Last Blade article needs info on why game sucks

[evilsamurai]

I just read over the Last Blade article and it is way too positive. The Last Blade series had serious potential but came out horrible. It is almost as infinite ridden as X-men vs Street Fighter. May someone please edit the article to mention the horrible brokenness and slowdown ever present in the series? People have also said that the Last Blade is a good game with no decent port as the Neo Geo was not powerful enough to handle it (and the games were not beta tested enough.)

[DojoCasino]

As Ray Charles would say.... 'WHAT YOU SAY?!'

I've only really played The Last Blade 2 to any extent, but since you say 'the last blade series' I assume you were talking about that one too. Quite frankly it's the best fighting game i've ever played. I really haven't noticed this 'horrible brokenness and slowdown' of which you speak.

[YourAverageJoe]

You COULD always write up a Cranky Gamer article on it, that's what it's for...right?

[Revolver Ocelot]

evilsamurai said:

I just read over the Last Blade article and it is way too positive. The Last Blade series had serious potential but came out horrible. It is almost as infinite ridden as X-men vs Street Fighter. May someone please edit the article to mention the horrible brokenness and slowdown ever present in the series? People have also said that the Last Blade is a good game with no decent port as the Neo Geo was not powerful enough to handle it (and the games were not beta tested enough.)

Uh, no, I'll not be doing that, but thanks for the heads up. This site is primarily focused with information, not opinions.

Infinites do not classify a game as broken, as nearly every modern fighting game has them, no matter how fine-tuned it is.

I've never observed any slowdown in the original MVS or AES versions of Last Blade. If there is any slowdown, it's probably in the NGCD, Dreamcast, or Playstation ports, though I haven't observed any slowdown there either to be honest (with the exception of Yuki's stage in the PS1 version of Last Blade, which I believe was mentioned in the article if I'm not mistaken).

As for this:

People have also said that the Last Blade is a good game with no decent port as the Neo Geo was not powerful enough to handle it (and the games were not beta tested enough.)

This is anecdotal information and not really worth putting in an article.

[chaoticgood]

I don't think any of the real (= NeoGeo) versions have any slowdown... As for the balance issues, from what I've read (no one here actually plays fighting games against me...) is that Zantetsu is broken in the 2nd game to the extent some of his moves are banned and he's still regarded as by far the best character. So there's some truth in that...

[evilsamurai]

they do have slowdown. Go to Shoryuken and ask the SNK fans there if you want proof. I also would like to see more information on the actual game systems and competitive viability in the articles about major fighting games. Infinite combos in and of themselves do not break a game. Look at MvC2 and compare it to X-men vs SF. One is competitively viable, the other is not. Criticism of gameplay has to be in the fighting game articles as the primary point of fighting games is to play them against other people (sorry but if you play fighters alone, you are not playing them correctly). The Last Blade series are simply not good fighters to play against other people competitively. That basically means they were failures as fighting games. Noble failures like X-men vs Street Fighter, not horrible make it stop failures like Capcom Fighting Evolution. Also, the fighting game articles need specifics on the actual game engine (more than just it has parry. The article should explain why The Last Blade's parry system and the Just Defend mechanism of Garou are inherently better than the tap forward parries of Street Fighter III). Sorry for the flamewar like title. I had to get some attention to my thread and the original title I wanted to use was too long. Basically what I am trying to say is that HG101 fighting game articles need to be more like the Senko no Ronde article, not simple glossovers like The Last Blade one.

[Sac (a.k.a Icaras)]

So for some reason the SNK fans at Shoryuken's forums are right, but the ones here, who have played the game too, are not? That seems a stupid thing to say, especially when you are ultimately arguing about opinion.
There is not right or wrong. You think the series is bad, some don't. So?

Even then, as the earlier posts said, the article is ABOUT the series, not a review of the series, so it doesn't really need opinion on why it's the worst/best.

