#capcom dont know how to handle good characters | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

hohoz · 4 years ago

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The ones that suffer the most

I wanted to talk about this for a long time.

I’m a Resident evil addicted, I finished almost every RE game released and I must say that Capcom made some poor choices regarding Jill and Chris, they are EASILY the most mistreated characters in RE Franchise.

But let’s explain why is that:

Jill and Chris are survivors, they had to survive in a mansion with a lot of puzzles and zombies, while looking for items that could help them to progress and find a way to reach Brad.

When they arrive at STARS Office, they are revolted that Umbrella did all that under their noses and innocents were dying because of that and they explained EVERYTHING in a report - but Irons made that go away.

In the ORIGINAL RE3 we had this special file (Jill’s Diary)

August 7th Two weeks have passed since that day. My wounds have been healed, but I just can't forget it. For most people, it's history now. But for me, whenever I close my eyes, it all comes back clearly. Zombies eating people's flesh and the screams of my teammates dying. No, the wounds in my heart are not healed yet...

August 13th Chris has been causing a lot of trouble recently. What's with him? He seldom talks to the other police members and is constantly irritated. The other day, he punched Elran of the Boy's Crime department just for accidentally splashing Chris's face with coffee. I immediately stopped Chris, but when he saw me he just gave me a wink and walked away. I wonder what happened to him...

August 15th Midnight. Chris, who has been on a leave of absence for a "vacation," called me so I visited his apartment. As soon as I walked into his room, he showed me a couple of pieces of paper. They were part of a virus research report entitled as simply as "G". Then Chris told me that, "The nightmare still continues." He went on to say that, "It's not over yet." Ever since that day, he has been fighting all by himself without rest, without even telling me.

August 24th Chris left the town today to go to Europe. Barry told me that he would send his family to Canada and then he would follow Chris. I decided to remain in Raccoon City for a while because I know that the research facility in this city will be very important to this entire case. In a month or so, I'll be joining with them somewhere in Europe. That's when my real battle begins...

For some weird reason this file isn’t available in RE3 Remake.

But ok, here we see that Chris was doing some investigation - in the RE2RMK you could see this letter that Chris left in a way that normal people wouldn't understand - the only thing that Claire says is that “doesnt look like him” but how normies would understand what Chris is like is he is not well represented in media ??????????????????

And Jill had all the detective work in her wall.

So far so good - we understand the basics about them - they are Special police force, the elite, they had a traumatic experience and they survived to tell the story.

Some problems until now:

Jill had a MAJOR personality change in RE3 RMK- I honestly like most of that, she is a badass in the originals and she is a badass in the rmk but I still dislike the fact that she swears all the time (specially because in RE1, RE Rev, RE5 she doesn't do that)

We can tell a lot about her personality just looking at her room, but I still miss some stuff (I had expectations - so this is not a real problem. but still) like a Vinyl player (since she is probably into classical music), some letters from her father so new players can understand her origin and why is she so good in lockpicking and more about her dog (she had a pic in the original that could’ve been her boyfriend but it was replaced by a dog in RE2 rmk but in RE3 Rmk there in no dog)

Okay - after you finish the game the only thing we see is this:

In my opinion this is Chris since he is always associated with Green colors while Jill is associated with blue.

So my speculation here is that she found him while in the original we had this:

This is not a major chance but still is important (lore of course - duh) but the problem here is that while Jill is looking for him - Code Veronica is happening.

So I can only assume two things, they did not show him because they DON’T HAVE A FACE FOR HIM or I am wrong and that is Jill, but if that is Jill so why there is no decent epilogue like the original ?

Okay, now we are arriving in the real trouble area

I will do RE5 first and the Wii and Rev1 (even tho those two comes first in the lore)

RESIDENT EVIL 5

So before the game was release we had some propaganda, including this:

So have in mind that Jill was dead, I thought that she died and RE5 would explain that shit.

But in the beginning we see that Chris is looking for her and have in mind that Chris HAD A MAJOR CHANCE IN HIS APPEARANCE, and I’m not talking about his muscles.

I will not address Chris in CV since he was good in that game but I the team that made CV also made the original, it had CONSISTENCE.

Here we have Chris, he’s THE classical american soldier protagonist from Hollywood in the 80′s/90′s and he had some omage to TOPGUN

He also shares some traits with his sister

A major trait here is that HE HAS BLUE EYES, typical good looking soldier from US.

and now let’s have a look at Chris in RE5...

Yeah... I still hate this face even tho I love his Character in this game, this ugly a** monkey looking mf and he had a lot of steroids

So we have some lore to him in RE5, Jill and Chris went to a mansion looking for Spencer (one of the fathers of Umbrella and the one that was behind project Wesker, he wanted to do this Virus so he could live forever, so RE has a good lore, it’s not just about zombies) but when they found him, he was dead and Wesker was by his side, in a fight Jill sacrificed herself to save Chris’s life.

Chris started doing mission after mission because her body was never found, and he made a name for himself, he became a ‘legend’ inside BSAA and you can see that in the beginning of RE5.

The reason behind the muscles was probably to fight Wesker mano to mano but still is not well made, it really felt weird playing for the first time.

So now we have a problem here, there is thing that you use in a narrative that is to make someone strong af powerless, and they did that to Jill. (a good example of this is in TWD- Ricky is a fucking legend and Negan made him powerless in the face of a event)

Jill was used in a Boss fight and that is it... She is not in the game as a character, she is being manipulated and her whole design was changed, she looks like Nina from Tekken. WTF. - BTW, the fact that Wesker had mind control over her created 1000 fics of sex

So that is it, my main problem here isnt Jill itself, but it’s the fact that they used her character as a boss even tho she is the heroine, she never appears in RE lore again until some guy inside Capcom said “Well people are asking about Jill so let’s place a file in Rev2 saying that she is in rehab”

The only time that she appears again is in a 3DS NINTENDO ONLY game, it felt that Capcom simply don’t care about her character.

By the way Revelations 1 is a great game and was adaptable some years later for PC and consoles

But you think that this is bad, wait until we arrive at RESIDENT EVIL 6

When I learned that Jill was not in RE6 I was mad... But after I played that game I said “thank you God” that game was bad, transformers kind of bad, it had bad writing, the lore was all over the place and Chris was the one that suffered the most in this game.

He was responsible for the death of an entire squad, suffered amnesia and people still wanted him in the command

THEY MADE HIM AN ALCOHOLIC

The golden boy of BSAA reduced to THIS.

By the way, the director said that HE WANTED TO KILL CHRIS IN THIS GAME to SUBVERT EXPECTATIONS - so if you liked Piers now that he died only because of that.

So now let’s analyse what we know:

The first 2 main characters are not well represented in media until RE6, they don’t know how to re introduce Jill in the games and Chris was reduced to a normal guy at a Russian bar;

But it gets worse...

Capcom LOVE Leon, we know that. he is always the hero, he is the protagonist in almost every movie and he is always the cool guy so when he get’s a new model, he looks like this:

But When Chris get’s a new face he look like this:

WHO DAFUQ ARE U, no offense to the model but he has NEGATIVE JAW LINE.

And still he doesn't look like Claire’s brother, there is no blue/green eyes and he looks younger that he was in 6 (and 6 still uses that ugly character model)

But let’s go in the lore- we HAVE 0 info on Jill in RE6 / RE7 and no sight of her in RE8

And speaking of which, they tried to make Chris the bad guy in the trailer so when we play we see “Ohhhh he was not the bad guy, that happened and that is why he did that”

But still...

If they are going to do that to his character don’t use this character, shit ! Do something with that Wesker’s son that made 0 sense in RE6 but leave Chris out of this - it really feels that they simply don’t know how to treat him right

And you may think that I may be complaining a lot because of his appearance

But this is him in RE8

(to me this is some random dude from Russia)

And this is him in RE:Verse (that is going to be release TOGETHER)

So this tells me that they have 0 clue of how to handle his looks

Jill got RE3Rmk but it felt like a cheap game compared to RE2Rmk where the original RE3 was SO MUCH BETTER

And this is bad because there are so many new fans joining the fandom only to see 2 great characters suffering from poor director’s choices.

I’m sorry about this rant, if you like Chris face and looks its okay, really, but dont tell me that Chris from 5/6/8 is the same from 1/CV and if you think im wrong about Jill its fine, but she is an amazing character that could have so much more impact in RE universe (I mean, she never even appeared in a RE movie - animations)

But it’s sad to see so many characters that receive good representation in media and good games/lore while Jill get’s almost none and Chris is handled like random face guy.

I was going to talk a little bit more about Rev 1 and RE Umbrella Chronicles but there is no need since Im mad right now and it seems that Capcom has 0 interest in making Code Veronica and Umbrella’s fall after that since their fav boy Leon need a rmk in RE4 even tho RE4 is not that old.

Bonus:

Fun fact: Chris served in the Air force, so yeah, to me even Tom Cruise looks more like Chris than Chris from the games

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snapdraqons · 3 years ago

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i see we are having very important nahyuta discussions right now

i honestly don’t know what i would expect if capcom tried to develop their character more. like, i want it so bad, I’m desperate for nahyuta content, but they handled them so poorly in aa6 that i dont think id like it. would they ignore his time under ga’ran? will they ignore their unconventional upbringing? will they ignore their trauma and their need for recovery? will they make them (more) unpopular with the fandom?

i, personally, am a bitter nahyuta truther. they probably weren’t taught how to control their emotions growing up (i love dhurke but sir your kids can cry), people they love keep disappearing, and i highly doubt their time under ga’ran was anything but grueling. and now, they’re likely hated by most of the people in khura’in. they either worked too close to the former tyrant, or helped take down the former queen. and what happens when you take an emotionally unstable, probably very traumatized 25 year old and make them reside over a country that looks down on them? you get a real bitter regent

i wonder so much about nahyuta’s past. how did they handle apollo being sent to america? how was their relationship with their father afterwards? did they like amara when she came back for that year? did they like rayfa? how did they do their prosecutorial studies? what were things like when they left? did they insult people because they had no outlet for their emotions, or was it due to influence from ga’ran? what happened to them under ga’ran? how many regrets do they have? when will they snap? i have so many questions, but I’m not sure i want the answers

YEAH SAME HERE. That kind of development honestly needs to happen over multiple games so they only way to truly develop him imo would be to bring Nahyuta back as either a main or secondary main character in a future game which I doubt is gonna happen.

Personally I think Nahyuta is very bad at handling/regulating their own emotions. They either repress everything or repress absolutely NOTHING which often presents itself as sudden moodswings and outbursts. And I don't think Nahyuta gets on all that well with Rayfa because a) a part of them is still bitter that Dhurke sent Apollo to America to protect him and not them and so being a sibling and a good influence feels kinda... wrong to them. And b) they wanted the life she got. Not necessarily the luxuries and royal treatment, but having a family and not being treated like a criminal.

Honestly I could go for years about Nahyuta's character bc they're so fascinating and complex and for once I think that's their character's downfall.

Also he/they/she Nahyuta rights.

