Thursday, October 23, 2014

The State of Now and Things to Come

It took me much longer than I wanted to get around to writing this. Though it may have been for the best, as I can now compress what was going to be 3+ posts into one.

Where do we start?

I still play +R when I can. Having to take several month long breaks at a time due to work is a downer, but it does help in some ways. Instead of playing too much and "burning out" (something I'm sure a lot of people reading this have experienced), I get to jump into the game cold a few times a year. This approach, while not ideal for a few reasons, does have its upsides. Namely, you get a chance to re-create your playstyle on the fly; whatever old habits/tactics you may have forgotten will come back to you when you need them, but until then, the gaps are being filled with tactics that are pertinent to whatever matchups you're currently playing. It's actually been tremendously helpful with learning a few matchups I had been struggling with.

I started playing Gundam again on a whim. I had only played Full Boost a few times since I'd been in Japan, and I basically ignored Maxi Boost for the first month or so due to the crazy queues. I jumped in on a free play shuffle at GameSpot Versus a few weeks ago and didn't do so bad once I remembered how to play. It is odd to think that to date, I've still spent more time playing NEXT than any other Gundam VS. That NEXT experience helped a bit though, as Epyon really hasn't changed much from that game, and is even a little stronger, I think. I'll probably start putting Gundam on my arcade rotation; DOA5 has already become stale, anyways.

Speaking of GameSpot Versus, I went there a few months ago on a Sunday and found myself in the middle of something that I wasn't even sure existed anymore: a KOF98 ranbat.

I had actually never played OG98 in Japan at that point, only UMFE a few times here and there. The show of players was pretty impressive, and in typical 98 fashion, the cast representation was excellent. As you'd expect, there were quite a few older players there, but there was no shortage of younger players, either.

The highlight for me by far was witnessing one guy OCV two players with Shermie, in tournament! I had never seen anyone use st.C quite the way this guy did, which was inspiring to me as a Shermie player.

I decided to play a few games, not expecting to win, obviously. I just wanted to see how well I'd fare, and maybe learn something new.

As it turns out, I came away with a new appreciation for something I never gave 98 due credit for: it is an incredibly timing intensive game. I think this has to do with the fact that I had never actually played KOF98 on a Neo-Geo before. Before then, I had mostly played the game via FBA, and online, at that. Needless to say, the difference is immediately apparent. I found that I actually knew the right answers in a lot of situations, I was just horribly mistiming everything. As I caught on to this I started to play much better, but still didn't end up winning against the guy I was playing.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that, no matter how much that may have made me want to play 98 again, the game is really quite dead over here. KOF in general is already a tough sell in Japan, and 02UM is the only one with a sizable playerbase. It's a shame, because I wouldn't mind picking up where I left off in that game.

Which brings me to the other game I once thought I'd be playing much more than I am now: Virtua Fighter 5.

To say this game is dead is an understatement. When I first came to Japan, most arcades had a token VF cab, with a few arcades sporting entire rows of VF. Since then, VF cabinets have been slowly disappearing to make room for DOA5 and TTT2. One of my favorite arcades (Pasopiard Yokohama) ended up getting rid of all their VF cabs earlier this year. This now means that in order to even find a VF cabinet, I now have to go all the way up to Akihabara. This isn't to say that I don't go to Akihabara frequently anyways, but it's hardly a stone's throw from where I am.

That's not even the beginning of it. Back when there were local cabinets, it was a pain to find anyone that wanted to play, anyways. Every so once in awhile there'd be a half-decent player, but past that it was very difficult to find anyone outside of the few VF hotspots. A game like +R still manages to attract a few people at most arcades (even now that Xrd is out), which is good enough for a weekday night. All of this signaled a very clear message to me: VF is dead.

I feel like a large part of the problem is that Final Showdown really wasn't the game it should've been. While I do like most of the system changes it brought, there were more than a few questionable choices made in regards to character design: did Akira really did a full circular jumpkick? Did Jacky's iaigeri really need to launch on normal hit? These kinds of things wouldn't be too bad if over half the cast wasn't near-unplayable and forced to rely on gimmicks to win. It's easy to say now that the game needed more playtesting, but I don't see how a lot of this stuff wasn't caught early on, especially considering how well 5R and even 5 Ver. C were balanced. Perhaps this was just Sega's way of getting over a game they were tired of working on? I can only hope that the future holds better things for VF, at this point.

