tdylan said:
It's like Spiderman being cut, beaten, and fatigued by Green Goblin's strikes, vs Superman not even having a hair out of place after being thrown through buildings by Zod. It gets to the point that I think "wtf is the point? He's not even fazed?" There is no tension.
Well... MK9 is a bit more progressive than other fighters because it actually does display visual damage to characters. By the time a fight is over, your character might have chunks of flesh missing and exposed bones from the fighting. But this doesn't translate to an effect on performance. I think the fighting genre does well enough at developing tangible tension, and far moreso than other genres do, just by competition.
Games like Marvel v Capcom get away with it for me because there's a lighthearted fantasy element to them. MK always struck me as the "grown up" fighting game with death compared to Capcom's "winner-loser screen with loser looking tattered, but alive." In MK's more "realistic" setting, the bone-breaking does too much to shatter the immersion for me.
Okay, I understand that. MK's context is fairly unique among the rest of the fighting game genre. I'd say it's extreme violence, while mature in a sense, ends up being more puerile and humorous. Sort of like the difference between the violence in Saving Private Ryan, and Kill Bill.
It also becomes annoying to watch the slow down over and over. It gave the fight a poor sense of pacing for me. Fight, fight, fight oh! Okay. Let's all stop and watch the painfully slow animation. I think it would have been better to have the same action take place, only at normal speed, and without the close-up. There should be a point to the brutality, else you have Superman and Zod crashing through buildings with no real stakes. If the camera didn't zoom in, and the action slowed for maybe just a blink when one of those moves connected in order to give you just long enough to go "Ooooooooo!", I'd be more excited about it.
Personally, I was never bothered by the amount of time it takes for an X-Ray for play out. Most of them take around the same time as it would for super specials in many other fighting games. I've played MK9 a lot with friends, and X-Ray attacks never ceased to make us laugh or yell at each other. I guess the same can be said for super specials in any fighting game, but the presentation of X-Ray moves is a lot more amusing to me. And the slow-down sort of highlights how well placed and timed those moves can sometimes be.
But, that's just how I feel about it. I've heard others say they really don't like the pause in combat and the slowdown, and I can understand that.
I loved the trailer that showed them trapping each other's strikes, and then counter attacking. The way those flowed had an impact that resonated with "nice! I just accomplished something out of the ordinary." I hope there is a "trapping" mechanic, perhaps like "tech blocking" in the later iterations of street fighter, that allows you to block and counter if timed properly. Those, to me, worked without giving you a "let's put down the controller because they obviously want us to watch this" interruption.
I'm with you on that, I expected a sort of counter or impact-reversal system from the looks of the trailer, but I haven't seen anything like that yet. At this point I'm starting to doubt that will be in the game in any form, which is disappointing because I thought it looked interesting. I love what I've seen so far, still. But I would've liked to see that in as well.
In high-levels of play, X-Ray moves are hardly ever used. Meter is much better spent on enhancing combos, and breaking combos. Spending all 3 meters on 1 move that does 30% damage is seen as a huge waste when a perfectly executed combo utilizing a single meter enhanced move can deal over 30%. You'll see it less and less as player skill begins to rise.
Anyway, I'm not trying to change your mind or anything about all this, I just wanted to understand why you felt this way. So thanks for indulging me.