#ace attorney #anon #nahyuta sahdmadhi #aa6 #soj spoilers

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boypussydilf · 2 years ago

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i know u asked for sherlock and iris for the character relationshjips ask game SO if someone else hasnt sent them yet do them but i want to hear you ramble abotu homumiko also. [holding you at gunpoint]

as you know i got a homumiko ask already but everyone look at it again “basil its long and incomprehensible and most of your followers dont even really know who these guys are” LOOK AT THEM. THEYRE KINDA WEIRD

ANYWAY !!!!!!! YAYYAYAYAYA IRIS AND SHERLOCK YAAAAAAAY. this post is probably gonna get long too so heres my eyecatch so people who dont wanna read all that are still forced to see them

describe their canon relationship/dynamic

tumblr is being buggy with this post.

God…. how do i…. they have so much going on …. lets start with the basics hes her dad. Obviously. thats her dad. he was handed a baby and just went Ok!!!!!!!! and took care of her forever. thats her dad. Iris’ main, initial frame of reference for The World and Being A Person is This Fucking Guy.

There is also the fact that thru most of the games she is not Calling Him her dad </3 consequences of. him telling her hes not her dad ansbJSHJSNSJSNSJSNWJS. even still as ryuu & susato say they have a parent child relationship … for the jokes abt iris being more lkke the parent of course which Is True and a Straightforward Joke But Still Really Funny. but he still is. like. The Dad Equivalent. Her Guardian. even when not actually Her Dad. they have a mutual duty of care. Sherlock makes sure they have money to buy food & Iris actually Makes Edible Food and thats about it you know.

they have the funniest fucking dynamic. Ever,. they treat each other like Equals. they talk to each other like Colleagues. They literally try to steal money from each other. iris bullies him all of the time and he also sort of bullies her back. Iris walks around loudly announcing embarrassing facts about him in public and Sherlock yells at her about it and no one feels bad and they love each other. and she kicks him. theyre so funny

Basically just. thats her dad. they are also best friends being each others constant companions for ten years (Because he raised her from birth). they steadfastly look out and care for each other. and every morning they wake up and try to invent new ways to be mean to each other

your ideal/headcanon version of it? how does it differ from how it is in canon & why is this your favorite version? any other alternate versions of it you enjoy?

in terms of Their Relationship Dynamic there is no way to improve upon it. there is nothing to change. theyre perfect. this is the best relationship ever. but i still of course have lots of headcanons about them. where do i even begin

for one thing as is probably already clear i thimk every day abt what capcom refuses to give us answers on: Iris’ Early Childhood and The Process Of Sherlock Raising Her. please i wanna know what that was like. And continues to be like tbh its just not something we see much bc its not relevant to ryuus side of things…… First of all: he has undeniably tried his best to take care of her and done an overall good job. look at her. Mikotoba would not have trusted sherlock with an entire fucking baby if he was not confident the man could like. Handle It. Successfully keep another human alive and make sure she comes out overall well adjusted and all that. But hes still. Sherlock Holmes (Ace Attorney Character). He. again. does not seem to have any perspective on what to prioritize. I just think he went “okay time to teach iris The Basics” and then jumped straight from “heres how to write your name” to giving her lectures on something he learned the other day about aerodynamics and skipped over a bunch of stuff in between and didn’t really realize until she, like, saw an owl and went UNAUTHORIZED FUCKING BEAST? because she was like 5 and had still never heard of an owl.

Also im glad everyone in the world independently got up and thought “he definitely took that baby to crime scenes” because he definitely took that baby to crime scenes. Like. As everyone has said 200 times. What the hell else is he gonna do? He has to take cases or he DIES. There is no one he is close enough to for him to go Hey take my baby for a while. He’s broke as fuck permanently he cant PAY someone to watch her. Come on 8 month old child who’s still figuring out how to, like, Exist, let’s go Solve A Mystery. I don’t think she’s ever, like, seen a dead body, though. It’s all in my head, you understand, I have the whole escalation of it in my mind - when shes a Really Tiny Baby he has to just focus on Watching Her and can only take the kind of cases that can be solved sitting in the living room (he is going insane), then when he gets past the “what if i stop paying attention to her for ONE SECOND and she EXPLODES” phase he can do stuff that actually requires Investigation, then the second she’s able to Talk he goes Yeah that probably means she can Help with investigations now. and shes iris so hes right. I think 1-5 is prrrrrrobably her first Murder Investigation though. shes a little girl! you don’t take a little girl to a murder scene! Except under special circumstances!

This veered in … some slightly different direction than just Their Relationship i guess but fuck dude it was fun. Like. I like them. I think about them. i think sherlock went oh god oh fuck i dont know what children are like whats good for children *thinks about him as a child* I WAS WEIRD WASNT I THAT WONT WORK *iris turns out to be Just Like Him* Oh thank god here 4 year old child take this chemistry set and scrap metal. Go wild.

what do you like about their relationship, why is it interesting or enjoyable to you?

I swear to god ive probably said this on 80% of these ask game responses: I like family. They family. all ace attorney games kind of have a Found Family cast in the end, but they dont generally refer to characters who dont have clear cut straightforward straight up family relationships As Family, except DGS, which has ryuu explicitly call them His Family, and, and, I don’t know that the themes of The Importance Of Family & Family Being Something You Can Choose play a huge role in the story of dgs itself in most places, esp the Chosen Family bit, but its THERE, in ryuu calling the gang his wonderful family & iris adopting him and susato as her siblings & mikotoba caring for asougi like his son and Most Prominently, Iris Calling Sherlock Her Dad. which i will elaborate on the importance of in a minute but anyway i just think theyre really cute and really funny

what about the individual characters involved? what does this relationship mean to them, what makes it unique among their relationships?

YOU REMEMBER THAT THING I SAID BRIEFLY IN THE HOMUMIKO ASK ABT MEETING SOMEONE RIGHT WHEN U REALLY NEED IT. *pulls out yet another pepe silvia style conspiracy board* Here i actually made a chart.

I don’t remember almost anything abt the mainline AA series, only remember this bc I’ve seen it mentioned so much, and don’t even remember it clearly enough to know for sure if it’s Dialogue From The Game or just Conclusions People Reached but you know that shit about, Phoenix gets disbarred and its A Bad Time For Him but its Less Bad Than It Could Have Been because at the same time he gets Trucy and now he has Trucy. Like. Same concept. “Accidental Child Acquisition leading to Better Ability To Cope With The Shit That Just Happened In Your Life” is more common than you might think apparently. Inspiring! Every Day This Man Holds Off Emotional Breakdown Until AFTER His Baby Is Fed

If i was ever going to say more about his side of things thanjudt. All That. i forgor. shes dotter. incontext the “i raised you well!!” line is just , a joke abt him being proud of her for something He Very Much Does Not Ever Do Himself but still like WAH . proud of dotter.

Anyway originally i was like, what the hell can I say about iris? That’s her dad and that’s about it. And then I went Simon are you fucking STUPID? THATS HER DAD. THATS THE POINT. God… oh my god …….

Basically!! Returning to the point about Choosing Who Your Family Is and how Sherlock & Iris and specifically Iris calling him her dad for the first time (since we met her) is the most prominent example in the game!!!

Iris’s Whole Deal™️ is she got her World Changed by finding out sherlock wasn’t her “real” dad and her dad was Some Guy She’s Never Met and now she goes then who the fuck IS my dad? Where do I come from? Who Am I? and her Search For Her Dad, Desire To Meet Him, & Attempt To Feel Closer To Him By Reading His Notes And Putting Herself In His Shoes is like. a big part of her identity. For like maybe almost half her life up to this point too!! And …… then she gets closer & farther away & closer & farther away and she decides Susie & Ryuu r her Siblings and somewhere in all of this. decides it doesnt matter quite That much who her “Real” Dad is because shes not defined by her biological father and she already. Has a dad. cries. And. And. And because of the time she spent Not Thinking Of Sherlock As Her Dad it means hes her dad ultimately because She Decided It . not bc he or anyone else said it should be like that but bc she decided he is her dad.

So like . you know. starts sobbing in the streets. anyway they r just both very very important to each other

favorite interaction they have in canon

First prize goes to the off-screen interaction Iris mentions in the credits where she gave him a note that just said like “thank you for everything daddy!” and he read it and started crying. Its like. The ONE thing about dgs2 i remembered with Clarity. in the years between my first & second times watching dgs i thought about it often and i still do.

Second prize goes to her going “oh its just a wax figure see *KICKS HIM AS HARD AS SHE CAN*” itsso fucking funny. that was not necessary. at all. she just wanted to kick him huh

favorite interaction they have in your head/a situation you want to put them in

FUCK UMMM. UHHHHH. i already kind of talked about it but even though i dont think its really even IMPLIED? that sherlock has ever taken her to Investigate A Case? she just stays at home generally? In my heart she goes with him and helps out somet8mes. i want to see it.

what else. obvious and not really the kind of thing id put in this category generally but like Iris finds out her dad was klimt when. hey fuckos!! When r u going to tell her !!!

alsgo i have a weakness for Older Iris content like ough my god 🥺🥺 ou my goed 🥺🥺😭 She growed. one day she will not be the most powerful 10 year old in the world she will be the most powerful 20 year old in the world. show me !! show me !! I want to see!! she is going to do so fuckinf much its unreal!!

Finally, i thought of this ages ago for reasons now forgotten to me and just remembered it today. sherlock & iris & date & mizuki hangout. tehyre *checks notes* girls who do violence on their dads sometimes and that’s about it but its funny right

In conclusion: kiss on top of iris little baby head. appreciate her

#this post took uhhh. LIKE 5 OR 6 HOURS TO MAKE .#MAYBE CLOSER TO 7??#i hit post limit. then ikept getting interrupted by other stuff. then i made the post very long #its. very long.#*iris voice* this is my cringe ass roommate who always breaks the dishes when he washes them #OH: IN BETWEEN THE VIOLIN THING (MENTIONED IN OTHER POST)#& JUST. LIKE. IN THE POSITION OF A DGS FAN HOW CAN U READ THE SH STORIES AND NOT SOMETIMES GO #‘LOL IRIS WROTE THIS’#ITS LIKE. LOL IRIS WRITES ABT SHERLOCK IN A WAY THAT MAKES HIM SOUND COOLER THAN HE IS #‘YOURE SO FUCKING LAME. DONT WORRY ILL MAKE PEOPLE THINK UR REMOTELY COMPETENT’#LOVE IT. LOVE HER #basilask #dgs from my brain

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biohazard2017 · 1 year ago

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ok so quite predictably i have a lot. and i mean a lot of opinions so i'm immediately putting this under a read more ^_^

so ill start w the things i most liked bc i honestly had quite a lot of fun with this movie !! i think character-wise rebecca was a standout. idk like she was handled so well especially compared to vendetta. every time she talked it felt incredibly in character. the little giggle in her voice when she started talking about chemistry. her little "don't die!!!" to leon. her va was so so cute it was great. also loved leon (except for well. you guys all know). he made such terrible horrible jokes that it really just loops back into meta-humor. it was great to see matt mercer again like ive gotten more used to nick but mercer was my favourite for a reason and he did deliver. i also didn't mind jill as much as i was worried about! i found her delivery quite fitting and i just like that this is clearly jill's movie. yes, she's w chris and claire for a good chunk and leon is always the poster boy for the cg movies but it really did feel like HER movie even if well the story was quite bad (which we will get to later). chris and claire were the only 2 leads that i found a little same-y like chris is chris and claire is claire it was cute seeing them together but it wasn't particularly special. also HATE that they are fully committed to keeping claire out of the big fight scenes its so annoying!!! let her be w the rest!! but she did get some fun action scenes at least which is already a step-up from id.