[Revolver Ocelot]

evilsamurai said:

they do have slowdown. Go to Shoryuken and ask the SNK fans there if you want proof. I also would like to see more information on the actual game systems and competitive viability in the articles about major fighting games. Infinite combos in and of themselves do not break a game. Look at MvC2 and compare it to X-men vs SF. One is competitively viable, the other is not. Criticism of gameplay has to be in the fighting game articles as the primary point of fighting games is to play them against other people (sorry but if you play fighters alone, you are not playing them correctly). The Last Blade series are simply not good fighters to play against other people competitively. That basically means they were failures as fighting games. Noble failures like X-men vs Street Fighter, not horrible make it stop failures like Capcom Fighting Evolution. Also, the fighting game articles need specifics on the actual game engine (more than just it has parry. The article should explain why The Last Blade's parry system and the Just Defend mechanism of Garou are inherently better than the tap forward parries of Street Fighter III). Sorry for the flamewar like title. I had to get some attention to my thread and the original title I wanted to use was too long. Basically what I am trying to say is that HG101 fighting game articles need to be more like the Senko no Ronde article, not simple glossovers like The Last Blade one.

You're being pretty presumtuous in assuming that no one plays Last Blade competitively. I've enjoyed Last Blade 2 with my friends for years, and I'm certainly not the only one. Reviews for Last Blade are almost universally positive and it is considered to be one of the Neo Geo's finest titles.

Your claims that the game is broken are extremely embellished and seem to be based on personal bias. If you want broken, play JoJo's Bizarre Adventure or Arc System Work's Hokuto no Ken. Last Blade 2 doesn't fit that designation by a long shot. Certainly, there are elements of the game that can be exploited by hardcore professional players, but as I said in my previous post, this is true of ANY and ALL modern fighting games (if you want proof of this, go to newchallenger.net. There's thousands of videos there showing just about every fighting game ever made having its engine exploited), even games like Garou where you can use feint moves to link nearly anything into nearly anything else. However, these elements are ONLY exploited by hardcore professional players who spend excessive amounts of time uncovering these tricks, who represent a very small minority. A minority I wasn't particularly catering to in my article.

Again, what you've said is largely based on your own opinion (like the Just Defense > Parry system making Garou more competitively viable, despite the fact that SF3 is one of the most competitively celebrated fighting games of all time, or haven't you ever been to EVO?). You're being pretentious, arrogant, elitist, and you're trying to force what you think should be onto other people, and it's not going to work. Not everyone cares about every little glitch or oversight that you'd have to go over a game with a fine-toothed comb to find. Hell, almost no one cares about that. If you need proof, go here. You'll note the initial response to the article was resoundingly positive.

[Discoalucard]

revolverocelot said:

who represent a very small minority. A minority I wasn't particularly catering to in my article.

I was intending on saying this, before I finished reading your response. I love fighting games and I play them a lot with friends, but I don't play them competitively per say, at least not on the level of EVO. That's an insanely high and often nebulous standard, and not one a vast majority of people are going to care about.

[evilsamurai]

Competitively means in tournaments. What I ment by Just defend and Last Blades parry being superior is that SF3's parry ruins the Street Fighter mechanics (parry can't whiff so often your best option is to randomly tap forward or down to get out of a difficult situation). As a consequence of this, SF3 does not play like Street Fighter: projectiles are useless outside of combos, guessing games take priority over zoning, etc. People who usually review fighting games do not know what they are talking about. They almost always do not understand the intricacies of the game engine or even of prior game engines in the series. They can't really test it for anything other than control responsiveness, sound, and graphics. The only thing they can really "review" is if a game is worth actually even attempting to play. Even your average game reviewer will recognize that Kabuki Warriors for Xbox is a horrible game compared to Bushido Blade or Soul Calibur. A notable example of misguided reviews is Street Fighter Alpha 3, which generally received high marks even though it was worse than Alpha 2. Alpha 3 has arguably the best presentation of any SF game but some of the worst, most-unbalanced gameplay. To give it a higher score than say Super Street Fighter II Turbo is absurd. I don't claim to play The Last Blade 2 with any reasonable competency (The only fighting game I actually play semi-competitively is Super Street Fighter II Turbo) but it is clear to me that it has "worse" gameplay than say the Samurai Shodown series or even MvC2. The game is fun though, just not fun to play competitively similar to say Killer Instinct. LB2 is not nearly as broken as say Mortal Kombat or Hokuto no Ken though (those games are BROKEN with a capital B). All I am really saying is that you should include information on a fighting game's engine exploits/flaws/brokenness and, if it has one, on the game's competitive scene. The articles on this site express negative opinions on games such as Vagrant Story so why not for fighting games?

