This is my 3rd time writing about this game. Maybe my last review just flatly stating "Platform Fighter" was a bit unfair, but here's where I'm coming from. The term 'platform fighter' became a popular phrase distinguishing this style of game in the wake of Project M. Because that's where this really started. Smash may be the original but PM is seriously it's own game made by the community. From there it splintered and now Melee's emergent game design affect permeates through common discourse. Everyone knows what wave dashing and shines are now. It's no longer some insular thing that makes you look like you're 'too' into it, ya know. The most infuriating aspect of these platform fighters is they're all designed by people who don't actually understand the game that inspired them. This statement isn't too presumptuous, for reasons I'm about to get into, but I don't blame them for not knowing because Smash is not clear about it's game design at all. And it's emergent game design is even more indiscernible.
I think the biggest thing worth scrutinizing here is the parry mechanic and how defense works. In this game instead of shielding, you have a parry that has 2 frames of startup, 8 total effective frames, and the entire action lasts 30 frames on whiff. Upon any successful parry the attacker undergoes 40 frames of recovery on any of their moves, or once they hit the ground if they used an aerial. Jabs are unaffected by this though. Aside from rolls, which have less I frames than their smash counterparts, this is the only mechanical form of defense in this game. I kind of can't overstate how astronomically awful this bit of design is. It's conducive to being different, but it kind of misunderstands why Shielding in Smash has to be a powerful option in some respects. Having only parrying, and also lacking ledges (ledges in Smash games have a tendency to degenerate play, such as in Melee and Brawl due to polarizing counterplay to attack their invincibility.) ostensibly shows that they're very self conscious about not having a game that will devolve into something very campy and 'lame.' I brought up platform fighters as a whole earlier because all of them do this, except Brawlhalla I guess. The reason why only having a parry is stupid is because:
For one, this frontloads the movement into being your main method of defense. While it's perfectly reasonable to want the expressive movement to be how people avoid damage, because conceptually it should require more effort than just holding a button that makes you almost invincible, there's nothing really else in place that gives a meaningful context to this. What I mean is that without shielding, there's kind of no reason to space moves. Now that sounds wrong, because there are other reasons why you'd want to space something besides the fact that it can be blocked. Like in the case of counterpoking, deliberate hitbox placement so that they'll run into something if they press a button. Counterpoking is very important because it's conceptually perpendicular to how 2 players go about moving in and out of eachothers threat ranges. The most fundamental aspect is the 'timing' applied to one's approach. Placing a hitbox proactively means it's not necessarily just in and out, you can stuff their approach from even taking place. But that doesn't happen in this game unless a character has a super disjointed hitbox. That's because if you commit to a move, your sprite becomes your effective hurtbox. And as an unlucky side effect of the games visuals, the characters are so small and low res they require giant smears for anything they do to be particularly readable. These hitboxes encompass those large animation smears, so this results in there being no hittable area, particularly if someone's doing a full drift in short-hop aerial in neutral. The element of timing is dumbed down back to sterile, spotty touch and go neutral where every hit is opportunistic in a way that isn't particularly engaging outside of the sparse minutia to attack properties.
Surely this is rectifiable by crouch cancelling right? Crouch cancelling gets a bad rep by newer players of platform fighters because making something minus on hit even at a mid percent feels very cheap. But what they don't realize is that it's a very necessary compromise to make dealing with the spacing game more manageable. Without it you're left to preempt movement earlier because sure it's more advantageous for them to hit an aerial deep due to the frame advantage-- thereby being more reactable, but just raw movement isn't always readable. Especially if a character has versatile ground normals and safe rising ones that hit grounded. It's not truly brainless either, it's a very costly transaction to make for lighter characters. You're still taking damage, and it's beatable mechanically by throwing. But because Rivals doesn't have shielding, it doesn't have throws. Thereby necessitating crouch cancelling to be weaker because there's no mechanical counterplay to it aside from having a strong multihitting move. No grabs means parries also lack any sort of mechanical counterplay. The answer is to just wait and keep moving or do nothing entirely.
