I don’t see how any of your criticisms make sense.
As far as a roster: You’re going to be hard pressed to like every character in any fighting enough to learn them to within an expert level of play. SF4, by the end of it’s tenure, had over 45 characters if I’m not mistaken, and we didn’t even hit half of that number till this season. That said, I don’t think you’re going to like all 45 characters, or even half of them, to try and learn them to the point of proficiency you are suggesting to validate their existence. Not everyone can play a grappler, nor do some even want to, but does that automatically mean RAAM is a wasted character? It simply means, while you’ve tried to embrace his playstyle, it’s just not for you, so you experiment until you find one that is your style.
And that’s where KI’s character diversity comes into play. You’ll never see a more diverse cast of characters that play like these do unless it’s probably MvC. If you start making them all generic and bland enough to where a grounded combo game is the only possible game to play, then the combos become cheap, generic, and dull. How often do people enjoy watching a Ryu combo of cr.lp, cr.lp, cr.lp, cr.mk, hadoken? Or would you rather see some of the crazy things Gen players can do going everywhere?
Ultimately, matchups are hard to learn, but that’s a caveat of any fighting game you’ll ever play. We’re somewhere between SF and MvC type games as far as difficulty of game mechanics and matchup variety. At that point, it’s a matter of accepting whether or not you’re a casual player or are you going to make the extra effort and try to jump up in skill, fix the holes in your game and get better competitively. Eventually you’re going to hit a skill ceiling, and at that point, it’s not a matter of whether the developers should lower or raise that ceiling to meet the player’s skill expectations, it’s a matter of will a casual accept his limitations and have fun in a more lighthearted manner, accepting he may have to lose more frequently than other, or is he going to make the attempt to overcome the skill plateau he’s hit.
And as far as the e-sports side of things, I don’t see KI fading at all. I will say that when MS made KI console exclusive at the launch of it’s lifespan, the move wasn’t well received as there was a LOT of bias against MS at the time the Xbox One launched, so Sony has started to buy up exclusivity rights to a LOT of the more popular 2D fighters. SFV, Guilty Gear, I think the newer iterations of Blazblue, King of Fighters 14, etc., are now Sony exclusive for the time being, and they are wanting to make a stranglehold on this market, and pull as much hype to these franchises. Combine that with the fact that MS doesn’t market KI nearly as much as they should, and you have a perceived impression KI is fading in the e-sports community. We aren’t the biggest hype train in the FGC, and for some bad reasons, but fading isn’t something I’d use to describe our situation. I’d say it’s more like, continually underrepresented, especially in light of competition that hypes their game senseless.[quote=“oShift2oVet78, post:4, topic:15644”]
*You know a game is too complicated when throws become a breakable part of a combo after an update. Rules of this game aren’t consistent enough with other ones and change too often.
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Two throws in the game are breakable, Orchid’s and Gargos’s, and I’d say they are well within their right to make them breakable. Since air throws aren’t “techable”, they’re breakable, which leads to about the same result, and since Gargos can get extra damage off of his grabs with physical hits and can actually combo into it without it being an ender version, I’d say it being breakable is justified.
On top of that, your complaints about mechanics don’t ring with me either especially since nothing in the game introduced in Season 3 is anything new if you played SF 4 or 5. Stagger is a modified version of the crumple state in SF 4, in which the character is placed in a defenseless combo-able state on a lvl 1 focus counter hit, or a level 2 or 3 focus attack hit. Also, flipout is in SF4 as well, and in other games than SF. It’s nothing radical to fighting game players, and those who struggle to deal with it either lack the knowledge to counter it, or just choose to not make the effort to recognize potential reset moments and appropriately counter. If Thunder is resetting you a lot and getting away with it, that’s on you, as after a while, there’s only so much he count mix you up with after knee, most of which can be avoided via neutral jump. So if you’ve ever played SF4, you shouldn’t be at any shock to see either of these at this point and should be able to understand how they work, and they are actually well balanced within KI’s mechanics.
If you want a game bogged down in mechanics, technical stuff, and things that don’t make sense, try some of the King of Fighters games, I can see the appreciation behind a hop jump, but to have 4 different types of jumps? In addition to having to meet super specific conditions to use a highly damaging attack heavy on multiple resources and gauges? And have you ever tried to understand the juggle system in SF 4? It’s so convoluted, it’s no wonder why they simplified it in SFxTekken and SF 5.
Your evaluation of juggle characters troubles me too, as you seem to think (from what I can gather) they detriment gameplay by bypassing the traditional ground combo system and are all the more unfair for doing so. If anything, juggles are big risks and easy breaks once you identify the juggle flow patterns.