another thing i really liked was the action it was just SO fluid. already, vendetta's hallway fight scene doesn't even hold a candle to so many of the scenes in this one. i liked the prison hallway one bc it highlights all 3 charas' strengths incredibly fast almost IMMEDIATELY into the movie. leon and jill's teamup feels like a natural evolution directly from vendetta with them working so closely together (also can we talk about them fighting each other to a standstill im dying to talk about that move over chris). loved the final boss section too i like that it just gives them an excuse to just play around with weapons and have fun with it. there were so many good kills it just looks so impactful sorry i keep using adjectives when i dont have anything useful to add. ugh the "it has a trigger." then the fact that they need to double shoulder the gun and chris is facing backwards 😭 literally so funny

final thing i enjoyed was all the callbacks? admittedly sometimes they are very fanfictiony almost but a lot of the time i liked the mentions. especially LOVED the harvardville mention like that NEVER comes up in any media since degen and NOW they bring it back?? i find that so refreshing tbh !! and i liked how they used a bunch of old footage for the intro too, really was not expecting leon killing benford cutscene to come back!!

now i can stop sucking capcoms dick. ok so like i mean this has been talked about alot around release but oh my god why is jill looking like that !!!!!!!!!! its a little (miniscule) amount of consolation that 5make is pretty much confirmed so its not so much dissonance bw remake and og 5 appearance but still like what... is sje going to be wearing that stupid tank top with the plague doctor outfit??? what was the point of the tentacle bit 😭😭like it was so gratuitious..

and also like bro they need to stop writing villains for these movies . like they are just so bad. not one has even been Good in any capacity. sometimes dylan's dialogue is quite interesting (quite neutral about the weird shift Back to anticapitalist sentiment of the og games but from the villains' pov..........) and then he just keeps fucking talking and talking and its such a fucking slog to get through like shut the fuck up already! and maria was just there to beat up leon for a bit and unceremoniously die like what the fuck! it was such a good fight sequence and then it just .. ended so abruptly? she punched through concrete! and she dies like that??? i GET that we're supposed to realise leon's adaptability and versatility and his gaining the upper hand or whatever but like he gained the upper hand in the last 5 seconds of the fight and she is way more versatile than he ever could be like sorry just bc he cld notice rebar sticking right at her if he hit her exactly or whatever leon is not going to smash into a monitor display pull out the wires and use it as a whip to throw someone else around like she has him BEAT in full. i was fine w the fact that he started getting used to and being able to bear her attacks as it went on it just couldve ended so much better if it wasnt . so abrupt! honestly i think it was just a BAD matchup i think chris v maria would be way more interesting bc they have COMPLETELY diff fighting styles compared to leon whose strengths align with hers. and also the bitch comment was so unwarranted like normally i have no issue with anyone saying the word but when leon said it i actually shuddered like i was Not expecting it and it was just really bad especially for a character like maria who was only in the movies to be a sexy lady in a bodysuit like ... bro what.... ANYWAY

like i just watched it so i dont think ive developed any more complaints or whatever its just dude dylan sucks so so much OH I REMEMBER i also do hate so much of the dialogue surrounding dylan the fact that all the mcs can say to him is just "youre insane!" or "asshole!" or "stop!" its like i love jill but the fact that thats ALL she says even in her final kill its so boring theres no dynamic its so nothing. also in the beginning when i said i liked that it was jills story i mean that just shes the mc. i dont mean she has any real kind of great character arc bc it really feels she doesnt progress as the movie goes on. shes still jill, and i feel that was also the point of the movie (the whole we just get numb to it.. etc bit) but like no other cg movie has had a chr arc either anyway so yeah it doesnt matter its just a little weird for whats essentially a comeback movie for jill, not just supplementary material for one of the series leads like it is for all the other leon movies

but anyway its probably a 7/10 rn for me bc i just really really enjoyed the action setpieces they clearly had a lot of fun with the movie and the fact that there is only a little bit of 1 out of 6 big fight scenes that i dislike really attests to that. ok review over im gonna go play 999 now:)

im gonna finalky watch death island yayyy

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gross-gal · 4 years ago

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yo!! i dont know jackshit about Darkstalkers!! What's it about?? What do you like about it?? What do you NOT like about it?? Tell me alll!!!! (@gamer-gremlin-gf-ships)

AAAAAA THANK YOU @gamer-gremlin-gf-ships

SO. I’LL PUT THIS UNDER READ MORE BECAUSE THERE’S A LOT.

Darkstalkers is a fighting game developed by Capcom. The main gimmick is that, most of, the fighters are based off of horror archetypes. So ya got vampires, zombies, frankensteins, fishmen, ghosts, all that shit.

There isn’t really much story wise I can elaborate on since, fighting games don’t usually have that much of a story to begin with. BUT, in Darkstalkers 1 and 2, main story is that this big bad dude named Pyron kinda wants to determine if the Earth is worthy to be ruled under him or if he’ll destroy it. Pyron is a shape shifting alien dude from the planet, Hellstorm and he’s really looking for a good brawl so he goes and fights the most powerful Darkstalker, which is whoever you choose to play as.

Now then, to avoid confusion, Darkstalkers 1 and 2 (or Vampire Hunter/Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge) are basically the same game. 2 is more of an updated version of 1, has two new characters, better gameplay, and it also changes some part of the story because Demitri (the vampire dude) actually was the one who originally started the whole tournment thing in determining who was the most powerful and I think? Pyron kinda ends up in the way. In 2, it basically is changed to Pyron is the one that starts the tournament, and that’s the canonical version.

So 2 isn’t really that much of a sequel, while Darkstalkers 3 (or Vampire Savior) is an actual sequel to the series. This introduces the antagonist, Jedah Dohma, whose plot is that he wants to collect all the powerful darkstalker souls and put them into this big demon baby, which then be used as a vessel for him. Jedah’s whole thing is that he’s basically disappointed in what has become of the demon world (makai world) and decides that he’s going to annihilate both the demons and humans. He sees himself as a savior, and while there really isn’t a protag, Jedah kind of is considered to be one in 3.

NOW. WHAT IS A DARKSTALKER? It’s literally just...fucking monster? I guess? There really isn’t a specific definition but just know, everyone, besides B.B. Hood because she’s the only true human in the series, is a Darkstalker.

Just gonna get my problems out of the way. Obviously, the series has some sexual stuff, which is fine but it can get uncomfortable. Demitri is a pretty big example since he literally has an ability that just involves transforming the opponent into a younger, more desirable person so that he can drain their blood? I won’t go to into it since it’s gross but yeah. Then of course there’s Lilith and yeah...REALLY WISH THEY DIDN’T MAKE HER LOOK LIKE THAT BECAUSE SHE’S A PRETTY COOL CHARACTER.

Darkstalkers also doesn’t offer much as far as a story, this is sort of good because it offers a lot of freedom as far as writing, but to be honest? A lot of stuff which tries to elaborate on the Darkstalkers lore or whatever, KIND OF SUCKS. I myself, am not into the Udon comics or the mangas, the OVA also doesn’t offer much of a great story. Which is a shame because Darkstalkers has a lot of potential but so many attempts, just kinda fail because they miss the point in the series. Udon and the Vampire Savior manga in particular because they take the series way too seriously or just characterize really strangely? The OVA probably offers the best in terms of story but it’s not even much because the only actual good and satisfying one, is Donovan’s story. His is the only one that actually has a conclusion. Otherwise, the OVA suffers from poor pacing, lots of exposition, or just OOC moments. LIKE??? REALLY DOESN’T MAKE SENSE AS TO WHY FELICIA GETS ALONG WITH ZABEL OR MORRIGAN ENDING UP WITH DEMITRI?

And then I guess a more minor complaint. Darkstalkers has a very specific style, I really think the series look best in the first two games and in the OVA. I personally am not a big fan of the character art in 3 jdskal

NOW FOR THE POSITIVES.

I CANNOT EMPHASIZE ENOUGH HOW MUCH I ADORE THE ART AND ANIMATION IN THE SERIES????

The main artists for the series are Bengus (Gouda Cheese) and Daigo Ikeno. Bengus really fucking nailed how the series should look. It’s got that perfect balance of the gothic, sensual aesthetic with exaggeration and fuckin weirdness of the series. Darkstalkers is a series that completely embraces it’s wacky side and just how campy it’s influences are. I mostly love Bengus’ earlier works from 1 and 2. Daigo’s stuff is much more casual and less elaborate compared to Bengus’ works but I kinda love that, he’s really great at showing off the characters in more casual situations and showing off their goofier sides. I’ll share some of my favorite pieces at the end.

OH GOD. AND HOW CAN I NOT BRING UP THE ANIMATION???

While I wouldn’t say it’s as fluent as Street Fighter Alpha 3′s sprites, because Darkstalkers is able to be more creative with it’s moves, the results are some super wacky and fun animation. Darkstalkers animators heavily referenced old Looney Tunes and Hanna Barbera cartoons when it came to animating. I really don’t know a whole lot of fighting games, especially from Capcom, that look the way Darkstalkers looks. And a lot of that comes from the fact that Darkstalkers isn’t very limited. Characters can launch missles, fireballs, fucking blood?. Characters can extend or manipulate their body. Or just do weird shit like transform characters into basketballs, make characters perform in a rhythm game?, A CHARACTER STRAIGHT UP USES HIS ASS CHEEKS TO GRAB YOU AND SUMMON LIGHTNING?? Everything is super fucking wild and that’s what makes the series.

A lot of people say Darkstalkers needs to be gorey and sexual but that’s really not what the series is about. Yes, Darkstalkers is def sensual but it also really doesn’t take itself seriously. That’s what so many people miss. And honestly? Even though it was terrible, the American cartoon ends up being the most accurate to the source material because it gives no fucks and so much weird shit just happens.

Another thing I love about Darkstalkers is how much it subverts it’s characters and just how creative they got. You have an Australian zombie rockstar, a catlady that’s also an idol and a nun??, a demon possessed samurai ghost armor guy. The character design is genuinely fucking brillant and not at all what you’d expect to get when given the idea for monster characters. I would talk about the characters but you see how long this post is starting to get.

And I haven’t talked that much about gameplay but Darkstalkers feels fucking great. If you’re curious about which game to get into, absolutely go with 3/Vampire Savior. It feels great, combo inputs are relatively simple, you can straight up beat the game just by button mashing, and no character really feels too similar. It’s also a very fast game too, if you ever watch tournaments, they go by so fast and when you play it, you’re very much engaged. It’s a game that requires a lot of attention and I enjoy that. I also have to mention this but, pretty much every character has their own unfair, bullshit tactic that, if you plan on getting good, will require you to figure out how to avoid depending on what character you use. There’s a sorta popular joke with the game that, it’s balanced if all the characters are broken. I’ll admit, probably not the best game for someone like me that sucks as far as remembering stuff and being able to plan ahead, but I still have lots of fun with the game!

