Lets talk: General Aspect/Gameplay

Now before I even continue writing about my OPINION on what I would like to see change in this game, don’t come in the thread saying “The game is perfect how it is” or “Git gud.” Cause lets be realistic nothing is perfect, and some things need attention other than character changes. You can disagree or agree with me, remember this is my own opinion.

Lets talk KI Community, I’ve been playing this game for quite some time now and I noticed this game has some to a lot of fixing to do to get everything right, to the Hitboxes, throw vs strikes, flip-outs, rankings and U.I. I’m just gonna list them, and talk about each individual topic.

Hitboxes

I don’t know about you guys, but the hitboxes in KI is not good at all, literally I find myself doing a special move on my opponent and the move doesn’t connect. On screen it will show my character, making contact with the opinion, but my move goes right through them like they’re a ghost. For example when i play with hisako and use influence, literally i would see hisako hand touch the opponent, but it doesn’t do the move whatsoever. Her hand goes through the opponent like a ghost. I was hoping they would at least address some of the hitbox issues in S3 but they didn’t and added new things.

Throws vs Strikes

Let me get this off my chest KI the only game I know you can perform a throw if someone is striking at you, also the throw animation so damn fast you gotta react fast or read your opponent. Every fighting game i played, if you initiated a throw when the opponent is striking you will get punished, MK, Street fighter, DoA, heck even UFC a fighting game simulator. It makes sense though cause you perform a throw or grab someone why they are striking you, you yourself are left wide open for an attack. Go fight someone in real life and try to grab them while they are throwing punches at you, see how long you last. For example when I’m performing on ryo zon with hisako on a opponent and they block, they legit can punish me by throwing or striking while i’m in still attacking them, don’t believe me go try it in Dojo mode. To fix this I would say make it where you can actually react to the throw, and have a strike beat a throw.

Flipouts

I don’t mind flipouts and getting juggled it’s just that literally, if you mess up and get locked out and you’re watching your opponent just juggle you for however long, while the KV meter treats it as a regular combo. Especially Shago, when i discovered you can just spam his little spin uppercut move, I knew it was gonna be abused for juggling. A way I would say to improve on this, is have the KV meter build up faster on certain moves or strengths, you don’t have to revert it back to old KI, just improve so you won’t see juggle fest, especially at the end of the match. No one wants to watch you do achieve a 150 hit combo in ranked match. salt

Rankings

This is one I do not understand from losing your promotion match, to fighting top tier Killer ranks in a low division. Literally I would win 4 straight go to promotion, to fight someone super high in their division and just lose, just to be back in same position cause i won 4 straight again. That happened to me all this week, winning straight matches to just lose in the promotion match:rage:. I would prefer it if you didn’t lose 150 points each promotion lost after fighting your way to the top like 4x. It just tells you, that you don’t belong in that division. What i was thinking is if you lose your promotion match lets say 5x, you have an option to either fight to 1500 points in your division (but the competition gets tougher, you don’t gain the average amount of points and you lose more points than average) or choose to try to promote again for 1000 points. That way if you keep losing your promotion match you get a secondary option to not be in your division no more. Also each time you lose your promotion match the points to advance is decreased by increments of 10.

U.I.

The U.I. of this game can be a bit confusing, trying to find out how to customize your character still confuses me to this day, accessing your fight archive and etc. Honestly customizing your character should not be under store, fight archive(???) , Why is store listed again when i click single player? Help & Options should be at the beginning of the menu and etc. I just think the U.I. needs to be more user friendly so players can navigate the menu’s faster.

To conclude this off, KI is a wonderful fighting, just needs little more polish to the general side of the game to be best fighter ever. This generation it’s better fighting game than anything that is out right now. Like I said before this is my opinion and would love to see some fixes to the general game play instead of seeing characters getting fixed every time. Character fixes is not a bad thing, but to me General > Characters > Misc. But thanks for taking your guys time reading this.

Hisako’s grab going through the opponent? Have you considered that you cannot throw them if they are in blockstun/hitstun with some exceptions like a combo ender or soecial traits(Thunder for example or a wall splat)

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You’re supposed to be able to throw hisako between her hits, it’s a design choice, if you want to stop people from grabbing you do the heavy version.