[Revolver Ocelot]

evilsamurai said:

Competitively means in tournaments. What I ment by Just defend and Last Blades parry being superior is that SF3's parry ruins the Street Fighter mechanics (parry can't whiff so often your best option is to randomly tap forward or down to get out of a difficult situation). As a consequence of this, SF3 does not play like Street Fighter: projectiles are useless outside of combos, guessing games take priority over zoning, etc. People who usually review fighting games do not know what they are talking about. They almost always do not understand the intricacies of the game engine or even of prior game engines in the series. They can't really test it for anything other than control responsiveness, sound, and graphics. The only thing they can really "review" is if a game is worth actually even attempting to play. Even your average game reviewer will recognize that Kabuki Warriors for Xbox is a horrible game compared to Bushido Blade or Soul Calibur. A notable example of misguided reviews is Street Fighter Alpha 3, which generally received high marks even though it was worse than Alpha 2. Alpha 3 has arguably the best presentation of any SF game but some of the worst, most-unbalanced gameplay. To give it a higher score than say Super Street Fighter II Turbo is absurd. I don't claim to play The Last Blade 2 with any reasonable competency (The only fighting game I actually play semi-competitively is Super Street Fighter II Turbo) but it is clear to me that it has "worse" gameplay than say the Samurai Shodown series or even MvC2. The game is fun though, just not fun to play competitively similar to say Killer Instinct. LB2 is not nearly as broken as say Mortal Kombat or Hokuto no Ken though (those games are BROKEN with a capital B). All I am really saying is that you should include information on a fighting game's engine exploits/flaws/brokenness and, if it has one, on the game's competitive scene. The articles on this site express negative opinions on games such as Vagrant Story so why not for fighting games?

ONCE AGAIN, your opinion is not fact, so stop trying to pass it off as such. There are a lot of things that determine whether or not a fighting game is good or bad, and it's not always something so menial as how many buffer frames are in between the attacks from one edition of a fighting game to the next. Maybe people liked Street Fighter Alpha 3 because it had such a huge roster with all their favorite characters? Or maybe because the home version had a bunch of cool modes like Dynamic Battle?

Not everyone can devote years of their lives to unlocking the secrets of every fighting game that comes out to the point where they can compare them like lab technicians comparing samples of DNA. Some people just want to have FUN. With that in mind, there's no correct or incorrect way to play a fighting game, as you say, unless you're trying to prove something. And if being the shit at a fighting game is something you see as being worth proven to demonstrate some kind of superiority, then in my opinion (which I at least acknowledge isn't fact), you have a pretty skewed perception.

At the very least, Frankie seems to think Last Blade is pretty damn awesome, and this is a guy who's devoted the greater part of his life playing fighting games. No offense, but I think if he doesn't have anything bad to say about Last Blade 2, neither should I.

[YourAverageJoe]

evilsamurai said:

I just read over the Last Blade article and it is way too positive.

It's informative, that's kind of the point of the site.

evilsamurai said:

It is almost as infinite ridden as X-men vs Street Fighter. May someone please edit the article to mention the horrible brokenness and slowdown ever present in the series?