I really didn’t expect to become as engaged in the series as I did but there is a lot to appreciate about Darkstalkers. It’s unfortunate to because, sadly, Darkstalkers likely will never get another game.

While the series is technically popular, it’s still way too niche compared to most fighting games. It just never had the same impact as other fighting games, and ultimately, no matter how good those games feel to play, there’s always shit like Marvel vs Capcom that just is more well known and features more stuff that just is what people prefer going to. I think Capcom will pretty much stick with having Darkstalkers characters appear in crossover games vs actually giving the franchise another game

They tries reviving it with Resurrection, which was a re-release of the games on Xbox and Playstation, but it hardly even sold that many copies. Which is where the phrase “Darkstalkers are not Dead” originated from, a phrase that has become a joke now in the fighting game community. Even if they were to revive the series, it’d be difficult recapturing that same vibe since most of the original crew are working on completely separate projects. There’s also a part of me that does fear the idea of another game because of how it’ll be handled. I’ve heard people mention possibly having the Skullgirls team develop or maybe Arc Systems, I just don’t want a lot of the charm to be lost in a sequel.

Since a fighting game isn’t really possible, I do hope for maybe a show or comic series that explores the characters and story more.

My brain is kinda blanking rn but yeah. I just fucking love this series a lot. I hope maybe someday I can contribute something great to this franchise and I hope you listened to me ramble about it.

#i am so fucking sorry #but thank you djsakljdskalda #Anonymous

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getaroomyouheck · 6 years ago

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Freakin every V fan who saw the final boss fight leak vid be like "V's dead bruh!" Ok look, if the only thing we have is that final boss fight video, there's still a huge chunk of plot missing. Did I miss something!? Because everyone and their fucking mom is so sure V's done for! Look, until I get the game and see the full story, I'm still holding out hope for V. We all should. (BTW you might wanna hide this under a read more for people who haven't been spoiled)

we literally just have like a chunk of mission 20 that leaked. we still dont have any goddamn knowledge on mission 12 through 19, and any epilogue/post credits scene that could give a whole boon of knowledge that makes this revelation of “V is vergils human side” both actually work and be legitimately cool. and like you said, the fact all these V fans are writing off his character and going “CAPCOM AND ITSUNO ARE DEAD TO ME IM TAKING V FROM THEM” based on a few images + 6 minutes of gameplay that don’t have any context or buildup is a bit silly in my opinion. once we have the full game and we can fully see how this reveal is handled, then you can take it as you will

cause it seems like people dont get that even bad ideas can be done well in execution. a bad joke told well can get a huge laugh from someone. ideas that seemingly would feel cop-out or hollow could in actual context be a lot stronger than they are just on paper

and don’t get me wrong, despite my calm tone i am disappointed about this idea. i really wanted V to be connected to mundus or a clay golem or even like sparda or something. but i have faith that the full game will let this idea breathe and feel less cheap, and that there will be more of V we’ll find later like in a post-credits scene or something that we’ve yet to see

itsuno and bingo aren’t dumb people, they know how to write and direct good stories. i have faith

#ask me shit dudes #anonymous #devil may cry 5 #dmc5 #devil may cry #dmc #devil may cry 5 spoilers #dmc5 spoilers #V #vergil

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lilietsblog · 6 years ago

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ehhh i just feel that the fact that the only character with prosopagnosia is both a murderer and killed off is a problem, and the fact that it was manipulated and used by ga'ran without that fact ever being outright criticized is. not good on capcoms part. i agree with you abt uendo tho, i disliked that he was outed against his will but i did really like that he wasnt the killer and that he was handled in a largely respectful way

SOJ SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT

do you think they really needed to criticize Garan specifically for exploiting her husband’s mental health and not just, y’know, EVERY SINGLE OTHER ASPECT OF THE SITUATION, LIKE HOW SHE KILLED HIM

one thing about how aa treats neurodiversity that I really respect is how it doesnt Make It A Thing. nobody ever comments on how fucking autistic Manfred is, nor on how fucking autistic Miles and Franziska are. its just a background thing evened out between villain and protagonist so theres no stereotype or trope playing out smoothly in either direction

Neurodivergent People Are Uwu Babies Who Need To Be Protected And Can Do No Harm is not an approach I’m particularly fond of, because of both abstract reasoning reasons and personal experience reasons, and AA does NOT do that

Garan made use of Inga’s prosopagnosia, Rayfa’s insecurity, Nahyuta’s desire to do his best by his country and people, Amara’s Bad Decision Making Skills, Dhurke’s desire to be the most dramatic possible at all times and her country’s love and mourning for her sister absolutely equally, and THAT is equality we deserve. it was Just Another Aspect Of The Situation, not Today On This Very Special Episode Of Ace Attorney, and I like that way of handling it a lot actually??

I know of absolutely no established trope or stereotype that equates prosopagnosia with being murderous. In fact I know of absolutely no established trope or stereotype that acknowledges prosopagnosia exists at ALL, which makes every representation good representation. not all mental health conditions are equal, like how people who wear glasses and people with allergies usually don’t become targets for violent ableism? (as far as I know)

Uendo being outed against his will was… again, a lesser evil kind of thing? esp compared to the disaster that was Robin in Academy lmao that was a horrible trainwreck on nearly every level. but Uendo really should not have lied on the stand & tried to frame Bucky for the crime? their secret was Intensely Relevant to the events, and it’s not like they got any blowback for it? the only reason they werent admitting it was bc they were trying to protect Owen, and also because they dont just go around announcing to everyone that they’re DID any more than Apollo goes around announcing he’s gay (even though he absolutely is) (uh excuse me for getting distracted for a second here)

if anything there was fucked up it was the cheerful ‘oh you get blackout drunk from a manju bun! let’s test that!’ like… uh. Athena that sounds slightly unethical. but also they did not protest at any point and also it really was fucking relevant af to the case? and being easily intoxicated is not a DID relevant thing so thats a completely separate issue either way

like, this is not like ‘also the witness actually has girl parts not that anyone cares but lets just bring that up for no reason at all’, this is like ‘also the witness was the victim’s boyfriend which explains like half the case and also why they are so nervous on the stand’, like as parallel to ‘actually the witness is the victim’s little sister’ (oh no! they outed Dahlia! who was in witness protection or something, Miles acknowledged that the reason he allowed her to lie in court about her identity was bc she had apparently good reasons to hide it) (but Mia gets no blowback for outing her, possibly because there were good fucking reasons for it in context!)

btw AA also had earlier DID kinda-representation that I took note of and overall liked: Ben and Trilo. there the judge DID go ‘uh who IS the witness?’ but then Franziska was like ‘just let it go your honor the witness is the witness and we know exactly who they are’ because she is my precious daughter who is all that is good in the world. and it wasnt like GOOD good, because the case was low key poking fun at them being weird, but it was also on the background of literally everyone else in the circus also being weird in other ways, so it didn’t really single them out?

and then they looked back and went ‘lets do the same thing but better’ and boy they fucking did

(but god i just cant let go of the first point I replied to there. DID GARAN STRIKE YOU AS PERHAPS A SYMPATHETIC CHARACTER. SOMEONE WHOSE ACTIONS THE NARRATIVE MEANT YOU TO APPROVE OF. CRITICIZING ATHENA’S ACTIONS IN OUTING UENDO MAKES SENSE BECAUSE SHE’S A PROTAGONIST AND WE ARE MEANT TO IDENTIFY WITH AND APPROVE OF HER. GARAN IS LITERALLY THE FUCKING VILLAIN SHE HASNT DONE A SINGLE THING THAT WASNT EVIL FOR THE ENTIRE CASE WHY WOULD YOU WANT HER SEPARATELY CALLED OUT FOR THIS SPECIFICALLY. ITS NOT THAT SPECIAL COMPARED TO THOUSANDS DEAD BECAUSE OF MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE)

#caps lock /#ace attorney #spirit of justice #soj spoilers #representation #neurodiversity #this is Good Shit anon thanks for letting me ramble about this #i have Strong Opinions about what representation should look like and i want to share them with the world #anon #asks

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pagutheshadydealer · 4 years ago

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Ok, so one thing I want to ask is why opinions are allowed to go so far into judgement territory that people are bashing on things they refuse to have any other knowledge on.

Cases in point

A friend of mine hates the company of capcom and monster hunter world. Not because it's a bad game but because the talking animation doesn't match up with the dialogue in the cutscenes and he therefore cannot play the game and hates the company because It doesnt matter if they can make the game look as good as it does or how successful it became, they can match up the animation with the dialogue. Normally I would agree but with how much hate the hate filled opinion has, its fucked up on so many levels. Plus I know that companies are sometimes rushed or other things happen so they cant get everything they want to do in the game sometimes. Whether or not a game has a very minor animation issue, which monster hunter worlds dialogue not matching up with the talking animation on their cutscenes is, its very minor most likely ignorable so in conclusion. Get the fuck over it, play and enjoy the game and have fun

Sherwin-williams and firing a guy because he was actually passionate about his job. Ok I have never been a fan of Sherwin-Williams or other similar companies because I never got into paints that much when I was growing up but fuck that company for doing that. That's just wrong. People are allowed to like and be passionate about their own jobs. hell that's a employees that will be one of the best. And the fact that same employee got hired by another company... *chuckles* well, sherwin-Williams get fucked

Same friend going absolutely batshit crazy and telling me I dont know biology because dbs gohan is stupidly weak looking when wearing his tracksuit. Yes I got into an actual argument with the guy over this. He literally refused to believe that clothes, posture, angles, lighting and more affect the look of a character and then tried telling me that atrophy of muscles doesnt work for saiyans because they are built to be muscular and such. Ok some counter points

Super saiyan bulks goku up a bit to handle the new power

Gohan bulks up considerably more when first achieving super saiyan 2

Goku and gotenks bulk up even more due to super saiyan 3 because its power based and not balanced. That's why the muscles are so big

GOHAN IS A HALF HUMAN HALF SAIYAN HYBRID! AGAIN HALF HUMAN HALF SAIYAN!!! If you honestly believe that being only half human doesnt mean shit in db/dbz/DBS then clearly gohan will get sick and die at any age from any space disease, toxin, atmosphere etc, no matter what his half saiyan biology says...oh wait it does matter, humans are one of the most adaptable races out there. Not only that but being half saiyan would bring massive benefits to a half human being, like resistence to diseases and such. Also broly and kale (especially kale) look and are positively meek compared to regular saiyans but have completely different transformation and a demonic inner personality that can affect their consciousness.

