I think you are misjudging the amount of time necessary to get good at any fighting game. This type of esoteric knowledge exists in every game. To play MKX at an intermediate level, for instance, you have to know the high/low string options for every character (including where there are gaps and where they are at plus frames), which I think is quite a bit more of a burden.
In KI, you can learn to combo break easier than you think. You can learn to break heavy auto-doubles as a “class of similar looking” moves that have very much the same rhythm and feedback, for instance. Once you learn one or two classes of moves, you can play KI just as well as you can play other fighting games with similar effort. You basically can’t react to lights (doubles or linkers), manuals, and all that type of stuff, so you can just throw it out.
You don’t have to open a spreadsheet and memorize the visual cues for 100 moves. Nobody does that and it’s not necessary to do well.
Are you serious, you’ve obviously never played 1 or 2. Go look up how Combo Breakers work in that game. You had to perform a character’s special move to break a combo and you only had a short time to react and get it out or you eat the damage. If you do it fast enough the combo damage is reset and the attacker takes some damage as well. It was a billion times better than what this game has.
But, if I were to add a metered combo breaker, it would be similar but slightly different. You could even throw it on top of the current system without any problem. So, boom, you get hit, your opponent starts to combo you. You have a choice to make go for the manual combo breaker(same combo breaker in the game now) or you could chose to go for an special combo breaker if you have meter. If you choose to go for a special combo breaker and have meter you eat up to 25% of your life. You can input the special combo, any of the character’s special moves, within a pretty lenient time like 1.5 seconds since by doing so you are agreeing to eat all the damage to the cap amount, if the combo is dropped before it hits max you won’t lose your meter. Now, if at any time you go for a manual combo breaker and miss, you eat full damage and special combo breakers cannot be used for the duration of that combo.
And, that makes perfect sense in all aspects. You risk unlimited damage being taken by going for combo breakers as they are for the payoff being the combo gets stuffed quickly. With a special combo breaker you concede a fair amount of damage to break it.
Dude I played SF4 from day one and spent a lot of time in the top 20 for my character. I know the time required and it’s not right. That’s why for SF5 they did away with those garbage heavy time commitment 1-framers. lol Nobody has the time to learn that from muscle memory except pros and no lifers. You do have to memorize the animations otherwise you are just guessing, shoot even if you do learn the animations you’re still guessing a lot of the time because of how freaking similar one strength looks to another!
You successfully break, lose meter, AND lose 25% of you health? And you think that makes perfect sense!?
Wow…
It’s actually easier and makes more sense to do it the way it is currently designed, IMO (not to mention it adds a whole other level of play that otherwise wouldn’t be there).
I have proof - simply ask @SightlessKombat; he hasn’t memorized ANY of the animations (because he’s blind) and even he can still break consistently (and he has even reached killer tier).
Correct, I never played 1 besides casually at a friend’s house, and I never touched 2 at all. I’ve tried to look up how combo breakers work in those games, but couldn’t find a clear description of it that wasn’t inconsistent.
But it’s fine, I don’t need to know how they used to work, I’m only concerned about how they work now.
I don’t see how this is better in any way. It’s stricter timing, it’s a more complicated input, and it also damages the attacker. The differences here are not at all related to what you dislike about the current breaker system. In fact, they would exacerbate the problem.
I still don’t really understand the description. Let me ask some questions to clarify.
When you “input a special combo breaker”, you’re saying the opponent can do any of their special moves, with any strength, at any time, and it will break anything within a large 1.5 second window? So timing and strength lockouts are never possible with this. I could input a light special move early, and break a heavy attack that happens 1 second later. But the cost is you lose 1 stock of meter and 25% of your health?
Before I explain my thoughts on this system, I want to make sure I have your idea correct.
I’m not really too concerned with how high into the online leaderboards you got for your character in SF4. I’m more concerned with what you understand about fighting games, and how you can back up your points of view with correct evidence.
If you don’t think SF5 is a game filled with esoteric science, I think you have another thing coming. It is already full of strange knowledge tidbits you need to know, and it will only get worse. You won’t ever have to practice 1 frame combo execution, but you will have to practice 2-3 frame defensive inputs, and you will have to study a spreadsheet of setups.
Quick question; if Necalli command grabs you and then does dash, is he at advantage, or are you? If you don’t know the answer to this question, I am going to win the match. If you can prove to me (while playing) that you do know the answer to that question, I will just change the question. If I get a safe jump after crush counter sweep, and then land and do st.MK, what buttons can you press to interrupt my stand strong? If I knock you down as Alex and make you block meaty fwd+HP, what are your choices after this? What if I just do dash command grab instead (there is a new OS discovered that lets you block a meaty and backdash a command grab at the same time, are you prepared to learn this 2-frame OS input to survive in SFV? If not, you could always just guess meaty vs command grab, just like you can always guess KI combo breakers!)
I played a ton of one and two and there were multiple problems with those breakers that make that system far inferior to the current one.
Ambiguity - did you miss the input or did you miss the strength? Who knows? There’s no lockout, no indicator no nothing.
Unfairness- some characters had charge move breakers. Others had DPs. Ridiculous. Some characters had “choke point” moves that were common break points. Usually because they had to do a charge move and only one strength of charge could be done holding backwards. Other characters didn’t.
Combo breakers doing damage to the opponent made long combos - the games defining feature- a poor strategic decision.