Again, the point of this review site is to introduce people to games that are generally fun. Whether that game has an exploitable glitch or not should not have an effect on the fun factor.

evilsamurai said:

People have also said that the Last Blade is a good game with no decent port as the Neo Geo was not powerful enough to handle it (and the games were not beta tested enough.)

The NeoGeo was powerful enough to handle it. But that's arbitrary to whether or not a game gets good ports. As for the lack of testing: this is freaking SNK! They may not have made a bazillion revisions to Last Blade but you can bet that they worked on it like hell.

evilsamurai said:

they do have slowdown. Go to Shoryuken and ask the SNK fans there if you want proof.

Hi. We're devout SNK fans. What more would you want?

evilsamurai said:

I also would like to see more information on the actual game systems and competitive viability in the articles about major fighting games.

Again, not the point of the site. Competitive viability tends not to affect the fun factor. (See: Marvel vs. Capcom 2)

evilsamurai said:

Criticism of gameplay has to be in the fighting game articles as the primary point of fighting games is to play them against other people (sorry but if you play fighters alone, you are not playing them correctly).

Yes, let's forget the intricate story in King of Fighters as well as the shit-hard bosses that make you feel so proud for beating them. Nope, don't mean a thing.

Seriously, I've played the shit out of Guilty Gear XX #Reload, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I don't like getting told how I should play a game.

evilsamurai said:

The Last Blade series are simply not good fighters to play against other people competitively. That basically means they were failures as fighting games.

That's just wrong. If an FPS has unbalanced online gameplay, does that make it fail as an FPS?

evilsamurai said:

Also, the fighting game articles need specifics on the actual game engine (more than just it has parry. The article should explain why The Last Blade's parry system and the Just Defend mechanism of Garou are inherently better than the tap forward parries of Street Fighter III).

But...they aren't. All of these parries were basically the same, except that maybe Last Blade's was more lenient.

evilsamurai said:

As a consequence of this, SF3 does not play like Street Fighter: projectiles are useless outside of combos, guessing games take priority over zoning, etc.

Parrying takes skill. If you want to make that training moot just because you can't be a turtling bastard too then you've got a problem.

evilsamurai said:

A notable example of misguided reviews is Street Fighter Alpha 3, which generally received high marks even though it was worse than Alpha 2. Alpha 3 has arguably the best presentation of any SF game but some of the worst, most-unbalanced gameplay.

But it's fun...right?

evilsamurai said:

All I am really saying is that you should include information on a fighting game's engine exploits/flaws/brokenness and, if it has one, on the game's competitive scene.

Because this website isn't called "Tournament Goer's Digest." It's "Hardcore Gaming 101" a website dedicated to bring unknown classics to other gamers.

evilsamurai said:

The articles on this site express negative opinions on games such as Vagrant Story so why not for fighting games?

Vagrant Story is not fun.

[zzz]

evilsamurai said:

...sorry but if you play fighters alone, you are not playing them correctly). The Last Blade series are simply not good fighters to play against other people competitively. That basically means they were failures as fighting games.

Honestly, the fact that developers in the fighter genre have catered to this kind of attitude is why the genre is dead. Fighting game players have forgotten what got them playing the games to begin with - that they had a good time doing so. As soon as they started worrying about dumb shit like that, the genre was doomed.

I like fighters A LOT, because I like to kick the shit out of virtual people. Yet fans of the genre are more concerned with whether or not a game is correct than whether or not it is good. This insanity wouldn't fly in any other genre, but fighting game fans act like they should be embarrassed to admit to liking games that don't follow a set of rules that don't actually exist anywhere other than on internet cesspools like Shoryuken.com.

I like 8-bit and 16-bit fighting games, I like Smash Bros., I like SNK - and I like them all more than anything Capcom ever made in the genre. Comboing is boring. A severe lack of balance IS a real problem. The SFII template isn't the "right way". It has a lot of inherent flaws that are totally needless and that a failure to discard lead to the death of the genre. Fighting games should have a ground level entry level. They should have the comboing toned down or eliminated entirely. They should abandon all of those needlessly complex move commands. Complain about how it does things the "wrong way" all you like, but Smash Bros. is basically a refinement of, and improvement on, a genre that had for eight years prior been defined by an inherently flawed game.