Yes clothes can make someone look bigger or smaller depending on the type of clothes used. Body builders will use tight fitting clothes that emphasise their bodies while others will wear dresses and tuxes that will make them look regal and powerful. Yes angles can make something look completely different because have you ever seen fun house mirrors? Yes lighting can make something look different, lighting can make something look demonic and evil or cheerful and good. Posture can effect someone or something as well, take mr crocker from fairly odd parents for example he is very creepy looking and obsesses about fairies. Part of that is due to his posture. Posing also effects, do a superman pose with your hands balled into fists and at your hips with your legs spread a bit apart. It makes you appear heroic.

Literally these are things that I have experienced or witnessed in life in the last 3 months or so I could say more but not sure how long the word count is so this is all you are gonna get. Have a good day/night. I would love to see comments and thoughts on this. However fair warning in advance if you disrespect me or my life or anybody else in those same categories for any reason you can come up with i will block your ass either respect and be kind to others or dont and be blocked. Your choice

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asiplaythem · 7 years ago

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Devil May Cry: Series Retrospective- "DmC: Devil May Cry"

At long last, I sat down and played DmC: Devil May Cry. Well and truly, the dust has settled, the dead horse has been beaten into compost, and the reactionary rages and defenses have died down. And, for myself, I think my fanboy passion for the series has subsided.

A weak Special Edition, a pachinko machine and a bad MvC model later, I hold out no honest hope for the Devil May Cry franchise now. We’ll always have the Temen-ni-Gru Dante...but we’re not getting back together, lets face it.

So now, when I look at Ninja Theory’s protagonist, who I will still refer to as Donte, the fresh insult that he used to be is now replaced with a genuine, tryhard, grittiness that just seems cute in an “ah, bless” kind of way. He’s no longer the sour white whale that ate my favourite character and franchise, he’s just a little fish who flops around in a harmlessly funny way.

....before the massive flaws of the game come forth.

This review is based on the PS3 launch version and does its best to criticize it on its own merits/failings, not merely on fan insult or in comparison to the previous games. But it is after all called “Devil may Cry”, so its existence as part of a wider franchise isn’t ignored either.

Also, fair warning, this is going to be long as hell. Which is suitable, because it feels like hell sometimes...

Technical Qualities

The engine/optimization is dogshit.

Ninja Theory infamously rejected Capcom’s offer to translate their wunderengine, MT Framework, into English so that they could use it. Instead the team built DmC: Devil May Cry using Unreal Engine 3, which was already starting to look dated by 2010 when the game was announced. For perspective, Unreal Engine 4 was revealed to the public before DmC even came out. The likely reason Ninja Theory chose to stick with Unreal was because of a developer kit popular with young game creators. Unreal 3 was a ubiquitous engine in the last gen of consoles, being the backbone of games like Bioshock: Infinite and the Batman: Arkham series. But you’ll be hard pressed to find any games using it that were as fast paced as the Devil May Cry series.

Off the top of my head, games that use Unreal 3 usually have collision and texture pop-in problems. This is less of an issue in first person or isometric games when player movement and camera angles/viewable space are restrained, but it’s disastrous for something like DmC with its wide angle camera, large open areas, dense enemy count and fast player movement.

On the very first mission, in no more than 2 minutes of having control, Donte got stuck in a wall as I tried to go through the level like a normal player. This was followed by hideous amount of texture pop-in, audio glitches that muted parts of the soundscape, a couple of attacks that didn’t connect with enemies when they should have, and loading times out the arse.

A nasty little secret I only found out from replaying it first hand was that many of the mini-cutscenes (like when Donte looks at the Hunter demon hop around buildings, or does a backflip as he collects his guns) are secretly loading screens, unskippable until the loading operation is completed. All of which are frustrating to have to sit through in such a fast paced game. The way they make such a deal out of the same, generic enemy spawning in by giving it a dramatic close-up every time feels patronizing on repeat fights. “OOOH look! It’s a flying thing again!”. Yeah, no game, these things are easy to kill and I know you’re covering up something with this. Nice try.

Without seeing the development build firsthand, I can’t say for certain why it ran so badly. The release of the Definitive Edition for PS4/XBONE implies that it was a hardware limitation...but....like....that’s what optimization is for; making games run well on older hardware. More on this later, but design choices in level layouts, for instance, can remedy this. You can, for instance, segment levels in a way that stops you from seeing large areas at a single moment, reducing how much the consoles needs to render and thus cutting down load times.

Instead, what we largely got were huge foggy rooms and camera lens flares there to hide unloaded textures. The problem then is that it just, in my opinion at least, doesn’t look very good. Think of how Silent Hill 2 and 3 manage to still look so good due to how they segment rooms with doors you can’t see beyond. Or how the use of fog doesn’t cover up anything that you’re supposed to be looking at. And how they manage to have shorter loading times for it, a whole generation of consoles in the past.

Another trick is to “hard bake” lighting effects into the level’s textures themselves, rather than relying on extra shader operations. It’s more taxing on hardware to emulate, say, the actual light physics of a red spotlight instead of just making the textures of the walls and floor red, using trickery to make it seem like there’s a functioning red light there. Open world games generally don’t have this option, but with Devil May Cry, which is a linear series with rarely changing environments, you can use trickery like this effectively. Instead, DmC has more shaders -many of which look terrible in cutscenes- than it can handle.

Ninja Theory did a bad job of optimizing their game for their primary hardware. Even with the update there were visual problems, audio glitches and collision bugs throughout the entire game. It’s far from unplayable, but it’s ropey for a AAA game.

Level Design

Before I get into the artistic choices, I want to take a moment to look at the more technical, grounded aspects of how Ninja Theory designed levels.

Most of the previous Devil May Cry games are economic with their level design, reusing areas multiple times over with remixed enemy layouts and the occasional change in lighting, music and even textures. This cuts down on development time, saves disc space, and allows the designers to really put care into each individual location. Resident Evil, the Souls games, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution are other good examples.

DmC had potential for this with its “living city” concept. The best use of this concept is with Mission 2: Home Truths, where Donte visits his and Vurgil’s gigantic childhood home. As you backtrack into familiar hallways and foyers, the corruption of Mundus’ influence causes walls to crack open, pathways to change shape and different enemies to spawn. It’s a great (re)use of assets that trip up your expectations as a player the first time around. It also uses some Metroidvania style locked doors and obstacles which you need certain abilities/weapons to traverse. The unfortunate limitation of that is that you can literally fly through some levels and skip entire sections of the game upon a replay; Mission 3 requires you to unlock the Air Dash move in order to clear a gap that appears early on, but you’ll already have it on a replay, turning a 20~ minute level into a 3~ minute one.

Sequence breaking like this doesn’t happen in any huge way though, due to how each level is an entirely separate area of its own. Likewise, most of these ability/weapon barriers lead to optional bonus areas that are slightly off the beaten path.

Linear level design isn’t inherently bad, but in this case I think it was a huge missed opportunity. Not only is there a parallel real world vs Limbo premise that has Donte shift from a greyscale, mundane city into a colourful, chaotic image of itself, that Limbo dimension has the ability to change in real time. If the level designers allowed players to shift from dimension to dimension in-game, a la Soul Reaver, or if they had just played up the “living city” concept in a more interactive way, the city would have been much more interesting and, ironically, feel much more alive than it does. Instead we got a linear, albeit pretty, collection of corridors with very little off the beaten path. DmC incentivizes exploration by hiding collectables, but “exploration” ultimately means turning left where you should turn right to find a Lost Soul behind a bin.

One place where they ALMOST got it right is the first Slurm Virility factory level. After a cutscene showing a mixing room, Donte and Kat break from the tour, slowly jog down some empty, boring hallways in to an equally empty and boring warehouse. Dante can’t attack or jump in this section, and there is absolutely nothing to interact with. It’s an unfortunately uninteresting forced walking section, only one small step above being an unskippable cutscene. Kat then sprays her squirrel jizz magic circle on the ground, Donte enters the Limbo version of the level, the room expands and the crates become platforms, and the level really begins from there. For reasons I never understood, Donte then has to take a huge route up sets of boxes and across dozens of different rooms to circle back on the way he came in. On the way back, he backtracks down the Limbo version of the boring hallways of before, except now they’re slightly less boring, with a few enemies to fight and moving walls and floors. Then you get to the mixing room (which is only shown in a cutscene) for a brawl, before moving on.

The reason this didn’t work as well as it could have are twofold. 1: You only see the real world version of a tiny portion of the level, and 2: said portion is boring as fuck and you don’t interact with it in any meaningful way. But hey, at least the idea was there.

Moments where the living city concept is pushed to the side for more one-off but more effectively done ideas can be found in the upside-down prison, the short prelude to the Bob Barbas fight and Lilith’s rave.

The upside-down prison starts off fairly strong, tapping into one of those childhood ideas we all idly wondered about; what if gravity suddenly shifted? The level starts off strong and has moments throughout that give a trippy sense of vertigo. Mostly this is with car and train bridges, but unfortunately loses the point as it progresses. Because the prison isn’t just upside-down, but is also in Limbo, gravity is already unreliable and the bottomless pit below the floor already looks like the sky. Similarly with the lead up to the boss fight with Poison that has you run “down” a vertical pipe, it all looks floaty and weird by default, making further attempts to be floaty and weird just seem...normal. Likewise, the prison is mostly comprised of bland, urban and industrial textures, completely interchangeable with any old warehouse. You quickly forget that you’re upside-down at all.

The setting also well outstays it’s welcome, taking up 4 entire levels to itself with not enough ideas to justify it. There’s even one moment where, after meeting Fineas, you’re told you need to follow a flock of harpies to find their lair....even though their lair is a completely linear set of halls...That says it all really; there was a fun idea in here, but it was executed without the same creativity.

Following that is the tragically short Bob Barbas prelude. THIS is one of the single most interesting concepts in level design I have ever seen. Seriously. I cannot think of any other game that took news graphics and idents and turned them into platforming sections. Even moments during the fight where Donte is dropped into news chopper footage manage to do something brilliantly original, stylish and funny. But as quickly as it came, it’s gone before you know it. It’s a fucking crime that the previous 4 levels didn’t use the same concept to break up the monotony of their urban corridors. They could have had Donte teleport around chunks of the level using the various TV screens with Bob Barbas propaganda on them, hopping across idents until he got to the other side. Shame.

Next up, almost in a moment of clarity from the designers when they realized that could do digital environments and cheesy tv show graphics in their game more than once, we have Lilith’s nightclub. Again, much more interesting than the living city stuff, albeit a bit harsh on the eyes with its lighting effects. There’s not much to say about it beyond “it looks cool”, but it’s worth mentioning that it feels much more focused and fully utilized than the upside-down prison. All in all. the level design in DmC is at odds with itself, marked by its lost potential. The concepts are interesting, but the execution is almost always lackluster, favouring hand-holdy linear hallways with “cinematic” qualities over more interactive, open spaces with a sense of place. For a game that, pre-release, seemed to want to show us a more fleshed out world than previous games, it winds up as little more than a flat backdrop.

But oh well, DMC is all about the action happening center stage, right?

Combat

Combat in DmC is a mix bag.