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Perhaps you missed the Pinned Topic at the top? You should check it out!

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Ok. I politely disagree then.

This would be a much better example with a video of this situation. It also may not be a hitbox issue, if you followed up a blocked attack that had enough blockstun with Influence, it just wouldn’t work because you can’t throw someone while they’re in that state.

That’s assuming it needs a fix. I don’t know why priorities were set as they were, so I’ll tag a couple of people who might @Infilament @TheKeits @STORM179

Ok, and how is that different from getting locked out and combo’d on the ground? Juggles in KI weren’t particularly great until this season, if anything timing a good juggle combo is maybe harder than a grounded combo.

No one does, its just part of the game. The people who want to do it, do. The rest of us, move on and forget about it.

The matchmaking system tries to find you the best opponent for your skill level. If it can’t within a certain amount of time, it will just find you the best possible match instead. Ranked tiers are not an exact determination of skill, especially with the Requalify option now. So I’ll take the system that gives me A match instead of having me sit at the Searching screen while it finds someone around my skill level for ever.

Nope. All it says is you lost a slightly more important match in Ranked. Again, Ranked tiers are not a true measure of skill.

So make the climb harder every time you lost a promotion match? We already have people complaining about the points lost from that match, this is a step in the wrong direction.

You mean betting the rest of your points for another promotion match? Hmmm… I kinda like this one.

Kinda agree here too, but where would you put it otherwise? In a way it makes sense, you buy costumes from the store, so its the closest place to put it.

I get tagged now when people have questions about Hisako? :open_mouth: Momma we made it! :persevere:

Influence is super shallow in general, but its hitbox is pretty well aligned with Hisako’s hand in my experience. If it’s passing through someone, then you’re either trying to throw them in hit or block stun, or you whiffed it as a meaty or something and what you’re seeing is the opponent standing up into Hisako’s recovery frames.

ORZ does become active much later than it looks like, however. The hitbox for her swings trails slightly behind the visual effect - this is generally annoying, but is pretty intentional, and can be used to surpise people when done meaty. Oftentimes the opponent will assume you’ve whiffed it, when they’re actually standing up right into one of the strikes.

Generally speaking though, KI’s hitboxes do tend to track fairly well with the animations on screen. There are only two other normals or specials I can think of that have hitboxes that don’t almost exactly align with their animations. Half the buttons in SFV phase right through the opponent at their extreme ranges.

Hisako’s mixup ORZ’s are designed to not be frame traps, and the opponent can always mash out of them with a strike or a throw. If you want to prevent people poking in between your rekkas, then you need to use heavy ORZ. It will punish any non-invincible attempt to stop or jump out of it, but you will forfeit your high/low mixup in return. In general, however, it is a good idea to use heavies to start with - only switch to the mixup rekkas after you’ve conditioned the opponent to sit still.

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A throw simply beats a strike when the strike has longer startup than the throw. The only way priority would take place is when strike and throw become active at the same frame. And tbh i dont even know if the strike would beat the throw but i think it does.

So when you get thrown you deserve to get thrown - there is no issue here. Hisakos On ryo zan is simply no true block string - if you want people to stop pressing buttons you can use heavy on ryo zan.

And react to a throw is impossible btw cause they have 5f startup.

The throw game in KI is fine.

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I just made it back to Killer rank, and on my climb upwards out of about 80 or so games I had only a handful where my opponent did a full double/triple ultra, and when they did, I sat back & enjoyed the show, because I didn’t see it very often. First off, in order to pull off a triple you have to play with one arm tied behind your back and not use either of your meters, and in high-level play that will cost you.
Plus to pull off 150 with any character it does require at least marginal skill to land the recaptures properly. So I say if they can do it, they earned it. Let them enjoy their triple ultra, and use the break to sit back and grab something to drink or whatever.

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It’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it! :thumbsup:

I was tagging STORM with Hisako questions back in S2 before it was cool :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I know it’s just your opinion but just as a counter argument, think about this:

Pre-S3 juggles had a good penalty in KV, you could only do so much damage before the opponent flipped out. Juggles are in general harder to break, but there really wasn’t much extra penalty in trying to break juggles (aside from being counter broken) because even after being locked out the opponent couldn’t do that much damage to you anyway. Meanwhile juggles are actually pretty hard to do - they require precise timing and usually opponents will predict (rather than react) the strength of your next move out of a limited range of moves that can keep the juggle going, meaning they’ll most probably break at frame 0, making it harder to counter break.