Some animations in KI 2013 are harder to read than others. Frankly, I think Hisako is the worst. But as multiple people have pointed out - if you can simply prevent your opponent from using all heavies you are essentially preventing a huge amount of combo damage. So don’t worry about learning hundreds of animations. Just look for heavies - they are easy to recognize for the most part because of speed. Don’t worry about anything else until you are ready. Trust me. If I can do it you can.
It’s called muscle memory. If you something enough the same way, you’ll almost always do it the exact same way after you reach a certain number of attempts. So, you’re actually proving my point! If you spend a ridiculous amount of time in this game you can combo break, otherwise it’s a crapshoot.
So, add a lockout audio queue and animation the game already has, aw man, that would be so hard.
There’s nothing unfair about charge moves vs dp moves. You’re adding your subjective bias to your argument. That is a false statement made by you.
Your sentence is completely incoherent or you’re lost. Combo Breakers “break combos”. No, long combos are not a defining feature of the game. Ultras, combo breakers, no mercy finishers, these are defining features in the game. And, if you’re saying combo breakers used to lead to a long combo for the person who broke the combo, false, you could turn right back and break their combo, putting you both back to square one.
Y’all have fun grinding away to keep your memories of every animations, I’m off to try out Battleborn.
Really, because in my experience, once I get something down, and then take the time to practice it over and over again extensively in practice mode, I actually get worse at doing it over time. I’ll start off doing just fine at 1st, but then my fingers will start slipping or not going where they’re supposed to go (likely due to exhaustion, despite any muscle-memory I might have).
Either way, muscle memory has little to do with SEEING the animation and HEARING it to identify it, and you don’t need much in the way of muscle memory to press 2 buttons that are right next to each other (LP+LK, MP+MK, and HP+HK) to combo-break once you do. And really, as Infilament has already said, you only really need to work on heavies and mediums, because the lights are too fast to react to, even if you identify them. Not only that, but he also mentioned breaking things down into component parts to make things easier - start with the slower, heavier attacks that are easier to identify. Once you get comfortable with that, then go to mediums - then lights (identifying only for pattern recognition, so you can more accurately guess your opponent, since you can’t react to them) - then manuals (same as light attacks in terms of reactibility, which is nil). Alternatively, you can learn 1 character at a time (by starting with the ones that give you the most trouble). That’s how you take something that seems insurmountable and make it easier to work with over time. Baby steps, man… Baby steps.
It’s almost as if you’re giving up before you’ve even began, and that my friend, is guaranteed to fail.
Ultras and combo breakers are part of the long combos. You can’t do either unless a combo is happening at the time.
I feel the need to throw this out there: if you’re infinitely better than your opponent you won’t need to perfect your combo breaking. Last EVO there was a top 8 player that didn’t bother with it at all.
No it’s not subjective at all. You can do a DP in about a tenth of a second, but in KI 1 and 2 you have to hold back for a significant amount of time before you can complete a charge move. That means you have significantly more opportunity to break if you are a DP character rather than a charge character in those games. There’s nothing subjective about that at all.
And long combos were absolutely the defining feature of KI. And the breaker system from 1 and 2 absolutely encouraged short combos in competitive play. Pretty much anyone who played these games understands this.
Na, anyone that has mained a charge character knows you’re mostly holding back as much as possible so you can unleash your moves at will. Your statement is false and subjective. jump in>hit>special charge move or hit, same, same, super or ultra.
Wrong again. It doesn’t matter how prepared you are. First, if you need to combo break it’s because you got hit. So probably not ready to immediately hit your charge move because you weren’t blocking. But you are also failing to account for the fact that KI 1 and 2 let you mash the breaker over and over until you got it - so the number of attempts you get with a DP is way more than the number of attempts you got with a charge character. There was a lockout period, but it was short and unstated, and it was way less time than required for a charge. Not subjective at all.
Plus, KI was unforgiving with charge timing and you had zero indicator of your characters charge. So again, you have no idea if you miss a breaker because of the wrong strength, a missed input or missed timing. Way worse when you have to count in your head.
You’re just flailing now. Instead of doggedly insisting that the breaker games in those two outdated, broken games (that we all loved 20 years ago because we didn’t know better), why don’t you actually try to learn to break in this game - which has identical break execution for all characters and now gives you immediate feedback on the appropriate timing and strength which makes it far easier to learn the attack strengths of your opponents? Or go play Battleborn as promised.
We were having fun before you joined this forum, and we’ll continue having fun with KI long after you find something more constructive to do than destroying meaningful threads on a forum dedicated to a game you dislike.
Can someone point me to the thread where people offer to help with match ups - can’t find it for the life of me and I need to practise as aganos vs Rash wrecking ballllls
Each character has his own topic on the forum. Go check out Aganos and if you don’t see anything there talking about the matchup, post your request there.
The combo breaker stuff can be pretty hard to get into sure, and then the whole counter breaker and shadow counter stuff.
I may well never get a great grasp on it, though if I’m fighting people similar in skill level to me it’s not such an issue.
So far with combo breakers my guessing (yeah, still guessing) is sometimes getting a bit better…the lock out symbol has increasingly shown strengths I was pressing so I guess I was a fraction off or I hit the buttons wrong.
I have been practicing this method over the past week. I have noticed how certain characters are covering your character not allowing you to see the animation on your own character. Also the KV meter, etc. gets in the way in the corners. So it has its drawbacks sadly…
