While I’m determined to finally crack the secrets of SFIV, my personal preference though runs to Guilty Gear/BlazBlue for 2D fighters and Soulcalibur for 3D.

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Blazblue, however, is a real beast to learn.

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I don’t mind looking up things regarding minutiae or precise explications of game mechanics or information on advanced tactics. But we’re passed the age where games are operating under harsh enough memory restrictions that they can’t include explanations for how the basic functionality of a game works within the game itself.

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I mean, it’s like the Monkey Island remake. The art simply isn’t as good. Not even by a longshot.

Oh, and the combo animations being long actually makes sense for two groups: the n00bs and the hardcore crowd (if you ever been to (or seen) a tournament, you know what I’m talking about). Boring when playing alone, of course. But then again, I don’t really care, I play GG, BB and LB2.

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There aren’t all that many of them? But they are not things one can figure out from playing the game. They are not the sort of moves that you’re likely to do by accident, because you’re already moving in the way that calls for them. They aren’t impossible to figure out, if you sit down and look things up and figure them out, but there’s absolutely no hint of what they are from the way the game presents itself to you.

It’s also probably worth bringing up that SC’s got the 8-way run. This isn’t a reason for it to be a better game, but it often means the sort of moves that get bound to different directions are similar to the sort of moves that are useful while moving in those directions. You circle clockwise around an enemy and press an attack button? You’ll execute a move that’s useful when you’re circling clockwise around an enemy. Attacking while moving counterclockwise will often do something similar from the other direction. Your attack buttons are “Vertical,” “Horizontal,” and “Kick,” which explains pretty clearly what these attacks do.

Oh, and, since you’ve got most useful attacks mapped to single presses of the 8-way movement commands, you don’t have to worry about fiddly timing. Even just knowing how to do an SF move is no guarantee of being able to pull it off, unless you’ve spent sufficient time sitting down and practicing until you can hit the proper timing from muscle memory. Yes, this shit gets easier once you can already do it. But when I have to spend a not insignificant amount of time sitting down learning how to execute the basic functions of the game (instead of, you know, playing it and picking things up as I go), that game counts as “impenetrable.”

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Interesting analysis. I’ll look into VF again, though IIRC I tried a PS2 version a number of years ago and found it completely impenetrable. I’m not really a “fighting game” guy as you can probably deduce, so it may be that VF is just too complex considering the amount of effort I’m willing to put in to the genre. As a check, though, would you have a recommended point of entry for the series?

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Obscene!

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