Of course no one data point can explain a game’s success or failure, but this is a pretty thorough and mostly objective review of the past 10 years.
Of course no one data point can explain a game’s success or failure, but this is a pretty thorough and mostly objective review of the past 10 years.
I played plenty of +R. A lot of Strive’s roster is the same characters using the same or slightly-tweaked gimmicks, and other than like Unika and Ky, for lore reasons, I think you’d have a tough argument to make that there’s much of any overlap between any two characters in the roster. A strong, diverse roster is an important quality to me, and it’s why stuff like Strive and Skullgirls have worked for me for so long.
You can wait on Avatar if you like, but it’s at least priced accordingly with how much went into it. I thought the game was fun to mash on for a few hours rather than dedicating serious time to, but lots of folks would disagree with me.
If you’re BlazBlue fan, there’s a new character on the way in 2027, and in addition to the community revival that will bring along with it, that probably means they’re testing stuff out for a sequel. I doubt they’d make said sequel too much like Strive when Strive already exists.
You’re not looking at it from the perspective of a Plus R player though. As a Zato player, I lost almost all of my unique strings. The potential openings, exclusive to my character, are a lot fewer. IIRC, devs said the reason gatlings are fewer and standardized across characters now is they want characters to be easy to pick up and defend against.
What they clearly did is strip Zato, and other characters, of a lot of cool shit that made them unique in an attempt to make them more accessible.
In other words, that breadth is part of what gave them that unique identity, and a lot of it is gone now.
You can be like “Yeah, but it’s not like he plays exactly like Sol Badguy now. At their core, they’re still different.” and I’d say “Yeah, but he used to be way more unique than this, and they used to be more different than this.”
This is what I mean by a push towards homogeneity and moving further away from unique identities.
I’d love to buy into that, but the big man himself said Strive was a move in the right direction, and he would like to make their future games even more accessible if he can. It also sold well, and I imagine they wanna keep that going.
Honestly, I get it. I think Plus R is peak weird and Xrd is middle ground perfected. I understand the gradual move towards accessibility because they hit their limit in any other direction. It’s just not for me.
They made a game that’s easier to learn, but not one that’s less difficult to master. Zato has fewer moves, but what they did was make sure that every move was useful, usually in multiple different situations. There’s also the plethora of applications for the new RC system, which is a universal system mechanic that acts as a multiplier for how you can use their unique kits. It’s not even that Zato is different than Sol Badguy at their cores; they’re wholly different from one another at every level, just like in +R. Accessibility is a great thing, and it’s not opposed to either depth or variety. If you want those larger move sets (even though, I’d argue, optimizations of those move sets tend to shrink them down to a possibility space that’s very similar to Strive), you’re allowed to have that preference, but I do think you’ll have a hard time arguing that this roster became homogeneous as a result. It’s extremely asymmetrical, and while SF6’s top tiers rise to the top so quickly that a top 8 will tend to have multiple repeat characters represented, it’s not uncommon to see 9 characters in a top 8 for Strive.
OK, I believe the following:
Let me demonstrate this:
Character D can anti-air using moves A, B, and C. Each move is applicable in a different scenario and leads to a different juggle combo.
Character W can anti-air using moves X, Y, and Z. Each move is applicable in a different scenario and leads to a different juggle combo.
If I’m counting differences between these two characters, in terms of how the anti-air and those juggle combos work, specifically the conditions for the antiair to hit, move variety and systems used in the subsequent combo, I have 2 more points of difference than I would if each character just had 1 anti-air move and 1 combo route; ergo, they can be considered less homogenous and more different.
Also, 1 anti-air with 1 route to follow is a lot less for a newbie to deal with, which in turn makes the game more accessible at the expense of variety, but not necessarily at the expense of depth because, at the end of the day, it’s an anti-air and a juggle combo that follows, so not much was lost on that front.
In my experience, the +R equivalent with three anti airs will always have one that’s just best to use instead of the other two, so you don’t really get that variety. Generally speaking. I play a Strive character with at least 3 very situationally different anti airs (Dizzy).
I guess my surprise comes from the fact that you think Strive is homogeneous yet you’re looking forward to Melty Blood, because as a layman, I can hardly tell the difference functionally or aesthetically between large parts of that roster when it’s on a stream.
Man, every once in a while I used to jump at them when they’re in the air as if I’m going for air-to-air but do Shadow Gallery instead: I disappear, they whiff, and I get a knockdown. Is this practical to do every time? No, because if they can see it coming, I’m fucked. They can easily grab me out of it, but it did catch much better players than I’ll ever be off guard because they did not see it coming.
Plus R is littered with shit like this that doesn’t have any equivalent in Strive.
I won’t defend Melty because most of my experience was playing MBAACC not Type Lumina, and there’s an argument to be made that what TL did compared to MBAACC is a lot similar to what Strive did compared to Xrd/Plus R. It does look like they’re expanding movesets though, which I would say is a step in the right direction.
I also trust French-Bread more RN because what they did with Under Night, IMO, was chef’s kiss. The fanbase were just happy to get rollback with Sys:Celse and they threw in a bunch of new moves and systems on top of that, and they’re all pretty fun. It seems like they align more with what I find fun than ASW right now.