The number of different attacks available and Donte’s versatility at chaining moves across 5 different weapons is pretty great. I’m a fan of how you can swap special pause combos across your alternate weapons; two quick hits with Rebellion, a pause, then a final triple smash with Arbiter takes a little extra skill to pull off but rewards you with a faster combo than if you just used Arbiter alone. Likewise, little tweaks like how fast Drive can charge now and how it does actual damage unlike Quick Drive in DMC4, or how you can hold Million Stab for longer, are all mostly fun changes. I tend to have a lot of fun with Osiris and find it to be the most versatile weapon for pulling off different combos. Its ability to charge up the more hits it delivers is a good incentive to hook in as many enemies as possible too, even if it means its uncharged state doesn’t do enough damage. Aquila is a fun supplementary weapon, mostly good for distracting one enemy with the circle attack and pulling the rest into range for Osiris. Eryx, however, is rubbish. Its incredibly short range, long charge times and weak damage output really throw it onto the trash pile when Arbiter is right beside it. Also, personal taste, but it just looks stupid. It’s like a slimy set of Hulk Hands. And they don’t even yell “HULK SMASH” when you attack. Previous DMC gauntlets all include a gap-closing dive attack to put you in enemy range, but the Demon Grapple doesn’t work the large enemies you’ll want to use it against. More on that in a bit.

Guns are mostly pointless. Donte can move laterally so much easier than before that long range combat is redundant. Charge shots with Ebony & Ivory are like Eryx in that they take too long to charge and don’t do enough damage to be worth the wait. Also, because you need to be in a neutral, non-demon non-angel, state to fire them, charging them up while you wail on someone only works if you limit yourself to Rebellion. Switching to Demon or Angel weapons resets the charge and limits you to a grapple move.

Which leads to another problem; 4 of your 5 weapons disable the use of guns. I mean, you’re not missing out on much by the end anyway because the guns are boring and ineffectual to use against all but one enemy (the Harpy), but it feels like a mistake. They literally give you guns in cutscenes as an afterthought. Like when Vurgil goes “oh yeah, have this, it’ll kill the next few enemies really quickly then sit in your back pocket for all eternity thereafter”. Donte never feels like he’s earning these guns like he earns the melee weapons, and they never seem to be worth a damn in gameplay.

The grapples are more useful but, again, having two different types feels redundant in combat. Large enemies can’t be pulled towards you, so why not do what DMC4 did and have one grapple that does both jobs; pull small enemies towards you, pull yourself towards larger enemies? The end result in either scenario is to get in melee range, so it shouldn’t make that much of a difference. Considering Aquila has a special attack to pull enemies in, why not offload those moves to the other weapons too? If you want to keep both pull-in and pull-towards moves in combat, why not give, say, Eryx a special pull-in attack so you can swap back to guns easier?

In short; while the combat is versatile and very satisfying to pull off combos with, large parts of it feel badly thought out. The moves and weapons that end up being useless most of the time have enemies spawn after you unlock them, just as an excuse to show how they work.

The infamous “demon attacks for red enemies, angel attacks for blue enemies” gimmick actually wasn’t as bad as I expected. Until I had to fight a Blood Rage and a Ghost Rage at the same fucking time. I don’t think I need to get into it due to how many other people have complained, but it was just fucking infuriating to say the least.

Okay, so.....Devil May Cry 3 did it better. Most people don’t seem to know this, but DMC3 gave you damage bonuses if you used the right weapon against the right enemies, signified by a subtle particle effect. Nowhere in the enemy or weapon descriptions does it explain this, but if you use your head (or just experiment) you can generally figure it out. Beowulf is a light weapon, Doppelganger is a shadow monster, using light on it does extra elemental damage signified by a flash effect with each hit. Cerberus is an ice weapon, Abysses are liquidy enemies, so using ice on it freezes them, signified by an icicle effect. etc But most importantly; it never STOPS you from using the “wrong” weapon against enemies. I don’t think I need to go into how annoying it is when your combat flow is interrupted by your angel weapon PINGing off a red enemy, but god damn it.

Credit where credit is due; Ninja Theory did emphasize the right part of DMC’s combat when they opted to focus on combos over balance. Both 3 and 4 had broken combos and attacks that skilled players could easily pull off, but they would make combat boring and the games all emphasized an honour system to prevent abuse. If you were good enough to use Pandora to break enemy shields in 4, you were good enough to not abuse it.

Then again, a games combat is only as good as its enemies.

Enemies/Bosses

So it’s a real shame then that enemies and bosses don’t push you hard enough.

The AI is atrocious. NO hack n’ slash should have two hardcore enemies accidentally kill each other without you noticing. The mixing room in the Slurm levels pits you against two Tyrants/the big fat dudes who charge at you. There’s an easy-to-avoid pitfall in the middle of this room. Once, on hard mode no less, they spawned in as usual and one accidentally nudged the other into the pit, insta-killing him while I literally stood still and watched...

Most regular man-sized enemies (Stygians, Death Knights, and their variations) have a common problem of just not attacking first, opting to side step around you forever until you run at them. Luckily there usually is one aggressive enemy mixed in there, like the flying guys with guns or the screamy-chainsaw men, so you’ll be forced to dodge into their range, but it’s embarrassing when they’re isolated. You’re left standing there, charging a finishing attack with Eryx like you have your dick in your hand, and these things are just strafing around you, doing nothing. So you miss with Eryx, step forward, and anti-climatically twat them about with Rebellion just to get it over with.

At first I thought this combat shyness was a design choice, but then it happened with the final boss, revealing it to be a pathfinding bug. But more on that later...

So yes, the red/blue enemy gimmick is bullshit and breaks the flow of a room-sweeping combo you have going, but it actually works really well with the Witch enemy who hangs back, projecting shields onto other enemies while she snipes at you from a distance. She’s annoying to hunt down when you’re dealing with 10 other enemies, so you have to prioritize whether you want to plough through them first or clumsily chase her down first. It’s a nice dynamic to fights, adding that extra layer of strategy to mix things up in a less punishing way.

The main difference with the Witch and the other colour coded enemies is that the Witch gives you options. Blood/Ghost Rages do not, and make fights involving them feel like complete chores. You’ll find the one tactic that works, then rely on it every time.

No, the most egregious enemies were the bosses.

All of them, every single one, was terrible. Not including the Dream Runner mini-bosses, there was a total of 6, less than any of the other DMCs, which makes how sloppily designed they were all the more horrendous. Every single boss is formulaic, partitioned out into “segments” cut up by mini cutscenes that have Donte do something sassy when he works them down enough. But each of those segments tend to have Donte repeat the same, boring, tired tactic until the fight is over. Bob Barbas is the worst example; jump over his beams, use that one Eryx attack to slam into the nonsensical floor buttons, wail on him for a third of his health bar, kill 10 minor enemies in his news world, repeat two more times.

No matter what difficulty you’re on, these bosses never manage to be a challenge due to how placid they are. They will always accommodate their little “formula” you need to solve to beat them.

It’s baffling, because the previously mentioned Dream Runner mini-bosses are great. They’re aggressive, reactive, open to almost any combo you can outwit them with, and don’t force you to repeat the same set of steps in every encounter.

Vurgil on the other hand....

So, here we are, the grand finale. The ultimate evil has revealed itself, and it’s your own brother! You’re clearly a badass because you just took down Satan himself along with his army, so surely the only thing left that could challenge you is your more experienced twin.

Well, he would, if his AI didn’t start the show by consistently suffering from that same pathfinding bug that makes minor enemies interminably strafe around you. So far so good for my first playthrough. So I attack him, maybe hit him 5 times before a min-cutscene rears its head because I’ve suddenly made it into the next stage. Same thing happens once or twice. Then, somehow, Vurgil’s model freezes in the air during one of his attacks. He hangs there indefinitely until I attack him again. Then, at the end of the fight where he’s summoned a clone (because he can do that apparently, not that he’s ever so much as referenced the fact) so his real self can take a knee and heal, I’m supposed to use Devil Trigger to move him out of the way and finish the job (though, I don’t understand why the real Vurgil isn’t also thrown into the air). I do so, but the clone lingers on the ground for a moment, trying to attack me before just zipping into the sky; another bug. I attack the real Vurgil, but nothing happens at first. I keep wailing on him, hoping that one of my attacks will eventually collide and then, -Scene Missing-, the final cutscene of the battle plays.

Do I need to say any more? Do you see what a fucking mess the boss fights are? The final battle for humanity, the emotional crux of the story, the update to the final unsurpassed boss fight of DMC3, reduced to a buggy, embarrassing slap fight that gave me four glitches on my first playthrough.

The whole thing bungled the climax of its story. But, then again, was the story really that sacred to begin with....

Concept and Story

I promise I will not use the word “edgy” here.

Satire and social commentary, no matter how cartoonish, is a weird fit in a Devil May Cry game. DMC2 had an evil businessman too, and 4 ended with you punching the Pope in the face, but neither seemed to say anything substantial against capitalism or religion. They existed in a much more fantastical place, where any sort of commentary was aimed at a more philosophical target. “What makes us human? What makes us into demons? What is hell like? Is family more important than what you feel is right?” The previous games are all centered around a much more personal, individualistic identity crisis, and not any sort of populist, society-wide problems.

DmC brings up surveillance states, the most recent economic crisis and late-capitalism, soft drink addiction/declining nutrition, news manipulation, the prison industrial complex, conspiracy culture, populous revolt, some scant mentions of mental institutions, hacktivism, and the Occupy Movement. These topics, all of which are pretty damn serious and warrant long discussions, are simply decoration for a story about fantasy demons secretly running the world They Live style. Hell, it basically IS They Live, only the aliens are demons and the tools of control are more contemporary. (somehow there’s nothing about the internet in there though...)

All in all, its treatment of modern issues is childishly simple at best and cynical at worst. Sure, the game presents itself as defying capitalism and social engineering via advertising, but it then goes on to launch an ad and hype campaign bigger than any of the previous games, spanning across billboards, phone apps, social media promotion, the usual games media rounds and expensive pre-rendered television commercials. Hell, they even had an ad for their ad! All of this amid a gigantic fan backlash and in-fighting with games journalists on whether people were mad about Donte’s hair colour of if they were just outrightly entitled.

The fact that lead designer and writer Tameem Antoniades responded to this backlash and feedback by tweeking Donte’s design and adding in a random moment were a wig literally drops out of the sky onto Donte’s head for a jab at this “controversy” says something about the intent he had with his story; There is no real political statement behind DmC, it simply pulls from what was in the news at the time, and uses it as fodder for an otherwise archetypal plot.

The problem is that it tries to do this while also talking about hellish demons, heavenly angels and earthly humans. Well, mostly demons, because the angels are absent from the plot and Donte doesn’t seem to have any sort of Angel Trigger, and the only named human character is Kat, who doesn’t have much ploy within the story; she’s there to be rescued, and provide minimal help with a pat on the back from Donte. So demons rule the world, the angels are absent, and the people who suffer are us lowly humans. But it’s a half-demon, half-angel who “saves” us all/reduces the city to rubble, while all us humans can do is post about it on Twitter. Doesn’t sound very empowering to me.