That means juggles where hard to do and easy to counter, their only advantage being that usually combo break attempts will fail by themselves so you trade damage for unpredictability.

I believe S3 tried to balance that, making so that trying to break juggles is more risky since if you fail the opponent can actually do pretty good damage to you, like regular combos. They are still hard to do (harder than auto doubles and linkers) so now you’re trading easiness and a little damage for unpredictability.

That’s what I believe they went for when redesigning KV penalty for juggles.

All 2D fighting games pretty much follow the same formula for throws. When you perform a throw, if your opponent isn’t in hitstun or blockstun, isn’t doing something that is throw invulnerable and doesn’t have an active move in the exact same frame your throw becomes active he will be thrown.

All the games you mentioned follow the same rule, so you most probably are just remembering things with a tinted pair of glasses. The original SF2 had in fact 0 frame throws, so tactics like tick throwing where VERY effective in that game.

Nowadays in most games throws have startup frames where they are not active, so any move that has less startup frames than the throw will stuff them. KI is this way. I believe throws in KI have 4 frames of startup (please someone correct me here). If you’re being thrown out of moves that means you’re simply using slow moves (relative to the throw).

That is a pretty terrible argument for any video game, let alone any fighting game.

The move is designed this way, the light and medium versions aren’t frame traps. This is a “problem” with Hisako, not KI’s throwing system in general.

My advice: go to training mode, turn on data display and see how much negative on block her light and medium rekkas are. You’ll see the opponent has ages to react to them and either throw you or even jump and punish with a combo.

I don’t know how this turned out to be a Hisako thread, I was giving an example.

Game improvements that are needed IMO

  1. Locking colors into custom slots is a biggy, i wish it was never changed

  2. A option to tie character themes to characters fighting in the match, because as it sits now i will never actually get to hear Rash, Mira’s or any of the upcoming character themes since they have no stages of there own and i am not wasting time picking the theme when picking a character, custom or default, custom slot, then a color is as tedious as it sits now.

  3. Using flip out against glacius sucks cause he goes further away then every other character in-game. ( I play TJ )

  4. I cannot stand the grab system in this game, you can wake up grab which almost beat out everything in this game.

  5. I agree about the UI its not the graetest.

Im sure there is more but this will do for now.

Wake up grab beats nothing in the game. A properly timed meaty will stuff this every time.

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It won’t beat a neutral jump or numerous back-dashes either (the latterof which is character-dependent).

All backdashes are throw invincible for the first 8 frames, not just some characters.

(In fact, I think that number might be slightly higher? I think it’s 8f for total invuln and an extra 3f of just throw invuln? Something weird like that, but definitely at least 8f)

I know, but some backdashes are still slow enough that they can be punished on the recovery after the throw attempt.

I believe @GalacticGeek is right in saying it’s character dependent because some characters have a backdash so slow and that travels so little that by the time the backdash ends you’ll have already recovered from your wiffed throw attempt and is still fairly in range for another try depending of your throw range.

Glacius mirrors must be hilarious to watch now.

Eh…it’s kind of a semantic point when you start talking like that. While it is certainly inadvisable that certain backdashes be used to avoid anything, the fact remains that all backdashes, properly timed, will avoid an immediate throw attempt.

The larger/more important point here is that throws do not beat everything (or anything, really), and are a manifestly terrible wakeup option unless your goal is to tech a throw.

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I understand. I was just focusing in throws and while proper timed backdashes will always avoid a throw, not all backdashes will avoid an entire throw attempt because the opponent just has enough time to try another one after the first.

Sure, that also means you have enough time to react and tech, so even in those cases a backdash isn’t useless.

I guess the reason the distinction is important is because understanding that backdashes are invincible has implications for how you understand the whole game. I didn’t want people thinking only some backdashes are invincible.

Also, I imagine even slow backdashes do an okay job at avoiding, say… command grabs (if you were to pop instinct during TJ’s pressure and see he’s going for shoot toss or something). Maybe not Aganos with 4 chunks but I imagine it’s the preferred option for almost every character.