SoulCalibur VI #HG

En Shoryuken han podido jugar este fin de semana durante el Texas Showdown. Hay un par de cosillas, que no me han acabado de convencer.

Guard Impact

This is the strongest Guard Impact I’ve ever seen in the SC series. It guard impacts everything — highs, lows, throws, you name it. Everything except Guard Breaks and Reversal Edges. I accidentally Guard Impacted Nightmare’s CE once. Yeah.

This is also, by far, the largest GI window I’ve ever seen. You know how you can GI someone, then immediately do a slow move to prey on their twitch reactions? Well, while that’s still possible, it’s a lot harder to do now because the GI window is so big it’s likely to catch even very slow lows. It looks visually odd, as the green spark from the GI will be gone from the screen but the GI will still catch the attack. It is still possible to punish early GIs, but this particular gimmick is a lot harder to do now. What frame speed you need to use to beat early GI will need to be discovered once the game is released.

I don’t know if it’s just the thrill of having it back at all, but I was able to hand-wave things that I thought would be real problems with having a GI this strong. Fundamentally, it’s still the same — you can still bait out GIs and whiff punish, you can still beat GIs straight up (only now you use Guard Breaks instead of high/low mix-ups), and you can still mess with people’s timing. GI is wild and strong and, right now, that feels great. I just hope that feeling remains after I get used to it, instead of just being annoyed at how it shuts down mid/low mix-ups completely.

Reversal Edge

Okay. Sip of coffee. Time to make myself unpopular with… probably everyone. I love my job.

The Reversal Edge is SCVI’s answer to Tekken 7’s Power Crush and Slow-Mo systems. It is an attack that automatically parries anything other than guard break attacks, and upon successful hit, launches into a cinematic Rock-Paper-Scissors mini-game. Correct guesses from this mini-game result in a (frequently powerful) hit, and different characters get different rewards for winning the mini-game. Some have combo starters, like Groh. Some get tricky low attack string followups, like Xianghua. It is the big dramatic exclamation point that SoulCalibur VI is attempting to hang its future on.

And it is, in its current state, a dismal failure of a mechanic.

It solves a problem that didn’t exist (“how do I actively break up my opponent’s offense?”) with a tool that isn’t useful in high or mid-level play. It is completely redundant in a game with Guard Impact, particularly now that GI has been buffed to the heavens.

If I, in my old age, am able to see this move once, on my first day playing, and then properly step-punish it on reaction with a launcher, this mechanic will not survive five months down the road. Period. And even when the RE successfully intercepts something, it’s possible to outlast it with an active-enough attack string. That Bandai Namco spokespeople continue to try and sing its praises during exhibitions not only baffles me, but indicates to me that they are, to some degree, tone deaf as to what’s actually happening in the matches real players are playing.

The general argument is that a RE gives you meter, and for that alone you should choose it over GI. It appears to be a gain of a little over 33% in the current build (a significant chunk, to be sure) but what’s left out of this argument are two important facts: 1) Your opponent still gets some meter for just participating in the RPS game whether or not they win it. And, perhaps more importantly, 2) You can still get murdered for being the person that successfully goes into RE.

Here’s a real world example I experienced in a match I had with TX Showdown commentator and Calibur OG OmegaXCN: I had magic-pixel health, and his lifebar sat at, what appeared to me, around 25%. I AA’d, he successfully RE’d me, RPS cutscene happens. I facerolled because I absolutely don’t care about this mechanic or know what any of my or my opponent’s options are on day one. OmegaXCN loses the RPS mini-game and dies because, whoops, turns out the damage for this one giant hit from RE is hilariously high and avoids Guts-Scaling. Cool. I win the round — though I absolutely didn’t earn it.

I get it, Namco — you want your big cool cinematic cut-scene experience to sell copies of the game. No one blames you for that, and considering how much I enjoy your games, I want that for you too. You want to catch the lightning-in-a-bottle you had with Tekken 7’s Slow-Mo — but the thing that I think is missing here is that Tekken’s Slow-Mo still functions within the context of the game at all levels of play. A thinking player that is trying to win would (almost) never attempt a RE, especially when the series’s strongest version of GI is sitting there in the exact same game. And because of how heavy-handed and limited it’s designed, I really don’t think you’ll get the same wild reactions that the organic Slow-Mo of Tekken yields.

And unfortunately, I don’t entirely know how you fix this. If it’s really supposed to be about meter, I don’t think both parties should get it once the cut-scene triggers. The reward should absolutely be high for how risky RE is, but the way your lifebar can evaporate over this is an insane gamble far beyond the realm of rationality. A possible solution is to go all-in on the meter aspect — remove or reduce damage dramatically, then make correct RPS guesses within the system reward even more giant amounts of meter, and heavily scaling combo extensions. Make it actually about meter instead of just playing lip service to the idea. But even if you do that, it doesn’t change how absurdly risky the RE attack itself is, which is a good portion of the problem — and if you make RE too good, it risks invalidating GI, which also builds meter to a much smaller extent. There isn’t enough difference between the two functionally, so just from a design standpoint, it might not even be worth it to balance RE.

Whatever they choose to do, I can say — with 100% certainty despite the fact I did not once use this mechanic intentionally in a sea of players that did — I never felt far enough behind in meter to warrant its risk.

Edit: Segunda parte, analizando a los personajes.