The main villain should say it all. He’s some sort of businessman/oligarch/banker/economist/military commander/mayor/Satan, but he makes the undeniable point that he gave human civilization it’s structure. He has a wife he at least somewhat cares about, and a child he has high hopes for. He (and his wife) shows more emotion than any of our protagonists, and they have more at stake than anyone else, with a genuine vision for the future no less. So, when he very reasonably asks Donte what his goal is, all Donte can say is “freedom” and “revenge”, then continue to childishly taunt him when pressed further. I could go on about how unhealthy the obsession with the post-apocalypse our generation has is, but suffice to say; Donte is not someone to look up to.

Donte himself, and by extent his story, has no real ideological motivation behind him despite being dressed up as an anarchist. His motivations and arch as a character are no less two dimensional than the original Dante, but now manage to be over-stated and hamfisted, with an added veneer of “politics”. Vurgil points how much he’s supposedly changed right before the final boss fight, but how he changes doesn’t include a strong statement of intent. What does Donte want? Fucked if I know! Fucked if he knows.

All of this says nothing about how...well....plain bad the writing is. The dialogue is famously cringeworthy and the plot has more holes than a sponge.

If Mundus was hunting Donte to kill him this whole time, why can’t he find him despite having multiple cameras aimed directly at this house? Why didn’t he just kill him when Donte was in the orphanage run by “demon scum”? Where was Vurgil this whole time? Why does Kat need to hit the Hunter with a molotov? Actually, what the fuck is she doing in the real world while this is happening? Are people just ignoring this pixie girl throwing bottles around a pier? What’s that weird dimension Donte goes into to unlock new powers? If it’s his own head, why are Mundus’ demons in it? And why would it change his weapons? Why doesn’t he have an Angel Trigger? If Vurgil can do all that cool shit he does in his boss fight at the end, including opening a fucking portal to another dimension, why does he need to rely on Kat to hop dimensions earlier on? Or rely on anyone for that matter? Why does he have white hair when he’s born, but Donte has black hair until the end? If Mundus is immortal, why does he need an heir? Why does time randomly slow down after Vurgil shoots Lilith? How did Kat know the layout of so many floors in Mundus’ tower? Surely he didn’t give her a tour of the whole building, right? Did Donte and Vurgil fuck the entire planet by releasing demons into earth and destroying world economics and governments? Or are there pre-existing governments anyway?

Seriously, I could go on forever.

Beyond basic plot, logic and diegetic continuity (the rules of DmC’s world, and how it suspends your disbelief), you get into more subjective questions like “is Donte a likable character?”

I, perhaps surprisingly, think he is. He’s such a tryhard asshole for the majority of his game, never stopping to think about what he’s doing or to engage with the They Live world he lives in that he is, honestly, a bit adorable. He’s not someone I’d ever have the patience to hang out with in real life, but he is at least consistent. He’s a total lughead and he almost blows up the planet, but it makes sense that a nihilistic, “act first, think later” bro would do that.

And I think that sums up his story too; dumber than it thinks, but entertaining all the same. It’s a different kind of dumb than the original games, a kind of dumb that stares at the camera wall-eyed instead of with a sideways wink.

Conclusion

As of writing, I consider Devil May Cry to be dead as a series. With no solid news from Capcom on further projects for 7 years now, DmC: Devil may Cry is the swansong of the entire franchise. Well, beyond shitty cameo costumes in Dead Rising 4, or pachinko machines or whatever.

Likewise, more recent hack n slash series like Bayonetta, Metal Gear Rising and Nier: Automata have risen to challenge Devil May Cry for its crown, and without something better than Ninja Theory’s efforts to stop them, they’ll probably get it.

DmC is not a complete trainwreck. It’s enjoyable, worth the second hand price and 10+ hours of your time. It’s entertaining in a similar way a bad film is; so long as you don’t expect too much from it, you’ll have a laugh. Let go of your bitterness with Ninja Theory and Tameem and you’ll poke fun at it in a less mean-spirited way then your fan rage wants you to. DMC deserved to end on a better note than this, but.....honestly....fuck it. Capcom probably couldn’t make anything much better themselves these days anyway.

Treat DmC like a pug; malformed and lumpy, probably should have been neutered a generation ago, but funny to look at and play with, even though it’s covered in its own slobber.

#dmc #devil may cry #ninja theory #dante

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

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Street Fighter 2 is one of the only games that truly deserve to be called "genre-defining" -- today, 25 years after SF2's release, we can see that practically every fighting game out there has adopted its core game design principles as industry-standard gospel, with only a few tweaks here and there to stand out from the crowd.

If you're the average consumer or dev, or even if you're an experienced fighting game competitor, you probably aren't all that familiar with all the games that have tried to make major changes to the fighting game template.

So, in celebration of SF2's 25th anniversary, I'm going to walk through some of the fascinating deviations and beautiful experiments that fighting game devs took to try and change SF2's fighting game formula. Studying these games may inspire you in your own designs, or may suggest ways to tinker with the paradigm you're currently wokring within.

I'm going to try to avoid the other well-known franchises (if you know Street Fighter, you probably also know Mortal Kombat and Tekken) and focus on the weird stuff... for education's sake!

A quick note about me: I've written a (free) book that teaches fighting game fundamentals using Street Fighter, as well as educational fighting game streams and videos, and I'm the community manager for a free-to-play PC fighting game currently in public technical alpha called Rising Thunder. You might also like my previous Gamasutra article, Street Fighter for Designers: Top 8 Lessons from Evo 2015.

Asuka 120% Burning Fest (Fill-in Cafe, 1994): Clash system and simplified inputs

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SF2 may have set the foundations for the 2D fighter genre, but there are several notable games that have poked and prodded at some of the genre's conventions while keeping a similar format.

Shoutouts to ex-Game Developer magazine editor-in-chief Brandon Sheffield for introducing me to Asuka 120% Burning Fest, a Japanese 2D fighter from the post-SF2 boom. Not only did it swap the standard martial-artists-from-around-the-world fighter cast with high school girls representing their various club activities (including the chemistry and biology clubs), but it also made two notable system changes.

One was the "clash system": in SF2, if two attacks collide simultaneously, both players take damage and go into hitstun, but in Asuka 120%, both characters will just go on into the next hit-phase of the move. The second was a significantly simplified input system -- pretty much everyone has the same special move codes, meaning that if you could perform one character's moves, you could perform all of them.

Combined, both systems made for a fascinating permutation of the SF2 standard. With the clash system, the number of hits in a move are relevant for determining who wins a clash -- and since the window to cancel a move into another move is fairly lax, players can clash across entire combo routes before one of them wins out and takes damage. All told, Asuka 120% does a lot with these relatively simple system tweaks to make a traditional 2D fighting game more accessible and less intimidating without feeling like a lesser SF2. The developers of Asuka 120% Burning Fest eventually went to Treasure, where they reused some of the core concepts in their fighting games.

Weaponlord (Visual Concepts, 1995): An online fighting game in '95

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Others have done good work unearthing Weaponlord's history as an interesting-but-ill-timed attempt by early American fighting game devs to challenge SF2's success, so if you want to know the whole story, check out the GameSpy interview with James Goddard and Dave Winstead, GameSpot's Forging Weaponlord, and the Hardcore Gaming 101 writeup.

From a modern game design perspective, the most notable contribution Weaponlord made to fighting games the active defense system called the "thrust block" -- a versatile parry that served as a high-risk, high-reward defensive option. This a relatively new innovation for the time, but more interesting to contemporary devs is this tidbit from the GameSpot interview with James Goddard, where he mentions that the thrust block was designed with zero-frame startup specifically as a concession to online play via the XBAND dialup peripheral.

That's right: A Super Nintendo game in 1995 was designed around internet play. Personally, as someone currently working on a fighting game built around online multiplayer over broadband, I can't imagine designing a 2D fighting game for ~250ms travel times, yet there they were, handling sync timing and tweaking frame data to make the game playable over a modem. Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that Goddard is currently design director on Killer Instinct for Microsoft, a game which has been lauded in core fighting game circles for having better-than-average netcode.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes (Capcom, 2000): The best team fighter

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Capcom had found plenty of success doing crossover fighting games during the late '90s, as their concurrent work on Street Fighter Alpha, Darkstalkers, and various licensed Marvel fighting games gave them plenty of readily reusable assets to keep the games coming. This peaked with Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes, a three-on-three tag match slugfest so chaotic that even genre veterans could barely parse what is happening on screen at any given time.

Capcom's earlier crossover games (X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, and Marvel vs. Capcom) had treated tag-team two-on-twos much like a similar pro wrestling match: You had one character on the field responding to your controls, and certain moves would allow you to tag them in, summon them for a brief assist attack, or perform a joint hyper combo together. MvC2 largely kept the same basic structure, but the addition of a third team member shifted the emphasis toward developing teams that synergized effectively between the three.

The ideal MvC2 team must take into account how well any given character can use the other two assists; how much super meter the team needs to build for each character to do its job, and how long it'll take to generate that meter before the opponent does; how well the team can recover from opponent-inflicted forced tag-outs (called "snapbacks"); and several other factors before even considering how effective the player is at controlling any of their characters individually.

It's a strange testament to MvC2's design that even though competitive play revolves around roughly 1/5th of the 56-character cast, the dozens of permutations available with just those characters are enough to have kept the game interesting for over a decade. The net effect is that MvC2, by virtue of its three-on-three format, has gotten the closest out of any fighting game to a compelling competitive 'build-your-own-character' mode.

Guilty Gear (Arc System Works, 1998): The 2D fighter for people who love 2D fighters

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As Guilty Gear is still very much alive and kicking, I'll keep this brief. With GG and its sister series BlazBlue, Arc System Works has forgotten more about traditional 2D fighting games than most studios will ever begin to explore. Each GG character is practically its own fighting game at this point, often with resources and mechanics that exist only for that specific character -- and they're bound together by a set of core shared systems and mechanics that would be enough to populate five Street Fighters. If you're ever trying to design a character for pretty much anything, it's worth your time to dig through the GG library, because ASW probably did something like that way before you did.

Highlights include: Bridget, a young boy dressed as a nun who fights with a yo-yo that must be carefully placed and moved across the screen; Zato-1, a blind assassin who fights by summoning his shadow (which responds to the player's joystick inputs and button releases, meaning the player must simultaneously handle two characters with one controller, and time their button presses and releases appropriately); Venom, another assassin who lays pool balls across the screen to create intricate setups off their chain collisions; and most recently, Jack-O, whose minion-summoning mechanics draw more from a MOBA than a fighting game.

Bushido Blade (Light Weight, 1997): Real-enough samurai duels

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One frequent criticism of traditional fighting games is that they don't look or feel like a real fight does, leading a handful of developers to build games aiming for a more realistic experience without getting into the sporty nature of a Fight Night or UFC game.

When I put the call out on Twitter for suggestions for this list, Bushido Blade was hands-down the most frequent response. Instead of street fighting, Bushido Blade aimed to recreate the thrill of a samurai duel by breaking out from the 2D plane into free-roaming 3D environments and designing a realistic damage system; you could block or parry, but if you ate a clean hit it was either going to injure a limb or kill you outright.