Maybe the stages add depth here? Not really. Most stages in this game are just permutations of Smashville, T&C, Lylat Cruise (with no tilt), Kalos, and Final Destination. Very bog-standard competitive Smash ruleset stages. The terrible feedback loop on defense makes these inoffensive stages really highlight how almost no aspect of this game's core design is fun. Platforms are sticky because there's very little that delineates certain states. So like, if you get launched onto a platform, you don't go into tumble and a knockdown state. You can tech, but your character actually just lands on their feet if you don't because there is no knockdown state. There's no shields so you can't buffer a platform drop through shielding. You are very susceptible to being sharked if even the weakest moves launch you upward because almost everything sends at a really bad 60 degree angle that forces you to DI down and away (generally HORRIBLE DI) unless you just get stuck in the air and die forever. It sounds like a very incidental, fringe scenario but almost every stage has platforms at similar levels and positionings. Every stage has an insanely low blast zone, although character gravity is so high it still takes a while to die off the top unless you get carried into the top blast zone by Wrastor or something. To top it off moving on these stages is always very samey. You can't stuff a jump in unless they're already too close to you so instead both players are gonna just be running back and forth within their own zones of stage control in a way that has to be very respectful of pressing any random button.
The most that can happen is the very basic mixup of, tricking someone to fullhop (which you never naturally have to do in this game, even in the very opaque and underdeveloped neutral that begets preemptive movement. Parrying and hitboxes beat projectiles in ways that depreciate such a maneuver. At best it's for specific combo starters and even then the risk largely isn't worth it.) and then running under them. Usually by hugging top platforms with wavelands to intermittently come down at steep angles. I said earlier spacing doesn't really happen in this game, so what gives? This type of offensive measure I laid out seems aware of it's own constraints. You come down in a very steep arc so you don't potentially run into something. You stand your own ground in a way, and then quickly retreat. But the difference is that the provisional nature of this movement in any other game ties into system defense in some way more than just 2 things potentially happening. In this game, if you do this, it's either to bait a parry or reset to neutral. Because it's actually unlikely to hit someone if you come down with a normal and they don't jump up to try to hit you. And the best outcome is that they do jump up for some reason (which they don't gotta do!) and now they're incidentally in a worse position because you controlled where they'll be in a certain point in time. That sounds like a very natural way of playing neutral but it's also literally all you can do aside from just dash dancing because everything collapsed in on itself to present this bit of gameplay that's just a minor player matchup thing in a better game but constitutes almost all neutral here. Riveting.
I think the biggest thing worth scrutinizing here is the parry mechanic and how defense works. In this game instead of shielding, you have a parry that has 2 frames of startup, 8 total effective frames, and the entire action lasts 30 frames on whiff. Upon any successful parry the attacker undergoes 40 frames of recovery on any of their moves, or once they hit the ground if they used an aerial. Jabs are unaffected by this though. Aside from rolls, which have less I frames than their smash counterparts, this is the only mechanical form of defense in this game. I kind of can't overstate how astronomically awful this bit of design is. It's conducive to being different, but it kind of misunderstands why Shielding in Smash has to be a powerful option in some respects. Having only parrying, and also lacking ledges (ledges in Smash games have a tendency to degenerate play, such as in Melee and Brawl due to polarizing counterplay to attack their invincibility.) ostensibly shows that they're very self conscious about not having a game that will devolve into something very campy and 'lame.' I brought up platform fighters as a whole earlier because all of them do this, except Brawlhalla I guess. The reason why only having a parry is stupid is because:
For one, this frontloads the movement into being your main method of defense. While it's perfectly reasonable to want the expressive movement to be how people avoid damage, because conceptually it should require more effort than just holding a button that makes you almost invincible, there's nothing really else in place that gives a meaningful context to this. What I mean is that without shielding, there's kind of no reason to space moves. Now that sounds wrong, because there are other reasons why you'd want to space something besides the fact that it can be blocked. Like in the case of counterpoking, deliberate hitbox placement so that they'll run into something if they press a button. Counterpoking is very important because it's conceptually perpendicular to how 2 players go about moving in and out of eachothers threat ranges. The most fundamental aspect is the 'timing' applied to one's approach. Placing a hitbox proactively means it's not necessarily just in and out, you can stuff their approach from even taking place. But that doesn't happen in this game unless a character has a super disjointed hitbox. That's because if you commit to a move, your sprite becomes your effective hurtbox. And as an unlucky side effect of the games visuals, the characters are so small and low res they require giant smears for anything they do to be particularly readable. These hitboxes encompass those large animation smears, so this results in there being no hittable area, particularly if someone's doing a full drift in short-hop aerial in neutral. The element of timing is dumbed down back to sterile, spotty touch and go neutral where every hit is opportunistic in a way that isn't particularly engaging outside of the sparse minutia to attack properties.
