This is my FAVORITE game these days, and I happily spend money on monthly skins when they come out, but I’m starting to get the sinking feeling that this game’s just too fuckin’ fast for me.
I get that this game is supposed to be fast, but it feels like there’s no room to punish anything! It feels like I gotta predict things years in advance, and have to be already signed up for a 12-step program to actually deal damage to my opponent on recovery sometimes. As someone who likes playing a much more reaction-based game, it’s infuriating!
Please, I beg of you, add some cooldown to some of these allegedly “high commitment” options. Ranno spinning needles and landing onstage? Nope, he gets to land for free, should’ve interrupted him before he even decided to recover. Olympia doing side-special from a mile away? Nah dude, you should’ve interrupted her way before she committed. Opponent missed a parry from a platform away? No man, you should’ve known they were going to mess up that parry attempt back when it was 2020 and everyone was playing Animal Crossing.
Land a parry against your opponent?
Unless you’re already inside of their body you’re not getting a charged strong attack to connect. In your dreams, you fuckin’ neanderthal. You literal cave-dwelling troglodyte. What, you think this shit’s easy? You want something simple? Take up soothsaying.
I love how fast-paced this game is, and how flexible it is in a ton of areas compared to, say, Melee or PM, but some of the things that feel like I should be able to punish on-reaction DON’T ACTUALLY HAVE ENOUGH COOLDOWN FOR ME TO DO THAT. Why does execution feel comparably easy, but landing punishes somehow feels impossible?
I don’t mind being out-execution’d by my opponent, but when I see a mistake and smell blood and go for a punish, but then promptly learn that the thing that looks punishable isn’t actually, it makes me want to run into oncoming traffic. I’m actually put into yet another situation where I have to hard-guess what my opponent is going to do instead of being given a free hit for guessing correctly. Even if I was GIVEN the punish, the required percentage to kill off of raw hits feels so much higher than Melee/PM anyway (unless you’re Zetterburn lmao), and with recovery mixup opportunities being plentiful for every character, I don’t understand why punishes aren’t more free once they’re secured.
I love this game and want to see it succeed, but if such a common complaint is that barrier for entry is too high (despite the overall execution requirement being so much lower than the previously-mentioned Smash games), and I’m having issues here as a veteran wavedasher/SHFFLer, then something probably needs adjusting. “I get to hit my opponent really hard after they whiff a big move” feels like a standard in all fighting games, and it’s not FULLY missing from Rivals 2, but it doesn’t feel weighted enough to feel like something that can be picked up on intuitively. I’m sure this is just a skill issue on my part, and I get that this isn’t Melee/PM, but I’ve been playing platform fighters for 20+ years at this point and this game makes me feel like I’m losing my gourd.
Frankly this whole post is mostly just my letting off some steam, but the amount of times I end up going “oh wait yeah, that move isn’t really punishable if they just throw it out” is genuinely bumming me out.