When most fighting games were going for more systems, more characters, more stylized graphics, more combos, and generally digging itself deeper in a hole of genre esoterica, Bushido Blade felt simple and clean. Interestingly enough, its legacy is best felt not in any major triple-A fighting game, but in indie games Nidhogg and Divekick.

Fighters Destiny (Genki, 1998): Point-sparring in a fighting game

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Of all the core design elements to mess with, Fighters Destiny arguably picked the most-core element to change. Rather than determine a victor using health bars, Fighters Destiny implemented a point system inspired somewhat by competitive karate, where players would fight until one scored a point by inflicting a ring out, knockdown, or other specific conditions, at which point the action would reset and the fight would resume.

Fighters Destiny certainly didn't leave any lasting impacts on the genre overall, but it's certainly an experiment worth considering further. Contemporary fighting games built around life meters and the best-two-of-three rounds system make it easy to snowball early advantages into a victory, because players have to earn a mid-round reset by doing something to get the opponent off their back and into a neutral state, at which point the defending player is forced to play aggressively and make bigger bets to win the round from a life deficit. With the point sparring model, you get to emphasize the players' jousting for superiority from a neutral state over their ability to snowball a small advantage into a bigger one, leading to more exciting matches for competitors and spectators alike.

Buriki One: World Grapple Tournament '99 in Tokyo (SNK, 1999): 2D MMA

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Buriki One is a curious one. Where SNK's core lay in their 2D fighter pantheon (King of Fighters and Fatal Fury, among others), Buriki One was an attempt to tie the outlandish characters of a typical fighting game into a game that felt more like Pride, the Japanese mixed martial arts event promotion that swept the country in the late '90s and early 2000s. (Ryo Sakazaki from Art of Fighting actually shows up as a playable character!)

What we end up with in Buriki One is a game that looks like a sports-fighting game, like any pro wrestling, boxing, or MMA game, but plays on a 2D plane. Part of this change entailed swapping the attack controls to the joystick (up for a heavy, slow attack, down for a quick, light attack, and toward for a medium attack) and the movement controls to two buttons that move your fighter left or right.

Given the realistic setting, this actually makes a certain amount of sense, especially if you think of Buriki One as an attempt to convert Pride fans to fighting games. If your goal is to simplify a core fighting game experience, it makes sense to try focusing less on the importance of positioning in a 2D plane, which is often hard for new players to learn and understand, and more on interactions between the different attacks.

Virtua Fighter (Sega, 1993): Welcome to the third dimension...kind of

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Bringing fighting games to the third dimension is not a trivial task, particularly because the established genre conventions call for the arcade-standard eight-way joystick and buttons to be used for both inputting move codes and navigating space. Once you've solved those problems, though, you still kind of need to figure out how to use the third dimension to, well, add depth to the actual fighting experience.

Sega's Virtua Fighter was the first fighting game to try 3D -- though when it comes to the actual gameplay, the devs kept it to fighting in a 2D plane until Virtua Fighter 3 introduced the sidestep mechanic to the series. VF's biggest contribution to the genre was arguably designing movesets around three buttons (punch, kick, and block) and a simpler set of motions -- usually combinations of single-direction inputs and button presses, often used in preset chains.

This made learning a character's moveset less about complicated joystick execution and more about memorizing a wider set of context-specific moves, which later turned out to be useful for freeing up the joystick so players could use it to more easily navigate a 3D space. Also, Virtua Fighter added ring-outs as another win condition; knocking your opponent off the platform immediately wins you the round.

Battle Arena Toshinden (Tamsoft, 1995): Sidestepping

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Battle Arena Toshinden was another one of the early 3D fighting games -- and that's usually the main thing people remember it for. However, it is generally recognized as the first fighting game to work in all three dimensions via the sidestep mechanic, where players can use the L and R shoulder buttons to dodge projectiles without sacrificing position. Most 3D fighting games now use different permutations of a sidestep, though DreamFactory's Tobal No. 1 was notable for using more of a free-roam style navigation system.

Soul Calibur (Namco, 1999): Full movement with eight-way run

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Namco had made a splash in 3D fighting games with both Tekken and Soul Edge, but the difference between the two games was mostly thematic (contemporary martial arts vs. fantasy weapon fighting) until its sequel Soul Calibur. Soul Calibur was arguably one of the first games to truly embrace all three dimensions; in addition to the simple sidestep, many attacks often included Z-axis movement as part of the animation, and players could actually shift into an eight-way-run movement stance that gave you access to a different subset of moves. The end result was that Soul Calibur felt like an excellent compromise between the samurai fantasy of Bushido Blade's free-roaming duels and a traditional fighting game.

Cyber Troopers Virtual-On (Sega, 1995): Mobility in sustained projectile fights

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When we look back at the fighting game canon, one thing stands out about SF2 and its numerous sequels: Projectile attacks are very, very important. Indeed, most of the subsequent Street Fighter series are largely defined by the systems they implement in order to avoid non-stop douken-fests. However, many later games decided to double down on projectiles, space control, and precision movement as the focal point of a one-on-one duel while feeling closer in spirit to a classic fighting game than, say, a first-person shooter.

At first glance, Virtual-On doesn't look like it has much in common with a classic fighting game; yes, it is one-on-one and uses health meters, but it's about robots dashing around in an arena blowing each other up, not people punching each other in the face. Spend some time with any of the Virtual-On games, though, and you'll find that it fits in far better with fighting games than any other genre. It doesn't emphasize aiming or weapon selection enough to feel like a shooter, nor is it about tactical positioning and attrition like a typical mech or tank sim.

Instead, the game is about attacking to force your opponent to dodge by dashing or jumping, then punishing your opponent for dashing or jumping while they're trying to counter attack and force you to move. When it comes down to it, Virtual-On is basically the Ryu fireball/Dragon Punch trap expanded into a 3D robot dueling game.

Touhou Suimusou: Immaterial and Missing Power (Tasogare Frontier / Team Shanghai Alice, 2004): Bullet hell 2D fighter

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In 2004, Japanese doujin devs took bullet hell series Touhou into 2D fighter-land with Touhou Suimusou: Immaterial and Missing Power (commonly abbreviated as IaMP). While the game appears to resemble any other anime-styled fighting game, it's actually built largely around projectile attacks (hence the bullet hell roots) and the "graze" mechanic, where most projectiles can be dashed through -- meaning that the traditional attack-block-throw triangle in fighting games is instead largely replaced by ranged attacks, mobility, and physical attacks.

Senko no Ronde (G.rev, 2005): Even more bullet-hell than IaMP

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If IaMP and Virtual-On gently push projectile combat to the center of the game, Senko no Ronde goes full-on bullet hell, complete with a change in perspective to a flat top-down 2D plane and the ability to temporarily transform your robot fighter into a giant boss form. The combat mechanics draw from a similar pool as Virtual-On, as well -- it's largely about using projectiles to force movement to open up more opportunities for damage.

It's worth noting that lots of other games have played in this space, to varying degrees: Taito's Psychic Force, Sunsoft's Astra Superstars, the Dragon Ball Z games by Dimps, and the Naruto: Clash of Ninja games by Eighting are some of the more notable examples.

Yuu Yuu Hakusho: Makyou Touitsusen (Treasure, 1994): Four players, two layers

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One-on-one is great, but what happens when we try to add more players to the party? These games open up the action to more players, which introduces control challenges, since you no longer can rely on the opponent-relative movement scheme that traditional fighting games use.

Yuu Yuu Hakusho: Makyou Touitsusen was another one of those Treasure games that was way better than anyone ever expects from licensed anime games -- unfortunately, since Yuu Yuu Hakusho didn't have a whole lot of clout in the U.S. at the time, we never got it here. The game was built around two-to-four-player combat, which they pulled off by borrowing Fatal Fury's two-layer stage design -- players can hop between a foreground plane and a background plane. Of course, this gets a bit tricky if you're working in the SF2 template.

Since Yuu Yuu Hakusho was designed for the Genesis, Treasure had to build a compelling fighting game around a three-button controller (which was more than Capcom was able to do; the Street Fighter II: Championship Edition release on the Genesis was meant to use a special six-button controller, and if you had a three-button controller you had to press the Start button to alternate between punches and kicks). They started by opening up the movement system so you could freely look in either direction, and simplified the input codes to only use down and forward in special moves, meaning that players didn't have to worry about facing the wrong direction in the process of executing a special move. Also, the three buttons were mapped to Light Attack, Heavy Attack, and Guard -- after all, SF2's hold-back-to-block system doesn't really make sense if you have an opponent on both sides of you.

The end result is a game that feels much better than you'd expect a four-player SF2 to feel. Fortunately, it wasn't just a one-off; the core design work was later recalled in Treasure's Bleach DS games, which are also excellent and worth checking out.

Super Smash Brothers (HAL Laboratory, 1999): A platforming fighting game

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In 2016, Super Smash Bros. Melee and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U tournaments are routinely topping the Twitch stream charts, so it can be easy to forget that Smash's status as a fighting game was contested for a long, long time. After all, changing the static 2D box arena out for levels that feel more like the original Mario Bros. and losing the health bars for the damage percentage mechanic essentially pull out two design elements so core to fighting games most players never even thought to question them.

It's fair to say that the standard four-player party mode, with items aplenty and stages that kill you rather often, don't really feel consistent or rigorous enough to encourage players to play it competitively. That's why the truly defining innovation in Smash isn't the levels, or the movement, or the simplified controls -- it's the way the team created a play space that is rich enough to sustain both party play and serious competition, and made the options available for the players to determine for themselves what they want out of it. Honestly, Smash wasn't a fighting game until the players made it a fighting game.

Power Stone (Capcom, 1999): Like Smash in 3D

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I'd be remiss in including Smash in this list and not also giving Capcom's Power Stone a shoutout; it was another party fighting game with items, engaging levels, and simplified inputs, but unlike Smash, it featured a free-roaming 3D arena. While it's certainly fun to hop around the various levels beating up your buddies, the tradeoff to free-roaming 3D in a party fighter is that the devs relied on a rather high level of auto-targeting in the attacks, which kind of diluted the player's feeling of mastery after a certain point.

Rakugaki Showtime (Treasure, 1999): If dodgeball was a fighting game

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Shoutouts to Ian Adams for pointing me in the direction of an interesting, obscure contender for the party fighter throne: Rakugaki Showtime, by Treasure. Like Power Stone, it takes place in an open 3D arena, but the combat is built more around projectiles, leading to a game that feels like dodgeball without the center dividing line. Play it to admire the scribbly, sketchy aesthetic and see how Treasure used targeting lines to visualize aiming projectiles in a 3D space.

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Patrick Miller is a writer, fighter, and community manager for Rising Thunder. You can find him on Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube. Or just sign up for his monthly mailing list.

Special thanks to Brandon Sheffield, Ian Adams, Andres Velasco y Coll, Bellreisa, Chris Pruett, Luis Garcia, and everyone else who suggested not-SF2 fighting games. Also, shoutouts to the poverty FGC for keeping this knowledge alive and kicking.

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