Surely this is rectifiable by crouch cancelling right? Crouch cancelling gets a bad rep by newer players of platform fighters because making something minus on hit even at a mid percent feels very cheap. But what they don't realize is that it's a very necessary compromise to make dealing with the spacing game more manageable. Without it you're left to preempt movement earlier because sure it's more advantageous for them to hit an aerial deep due to the frame advantage-- thereby being more reactable, but just raw movement isn't always readable. Especially if a character has versatile ground normals and safe rising ones that hit grounded. It's not truly brainless either, it's a very costly transaction to make for lighter characters. You're still taking damage, and it's beatable mechanically by throwing. But because Rivals doesn't have shielding, it doesn't have throws. Thereby necessitating crouch cancelling to be weaker because there's no mechanical counterplay to it aside from having a strong multihitting move. No grabs means parries also lack any sort of mechanical counterplay. The answer is to just wait and keep moving or do nothing entirely.
Maybe the stages add depth here? Not really. Most stages in this game are just permutations of Smashville, T&C, Lylat Cruise (with no tilt), Kalos, and Final Destination. Very bog-standard competitive Smash ruleset stages. The terrible feedback loop on defense makes these inoffensive stages really highlight how almost no aspect of this game's core design is fun. Platforms are sticky because there's very little that delineates certain states. So like, if you get launched onto a platform, you don't go into tumble and a knockdown state. You can tech, but your character actually just lands on their feet if you don't because there is no knockdown state. There's no shields so you can't buffer a platform drop through shielding. You are very susceptible to being sharked if even the weakest moves launch you upward because almost everything sends at a really bad 60 degree angle that forces you to DI down and away (generally HORRIBLE DI) unless you just get stuck in the air and die forever. It sounds like a very incidental, fringe scenario but almost every stage has platforms at similar levels and positionings. Every stage has an insanely low blast zone, although character gravity is so high it still takes a while to die off the top unless you get carried into the top blast zone by Wrastor or something. To top it off moving on these stages is always very samey. You can't stuff a jump in unless they're already too close to you so instead both players are gonna just be running back and forth within their own zones of stage control in a way that has to be very respectful of pressing any random button.
The most that can happen is the very basic mixup of, tricking someone to fullhop (which you never naturally have to do in this game, even in the very opaque and underdeveloped neutral that begets preemptive movement. Parrying and hitboxes beat projectiles in ways that depreciate such a maneuver. At best it's for specific combo starters and even then the risk largely isn't worth it.) and then running under them. Usually by hugging top platforms with wavelands to intermittently come down at steep angles. I said earlier spacing doesn't really happen in this game, so what gives? This type of offensive measure I laid out seems aware of it's own constraints. You come down in a very steep arc so you don't potentially run into something. You stand your own ground in a way, and then quickly retreat. But the difference is that the provisional nature of this movement in any other game ties into system defense in some way more than just 2 things potentially happening. In this game, if you do this, it's either to bait a parry or reset to neutral. Because it's actually unlikely to hit someone if you come down with a normal and they don't jump up to try to hit you. And the best outcome is that they do jump up for some reason (which they don't gotta do!) and now they're incidentally in a worse position because you controlled where they'll be in a certain point in time. That sounds like a very natural way of playing neutral but it's also literally all you can do aside from just dash dancing because everything collapsed in on itself to present this bit of gameplay that's just a minor player matchup thing in a better game but constitutes almost all neutral here. Riveting.