Smash Bros. is popular for the same reason that SFII was popular - because you could just pop in a quarter and beat the crap out of your friends within a context that worked as a novelty, and that stood up to repeat plays. It isn't entertaining for most people anymore because the designers have mucked it all up with all of this extra shit that nobody cares about for the sake of catering to a bunch of basement dwelling socially maladjusted jackasses who need to vent their nerd rage on MUGEN and doujin fighters. People still play Smash Bros. because Nintendo hasn't mucked it all up yet. If the next game has all the B.S. that 99% of fighters do then people will move on from that kind of fighting game as well.

Another thing: THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES A FIGHTING GAME COMPETITIVE IS HOW MANY PEOPLE PLAY IT COMPETITIVELY. You hear all this bullshit about how Capcom fighters are better because they are "more competitive", but that's just because more people play them. It sure as hell isn't because they're balanced.

To get back to the original quote:

evilsamurai said:

...sorry but if you play fighters alone, you are not playing them correctly). The Last Blade series are simply not good fighters to play against other people competitively. That basically means they were failures as fighting games.

Imagine if all games had to be like this. If they all had to be "competitive", even if that meant sacrificing quality. This attitude is why Smash Bros. tournaments have to be 1-on-1, despite the fact that it's not that kind of game. This is the attitude that gets people to insist on turning off traffic in a racing game, because "that makes it fairer". Or that gets people to insist on turning off everything that they possibly can in Smash Bros. games. I doubt that I'm alone here at HG101 when I say that every time I have ever played any of those games where somebody makes that suggestion, they immediate get flack from everybody else in the room for even bringing it up. EVERYBODY hates that guy. Who in the holy hell tries to turn playing a game with your friends into a competition? Could decimating your buddy at Halo, or whatever, ever really be as enjoyable as goofing off playing the game with them? Part of the reason that off-line multiplayer is dead in video games is because nobody is interested in playing with the people who play them competitively, and part of the reason that on-line multiplayer is successful is because these people can't find anybody anywhere else who is willing to put up with their bullshit.

youraveragejoe said:

But...they aren't. All of these parries were basically the same, except that maybe Last Blade's was more lenient.


Parrying takes skill. If you want to make that training moot just because you can't be a turtling bastard too then you've got a problem.

I'm going to back them up on this. Parrying is crap, and Just Defending is excellent. I explained this (poorly) in my Fatal Fury piece. Parrying has flaws that Just Defending fixes.

[DojoCasino]

evilsamurai said:

Go to Shoryuken

No thank you. I once was getting really into fighting games, and wanted to start playing them more seriously, but lurking around those forums completely put me off that idea. I don't want to turn out that anal.

[Revolver Ocelot]

Parrying is crap

O RLY???

Sorry, but the jury is still out on this. Both parrying and just defense have their strengths and weaknesses, and the only way one can determine which is better depends on how that player fights (or whether they're a Garou/Street Fighter fanboy).

I personally prefer parrying because you can immediately attack out of a parry, whereas just defense doesn't really serve any purpose outside of being able to avoid tick-damage and gaining a small amount of life back. And the combined factors of just defense having a block-stun phase not much shorter than regular block-stun and the fact that there's no pushback means just defending can actually put you in prime conditions for follow up attacks from your opponent, which is not good if you're having lots of pressure piled on you.

This is a pretty good and extremely detailed breakdown of Parry vs. Just Defense in regards to CvS2. It doesn't explicitely say either is superior, and it shouldn't. In the end, it depends on how you think when you're under pressure, be it "Please don't hit me!" or "Get the FUCK off me!", Just Defense and Parrying serve these trains of thought differently.