Hey
@Mike_Z , serious question. In your opinion, what did Blazblue get wrong that Guilty Gear got right? What do you think kept Blazblue from being the successor that many people expected? I've always wanted to hear your reasoning.
iLoli got some, but in short:
- Guard bar: GG's guard bar is the best-designed guard bar in any game PERIOD, because it doesn't
force you to stop blocking when it reaches max yet still punishes you hard when you get hit. That bold bit is the stupid part, you defend properly and get penalized. BB's seesaw guardbar was okay except for the guardbreak part, but it needed to go down from my side when
I hit
you, which didn't happen. Then they went to even more arbitrary guard primers, and kept the guard break. As well, barrier being a separate resource from anything else means you basically never run out of it. Keeping to the "in short" thing, moving on...
- Area-specific invincibility: In GG, if a move is above-the-knees invincible it's because it doesn't have vulnerable boxes up there. In BB, it's because the frame is marked "invincible to air attacks". What this means in practice is that in GG you can still beat antiairs with a deeeeep jumpin, but in BB your attack will completely go through them and you'll land. YOU CANNOT STUFF ANTIAIRS or any other type of partial invincibility (low- or mid-hit), you can only whiff through them and block, which is
absolutely stupid to me.
- Arbitrary combo structure per character: GG has some of this (Slash to 6P, what you can chain from 2S) but not as much as BB does. In BB it's completely arbitrary per character and ugh.
- Speed: BB is slow, GG is not. Even sped-up BB is slow.
- Bursts: They finally stole GG's burst in BBCP but then they made offensive bursts Overdrive which locks out their burst and is therefore hella stupid. I liked CT's bursts because they put you in Danger, but I disliked them because you got a new one each round. Plus you could hit bursts in CT and cancel into other things since bursts had autoguard, then they removed this and sped them up so they're incredibly difficult to bait at this point.
- Too many directional overloads on each button - 5C, 3C, 2C, 6C, and in some cases 4C (where C is a generic button) are all available options sometimes, some of which you can chain into or out of with other buttons and some of which you can't.
- Allowing throws to 'combo' in hitstun or blockstun and thus be teched; ruins counterhit tick-throw setups because they become easily-teched purple throws, and allows you to end any combo in a neutral situation simply by going for a combo into a throw (if not teched, do it again, if teched, neutral).
- Character changes: Tager only needed 3 things since CT, and he never got any of them. (A doublejump, projectile invincibility on Spark Bolt startup, and Sledge Break.) Instead he got a great many other mostly-useless changes. Other characters also follow this pattern often. Contrasting that with GG, which I use as an example of how to look at what players are really doing with a character and improve that playstyle.
- Balance: GGAC is amazingly well balanced, though admittedly it took a long time to get to that. BB has had bad balance since the beginning, has tried to fix it using improper tools, and even in the fifth(?) game now is incredibly poorly balanced.
- Combo length: BB has tried to limit this in ALL the wrong ways, and fails. GG tries to limit it in some odd ways too but mostly succeeds. (Time-based combos, for cryin' out loud!)
- Other designer-arbitary junk like Fatal Counters only being assigned on moves the game designers decided should have them.
[edit] Oh yeah and super-flash buffering. I have no idea why anyone thought that was a good idea.
There's more but those are the main ones.
