My E3 Xrd impressions: (feel free to ask questions and whenever I come back next I'll look)
- I'll say this on the positive side: the game is absolutely BEAUTIFUL. Like holy-crap-is-this-real beautiful. There are some rough edges, but in matches you don't notice at all.
- It certainly does feel slower than AC+R, noticeably slower. Likely this is due to longer hitstop? since the individual actions themselves didn't feel slower. I had to slow down my button press timing for Potemkin P->K->S->2D, for example.
- YRCs are the least Guilty-Gear-ish thing you could add to a Guilty Gear. They singlehandedly took the game from making good reads and knowing their character well in order to win to "just throw stuff out" and "oh oops, YRC" which is incredibly un-fun. Not to mention the burst-safe OS junk. Even in the Versus games you can't cancel to NEUTRAL on whiff, only to riskier attacks.
- Watching cinematics each time you do a super got old pretty quick, and the camera cuts on Dusts and on the KO hit are very jarring while playing. At least to me.
- The lack of force breaks and newer moves that had unique utility makes characters feel...flat. I'll admit to not really being excited for them when they were added originally, but going back to not having them after this long, when the newer added moves don't cover the same holes in characters' movesets, feels stale. [edit] Because Force Breaks cost meter they were able to have properties or strengths that you just can't give to a meterless special attack.
My takeaway:
I have absolutely no desire to play this game. Zero. I came away with the same impression I got from MvC3 - "Well, that's enough of that game." And I don't mean because Pot is awful*, I've played Pot since the beginning regardless so I can lose 25 in a row no sweat. :^P
It just...doesn't feel like a Guilty Gear to me. (More like a GG fan game? I guess that's pretty harsh.) It's a huge regression for the series, like the creators didn't play anything after #r. Whether or not #r is where GG started from, for the last eight years "Guilty Gear" has meant AC, and on the whole I think the series made a lot of positive strides. Things like choosing between damage or knockdown kinda don't seem to exist in Xrd, you get both. The addition of the random element in Danger Time, Hell Fire making you do absurd damage, or the seemingly complete absence of Tension Pulse encouraging willy-nilly meter use are just so backward for GG.
It's like Capcom deciding to make MvC3 and base it off XMen: Children of the Atom, or people wanting to play World Warrior instead of ST. It's great for laughs, but it's not something I would choose to play when the alternative is available. Heidern98 could come back from another universe and challenge me to matches and I'd say no. (Unless he wanted to play some AC+R, that is. :^)
Maybe the next version.
* We already know Potemkin is absolutely terrible, so I'll gloss it over. Heh.