while most of the positive stuff i've said about this game is still somewhat true, there's just too many aspects of its design that are both oppressive and aggravating. the character balance has arguably gotten worse with a lot of patches, with incredibly obnoxious characters like labcoat 21 and jiren completely shutting down so much of the gameplay. the blockstrings are so tediously long and the defense has never gotten a proper buff. z reflect and guard cancels are completely pathetic mechanics that do not offset the game's uninteractive offense. there's some good ideas in this game but it is far too bogged down by its destructive desire to make fighting games as easy to pick up as possible.

the combos are still pretty fun, though

it's like this game has all the problems of the guilty gear series i've critiqued plenty before but with even less of the stuff that would at least keep it novel. the offense is still absurd and the neutral is highly skippable, but they overall made characters significantly less unique as they simplified a game that was only complex in the amount of mechanics it had. for fans of the creative character concepts in xrd and +r, this game sucks, for fans of neutral and footsies based games, this game sucks... so, who is it for? i guess for those who haven't delved into either of those, and people who want to play fighting games without putting much thought into decision making.

i compare guilty gear to fast food because it is easy, convenient, and highly appealing to one's primal senses. it also facilitates bad habits in the sense that it discourages you from learning more about the fundamentals of improving at fighting games—the intricate dances of neutral and the push/pull of offense/defense are basically irrelevant when your character's buttons and blockstrings are just that effective at shutting it all down. it then pains most guilty gear players gravely when they are tasked with the act of playing a fighting game with significantly lower design tolerance for these attributes, turning them into what feels like limb-flailing fools.

the guilty gear series is the epitome of seeing a fighting game character do a setup and thinking, "oh, that's neat." the moveset design is surely unique and experimental on a lot of these characters, but then... you see how they play at a higher level and realize there's really nothing else to these characters outside of their gimmicks. it is a game mostly comprised of learning and reciting pre-baked setups, highly devoid of skill expression because you are so strongly encouraged to just do this one thing the character or mechanic does. xrd, in particular, struggles with this a lot thanks to its roman cancel mechanics, with yrc being perhaps one of the strongest "bypasses" in any fighting game. these design aspects have some great theory behind them, intended to give you lots of choices as a player, but their execution is incredibly skewed toward a single decision once you are skilled enough at the game. it's great for an audience of people who aren't too well versed in the depths of fighting games (i was certainly there too at first), as these flashy gimmicks and varied mechanics are instantly appealing to anyone without requiring much prior understanding—but at the end of the day, it just ends up feeling like the fast food of fighting games (and, just like fast food, it will facilitate bad habits).

while sf6 is lacking and had a subpar patch almost a year into its life, tekken already had a solid balance patch barely even a month after release that nerfed the excessively broken stuff and made the game feel more like tekken. always good to see. hopefully the next patch (where they claim to focus more on buffing movement/defense) will ground the series even more into its roots of letting a player escape guessing situations with proper applications of knowledge and awareness. the more i dive into tekken, the more i realize how much i love that kind of stuff.

there is some pretty scrubby stuff shoe-horned into the tekken ecosystem, but it really doesn't seem as bad as most modern fighting games. the love given to legacy players here still remains pretty strong. hope we get some actually cool dlc soon though... and please stop buffing asuka's offense, just give her a normal backdash :(

this game finally got a real balance patch after almost a year, and i'm pretty darn disappointed. it's not that the game is particularly imbalanced character-wise, but it really just feels like this game has no idea what it wants to be... or maybe it does, and i just don't like it.

though it's good that they reduced the game's damage overall, so many alarmingly strange design decisions still remain completely intact in a way that continues to feel actively detrimental to actual fans of the series. what sf player actually likes blanka being able to two touch off of unseeable left/right mix that consistently beats any reversal? or level 3s instantly winning you the resource game, forcing you to watch them almost every match, some of them giving FULL oki? why is drive reversal still both extremely slow and highly punishable on block? i know dee jay was hella good but why'd they have to get rid of his coolest combos? and nerf chun's walkspeed? why not nerf something that's like, not as core to a character's appeal?

i don't want to sound like an fg boomer, but i miss when offense came from properly placing your pokes and capitalizing on openings instead of just... drive rush. seriously, what a lame mechanic. any nuance and depth to the drive system is completely ruined by the fact that you can simply spend it on your pokes to force your opponent to guess from your ideal neutral range. i'm sure they saw the strength of this mechanic and thought, "oh, the player needs to be punished for spamming it", so they introduced burnout, something that makes the game even more shallow by actively limiting your options and giving the opponent guaranteed checkmate scenarios where you lose even if you guess or react correctly. a completely backwards solution to a mechanic that significantly impedes on the core spacing game that the series is so beloved for. these mechanics alone ruin drive for me. it seems varied and deep at first, but at higher levels of play it becomes an awful, totalitarian system that punishes you for doing anything else... like trying to actually play street fighter.

i played the heck out of this game at launch. i was a top 300 chun with 1700+ MR, so i hope this comes off less like scrubby whining and more like someone who genuinely sees the potential in this game being horrendously squandered. it doesn't help that the roster is still largely dilapidated sf2 characters or really one-dimensional newcomers. at least rashid is cool. hope next patch is better—but for now, i'm playing tekken bruh.

very charming and cool fighting game that's fun casually and has huge appeal to any longtime fg fan, but there is some absurd jank in it that really makes me not want to play it more often than not. a-groove and roll cancelling really hinder the game for me. besides that stuff, it's a fun footsies game with a great roster, though i wish there were a bit more hit confirms and special cancels to help round out decision making. would be great with a few balance patches (which makes it very good mugen fodder)