Making Things Not Work is Bad Design#235

I think the frustrations that I cannot get past, after playing this game through its many iterations in beta and the first year and a half, then dropping it, then trying it again, really roll into one general point: Things should work like you want. Floorhug, SSDI, hurtbox shifting w/ shorter grabs, and the unbufferable shield all make it so the thing I intend to happen does not. Here are examples from 30 minutes of playing against bots:

-I got reversaled for hitting a well-timed aerial at 0.
-My move that hit in advantage does not finish because the opponent (often small and/or floaty) fell out of it.
-My opponent whiffed a smash attack on shield basically in my face and my grab hit the Ult Sephiroth.
-I didn’t time the thing I wanted out of shield perfectly, so now I’m giving up my turn to sit in shield like a bozo.

In each of these instances, there is something natural I wanted to do, and it didn’t work. The game feels like it’s sacrificing making sense for the sake of balance. Grabs are strong because floorhugs are strong and it beats floorhugs. The game was overcentralized around them. What do they do? Make them shorter. Now you have even fewer options in many scenarios. Shield grabbing was probably pretty good, what do they do? Make it harder to input, leading to spurts of cortisol throughout the match because I didn’t adjust my timing to each and every particular move. It’s really hard to love and focus on the positives of this potentially great game when, mid-match, I have to recompose myself because of these frankly dumb mechanics. In my experience, this game has become way more fun to watch competitively than it is to play. Playing one session with modifiers that enhanced the speed and advantage state of the game (ex. ‘Project Nurse’ is a great start) really opened my eyes to how dull the base game feels. Giving us the modifiers on one hand was incredible, and on the other only affirmed my beliefs that they NEED to move away from the PM direction (or what I’ve been told is PM inspo) and towards what makes this series unique, because it is so much more enjoyable.

skill issue man

Title sounds like it might be about moves such as Slade’s side-Special, but these really are just complaints about you’re execution.
As always, Floorhugging is an issue that should have been solved months after launch.

*yr’oue

Only one of those was about execution (especially when shields used to be fine). Slade’s side special falls into this because floorhug makes it a non functional move. I have learned to use floorhug and play around it relatively well, and it’s never stopped feeling braindead on both sides. For SSDI, there is nothing I can do about Absa teleporting an entire character distance because I hit Ranno up air 1. For shields (and floorhugs now), the game was once touted as beginner friendly but insists on artificial skill barriers, and for what? I don’t know if shield dynamics are going to change at a top level because those are the players already know how to time things. Making things harder to input as a way to nerf something doesn’t really punish top players, but it definitely does for lower players. Again, I can input most of these for a majority of the time, but the fact they exist makes the game feel worse.