Now we come to the most important part of this entry: my thoughts on Guilty Gear Xrd.

If you've been following the Xrd forums on Dustloop at all this year, you've probably seen me posting about the game. Some of the information I posted around the game's launch was admittedly incorrect, but at the time all we had to go on was speculation, experience, and whatever the training mode monsters found (a group to which I definitely don't belong). Now that frame data has been published and translated (big ups to the translation team, I know how hard that can be to coordinate), we can start working more in concrete, less in "what if".

So, what about Xrd? It is a lot of things, and yet there are a lot of things it is not. It is a good game; we'll just get that out of the way right now. It's decently balanced, and I feel it has the potential to really be something great. But it's not there yet, if you ask me. It is also not a replacement for GGXX. While it is very much a Guilty Gear game, it doesn't recreate many of the things that made the XX series so good.

I'll spare you the complaints and cut to the chase: ASW needs to figure out the direction they want to take Xrd, and they need to run with it once they do. I see the benefits of the new Roman Cancel properties and how they can be applied to create new mixup situations that didn't exist before. The problem is that as of right now, a lot of YRC mixups amount to little more than the most basic of FRC mixups that existed in XX, only with slowdown. I also don't appreciate the option selects that YRC's have created so far, the most egregious of them being the mid-combo burst safe YRC OS. While there were characters in XX that had FRC's that allowed for burst safe combos, they were different in that you always had to commit to whatever move you FRC'd, and that was often the only burst safe point in the combo (there are, as always, exceptions). In Xrd, all you have to do to keep your combo burst safe is be between 25-50% tension and press three buttons at once: if they don't burst, you get the weakest button you pressed. If they did burst, you YRC nothing and punish accordingly.

Before you start making excuses for the game and saying things like "Just don't burst", let's not forget another game we used to make that same excuse for.

Things like this aren't that hard to fix, and it's likely that we will see a solution to this in the next iteration of the game. I just hope that it comes sooner rather than later.

Again, I want to reiterate that I like Xrd. It's not like one bullshit option select is ruining the game for me. It's more so that I see Xrd as a game that is more ambitious than its creators wanted it to be. It has a radically re-vamped system that brings with it a whole slew of new possibilities that only a series like Guilty Gear would have the gall to explore, yet a cast of characters too straightforward and bland to even begin to fully explore them. There's probably a few reasons as to why that is, and not wanting to overwhelm newcomers to the series is likely on the top of that list. I'm fine with that, as long as the game evolves in a way that takes advantage of the new system more than it currently does.

On a final note, words do not describe how beautiful a game Xrd is. The animation wizards at ASW clearly spent a lot of time and effort in making the character models move as elegantly as the sprites that preceded them, while taking full advantage of the kinds of effects that can only be done in 3D. If it weren't for the PS4's current state of incompatibility with PS3 sticks, I'd likely buy one just to play this game at 1080p. As it stands, the arcade version runs at 720p and still looks incredible, so don't feel too left out if you're in the same boat as me.

There's still more I want to write about, but that will wait for another day. In the meantime, I'll be working on a few posts in the near future, including my more recent visits to Mikado, and why Guilty Gear is the best fighting game ever made (you haven't heard anything like it, I promise). Stay tuned!

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Remembering The Past

Self reflection is a worthwhile endeavor (in moderation, of course).

Today's self reflection came in the form of a video YouTube recommended to me. It's a video I'd seen before, in a time and place very different from here and now. It was the video that made me want to play Guilty Gear, and subsequently sent me down a path that has led me to a point I never would have imagined myself at.


In hindsight, this match really isn't as impressive as it is notably ridiculous; but back in 2007, I didn't know any better, nor care. The sheer style that oozes from every second of this video was enough to have me hooked.

I've still a ways to go; but all things considered, it's pretty remarkable how far I've come since then. Things like this reinvigorate motivation in the face of all that works to waver it.

(That might be worth remembering when you read my next post)