A wonderfully crafted game ruined by the excessive need to amplify artifical difficulty
(long post, TL;DR at the end)
It's harsh for me to say that this game has so much potential it is almost sad to see just how much micro-issues slowly end up eating at the overall experience. The artstyle is lovely and so is the the way the game itself plays out: it's smooth, clean, simple, classy.
However, there is an enormous issue that drove me away very soon despite the incredible charm..
In a fighting game - be it good, incredibile or just nice - you have to make sure many small technicalities coincide with one another so that the gameplay stays fluid and the experience remains competitively fair and acceptable for those inclined to spend their time on it.
Some basic examples of such technicalities can be:
- hit boxes
- animation frames
- usage of "juggling" and recovery frames.
And I have to say that Skullgirls plays these out very nicely, albeit a few characters having arguably overpowered traits but that's just par for the course (especially considering this game remains a gacha at its roots).
With this introduction made, comes my real critique:
This game has an enormous problem with its AI and just general definition of what difficulty means.
Why does it matter at all? Well, because as with most gachas, and even more with a fighting gacha, pvp becomes only accessible (or viable if you may) after a certain progress gate is broken, before which you just have to endure grinding for experience, currency, technique and so on.
Before that gate is broken, you will have to face a ladder of increasingly higher statted AIs using increasingly competitive kits.. while that in itself presents no offense, in just a small amount of time you will notice that the AI behaves oddly..
some characters utilize a much more advanced AI (an understatement, really) and will absolutely abuse input reading and recovery frames of most moves against you, presenting endless combos and not allowing you to respond in any way, shape or form as they will continue to read your inputs before they can even properly be executed.
I found this phenomenon to rapidly evolve into an unspeakably unfair experience for the sake of making stages more of a stat-wall than an actual skill issue, and for a fighting game this is rather unacceptable if you ask me.
TL;DR
The game is extremely well refined and stylistically classy, however the gacha nature of it forced the solo-gameplay to become a rampant AI challenge where input reading and over-skilled characters burn away your patience endlessly for the sake of it. Good ideas, bad application. Unacceptable in this genre.
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