Maaan, it was a typo... My fingers are to big and end up hitting the wrong key on the ipads keyboard alot.
I will try to keep this concise and to the point.
I didnt like the oldschool killer instinct 1 for a number of reasons, many of which i dont even know if it was just my lack of knowledge making the game bad or if it was just a bad game. In retrospect i should have given the game more of a chance than the 3 months or so of on and off play i gave it at the arcades... But quarters were expensive then and the alphas were out... The primary design decisions i hated about ki 1 were... No throws iirc, so the only way to break guard was overheads... I still wasnt used to being able to setup overheads seeing as to how i was a superscrub (like most other people at the time) but even whenwe could setup overheads... They just got reactively blocked 90% of the time, and then since they were like unsafe on block, you got punished for attempting them. This resulted in people just sitting there staring at each other mostly and trying to eek out chip life leads and random poke leads. Boring stuff.
The second thing i disliked immensely was the breaker system. I guess the big reason was that i didnt understand it at the time... And it would seem no one else did either. But suffice it to say that i thought that starting a combo and doing less than 10% damage for starter into autodouble, only to get hit by a 15% damage or more combo breaker.... Really just pissed me off and turned me off to the game as a whole, especially when it was super hard to open the opponent to a combo in the first place.
Ok sorry for that long windedness. But thats the attitude ive taken toward killer instinct for the past 20 years or so and sets up the next points to be made about why i like the game... At least from a theoretical aspect:
What i actually like about new ki:
A throw game that acts almost the exact way i would design one were i designing it myself. Throws are setup attacks that do a low amount of damage but put your character in a very advantageous position. I like this. Moving on, the throw game and what is accomplishable via throws varies greatly amongst the cast. Spinal for instance gets a free left right mixup off of throw, whereas glacius knocks the opponent away from himself and into glacius best range'... This is expected of good newschool games and most offer it decently, but it is an amount of forward thinking i wasnt expecting from killer instinct.
Further moving on, even though i like throws (i LOVE them actually) i dont believe in safe on wiff (unless you perfectly anticipate them) throws... At all. In new ki, throw wiffs are highly punishable via backdash or neutral jump. This is perfect to me and rewards via a kind of option select, to punish throws, since throws themselves are kind of an option select in themselves (they beat high AND low block) and finally i love the fact that crouchtech results in a standing throw attempt so no sf4 crouchtech os going on here. Id probably prefer the tech situation to be more like in sg... But that imho results in a slightly to strong low/throw game imho. But, i mean, we are talking degrees here.
Combo system:
Lockout and counterbreakers and manuals add much needed depth (in my eyes) to the combo breaker system. Then you add in special types of enders and shadow moves and the combo game feels very robust... To me. I never liked the idea of only using autodoubles for combos... In the old ki that got real old real quick. Whereas this new thing has so much 2 player depth... Even in combo. The only thing i would "dart board beta change" would be to give a certain (small) period of non combo breakable time at the beginning of a combo. That way the combo person has a chance to guarantee a followup and a mediocre amount of damage. But can opt to do a longer breakable combo should they want to risk the breaker. Probably wouldnt work in that exact form, but id try to find a way to make it possible via some highly inelegant bs if i thought it was worth it. I prize functionality over elegance where elegant solutions dont readily present themselves. So, perhaps something like a shadow starter gets a one unbreakable L autodouble. Balanced by meter and allows something guaranteed like shadow starter > autodouble > ender of choice... It might break something, it might not.
Characters:
I like shadow moves (ex moves) in general as i think they add alot of depth to the games they are in. Of course they are less ex moves than supers in ki... But they feel like ex moves to me.
I like the overall design of lots of the characters movesets. Lots of "tricky" complicated stuff... Like GG... Lol things such as combo having lots of fakes and different moves he can do from his dash punch, or things like spinal being able to hold projectiles and get buffed like that. Kan ra using a sand mechanic... Theres just so much depth to the game in the character movesets alone.
Dash buffer special:
Yeah i just like this. Especially since dashx2 is so ugly on these sf4 style fighters.
Instinct:
Im crazy in that comeback mechanics dont usually piss me off unless they are super over the top, or im so good at the game that i am almost perfecting people all the time which means i rarely get to use my own comeback (never going to be a problem for me :(
I find instinct to be super interesting to me as a comeback mechanic and a decently balanced one to boot. It gives the game more depth and allows for more cheap shit, albeit at a very low health point to balance it out, and it is different for everyone.
Mixups:
Like your own design, every character seems to have really good mixup options such as overhead/low or left/right which keeps the game moving and doesnt bog it down with staring contests, save for perhaps glacius since hes keepaway.
Overall:
Yes i totally agree that its kind of an sf4 clone. But it changes most of the shit i hated about sf4 and puts something better in its place so it actually becomes a kind of sf4.... That i actually like. There are still some design decisions that not everyone will agree with like invincible backdashes... But i digress, invincible backdashes only ever slightly made me salty. Backdashx2 with invincibility by the likes of chun and rose was much more soiling for me personally because they could so easily reset to neutral via that. So one thing i personally would do (another dartboard inelegant solution) would be to disable backdashx2 for a certain duration after a backdash completes... Say 15-30 frames or so or whatever feels right, i just dont like the disconnect with action that non attacking runaway seems to bring to fighting games.
I dont expect everyone to share my opinion though, we are all different and value different things.
I value speed, neutral and unreactable (1 off) mixups along with all the things that one would expect from a premium fighter such as balance and depth and good controls... Etc etc.
Im sorry if this is the stupidest thing youve heard today. But thats my opinion in general. There are more things i like, but they are smaller. And of course there are still lots of things i dont perfectly agree with.
Tl;dr:
There seems to be alot of forward thinking to the games design and the devs dont seem to be scared of making an inelegant design decision or 2 if it a functional problem solver (like heavy linkers requiring a hold input so as to not get out an ender... Etc etc)
