WhiteTigerShiro said:
NeutralDrow said:
WhiteTigerShiro said:
Yeah, Tekken was pretty bad about it too as I recall, but Soul Calibur is also terrible about it. It's a really easy game to button-mash, sure, but when you're as good as some of my friends, you need to really know how your character works. Which means memorizing an encyclopaedia of moves.
Isn't that to be expected, though? I always thought it was the other way around: in the process of getting really good with a character, one eventually learns all or most of their moves as a natural consequence. Or rather, they especially learn which moves
work (not many Bridget players use his Tragedy in Maintenance move, and not many Yoshimitsu players bother with his suicide attacks, for example).
Well of course you have to learn the character's moves, but that's my point. With games like Soul Calibur, the moves list is simply massive. Sure you aren't going to use every single move, but how can a newer player be expected to know which moves he should learn and which he should ignore?
I was trying to say that that happens automatically during the course of play. It requires a slightly different approach, but it still happens as a natural consequence.
Then you get to games like Blaz Blue and Street Fighter. Every character has only a handful of moves to learn (with a couple exceptions for the more advanced characters). All it takes is a quick minute studying the moves list, a quick minute practicing the moves, and there you have it, everything you need to know about how your character moves. From here you can focus more on your personal technique and learning what situations are better for what attacks, rather than having to be bothered with losing a fight because you know there was that one attack you could have used to save yourself, but you have to spend about 5 minutes sorting through the moves list and trying each move before you finally find it.
Except it isn't nearly that simple. I know it took me at least a month before I had a decent enough idea about how Axl Low worked before I could reliably beat other players with him.
In any case, it does seem to take different skills. If BlazBlue is an "easy to learn, hard to master" game, I can really only see Soul Calibur as medium difficulty for both. Movement in the game is simple already, so just learning the moves of character confers with it a lot of the skill you'll need, and it just becomes a matter of taking the ones you like, and training reflex and muscle memory.
Quite a few 2D games, on the other hand, don't give you a lot of training with the moveset. Sure, Archer in Fate/Unlimited Codes has a lot fewer moves than, say, Yun-Seong, but using them effectively doesn't come nearly as intuitively. Granted, that particular game has (hideously difficult) Training missions (including combo training, which take jump installs, buffering, and reflect canceling into account), but that's not an option for many others. I can't remember Guilty Gear teaching me how to use Sol Badguy's dust loop, or Street Fighter 3 teaching me how to use a given character's selected super in a combo (SF4 might be an exception, I haven't played it much).
So in short, the thing I like about this game is that it lets you focus more on your technique in fighting. Where I dislike Soul Calibur because it seems to focus more on knowing an encyclopaedia of moves before you can really start to practice.
And this I don't quite understand, because the majority of a Soul Calibur character's "encyclopedia of moves" are really, really simple (at least partly because they list normal attacks as well). For me, trying out a character for the first time is basically a litany of pressing a direction and a button (or running and pressing a button, or a direction and
two buttons). Practice then becomes using the useful and cooler-looking ones in combat until they become natural. A lot of the more complicated stuff (unblockables, command throws, and the like) aren't especially useful, and can usually be ignored.
And this is where I break with Tekken, and its tremendously
unintuitive movelists. Seriously, it's not that hard to figure out Nightmare's 66B+K (a guard-breaking dropkick), but how the heck would I normally figure out Armor King's f+1+4 (a shoulder charge)?
Edit: Mind you, I'm not trying to say that Soul Calibur is a bad game by any means. Sale's figures alone would prove me wrong on that one. Just saying that it isn't my flavor of fighting game.
And I can understand that. It's only those who refer to it as a button-masher's paradise who piss me off, and you've actually gone the opposite route.
EDIT: And here I completely forgot to throw in a Maxi/I-no comparison. Two different games, two different people, one with string stances, the other with an upward dash and odd moves...neither of which I can figure out. In other words, yeah, I do get that each has its own complications.
