in pretty much every type of play style someone might have. There are zoning characters (Rachel/delta-11, who vastly differ between each other btw), there are mistake punishers (Tager), dancing characters (Tao), mix-up (Litchi/Bang/Hazama, again vastly different between them), dodger/rushers (Noel), pure rushers (Ragna/Makoto), hybrid rushers (Tsubaki), counterers (Hakumen), shotos - like Ken/Ryu (Jin), and more.

The balancing in Contiuum Shift alone was impressive. These are play types that diverge completely, yet ArcSysWorks managed to make the first iteration one of the most balanced franchise launches I've ever experienced. For CT, it was on par with or exceeded SFII:Remix on XBLA/PSN, something Capcom knowingly admitted to not trying very hard to accomplish with SFIV.

Even becoming effective against other human players requires a great deal of practice with a single character, and to become competitive requires true dedication. There may be characters on top of the tiers (and they broke Rachel in CS because of it but will fix it) but actually using them requires considerable time. Rachel in CT was one of the absolute hardest characters to use. Litchi and Bang are "top tier" now, but most people still play Noel and Ranga because they are that much easier to learn.

Compare this to SF. How many shoto characters does SF have these days? I'm not even sure anymore, but at least six. How many does BlazBlue have? One. There isn't all that much variety to the huge SF roster. Ryu has a better projectile, Ken has a better close-range->-aerial, Sakura has a better horizontal sweeping attack, Dan is for people who like to piss other people off, etc. You can't even play BlazBlue characters using the same style without getting your ass kicked repeatedly.

That's why I bash SF in comparison to the ArcSysWorks games. Lack of innovation in the scope of 2D Fighters. Calamity Trigger made huge headway in console netcode by reducing lag (in my experience flawless), Continuum Shift added more tutorials and modes that most reviewers have ever seen in-game to let beginners enjoy too (Beginner Mode is for people who need to button mash), while keeping the incredibly hard modes (Score Attack/Challenge) intact for those who really want to strive for perfection in their skills.

SF keeps true to its roots for consistency of the experience, but at the cost of bringing the genre forward.