Arcana Heart 3 - Out Now, Best Fighter Ever

[Desov2]

Okay. Cool. More you know. I guess ill be picking it up for ps3 then if I decide to get this.

[Reioumu]

Scharlachrot is a bit awkward in comparison to other characters, once you get over that it's pretty easy.

Or atleast that's what I'm told by our schar player.

Pros:

long range

can cover large areas of the screen easily

can set trap orbs up in corners to create good mixups

long hit stun off of chain explosions

fast overheads off of j.a, j.b

cons:

can be difficult to get away from fast characters that manage to stay on you.

Another con is negative guts (takes more damage as her HP decreases)

[Lastblade]

Ah true, forgot about that one.

[zer0kage]

Vote Arcana Heart 3 for Evo2011. Heard it's coming out around December 23rd.

[Prinnical Shock]

How is Petra overall, I may pick her up come release

[furix]

She's pretty darn good.

[agp24]

Can somebody please give me a brief rundown of Eko's playstyle? I'm debating on maining her, because she rides around on a giant doodle, but I can't figure out her exact playstyle from videos... except that she looks kind of akward. Very much appreciated.

[Shining Aquas]

Eko, what's she like?

BEWARE: THIS POST IS ME TALKING OUT OF MY ASS. READ WITH CAUTION

Well, it's hard to say. The crayon sketch does all the attacks and not Eko, so just about every attack has weird shapes and hitboxes. In all the videos I've seen of Eko she does tends to create weird pressure strings using these weirdly shaped attacks. She seemed good when I saw her played, but then again I haven't seen much any footage of her since the game originally came out, back when about half the people were playing her. You could probably just describe her playstyle as being "non-conventional" in the end.

Also, that castle super. So good.

[4r5]

j.E

[C.Roika]

Can somebody please give me a brief rundown of Eko's playstyle? I'm debating on maining her, because she rides around on a giant doodle, but I can't figure out her exact playstyle from videos... except that she looks kind of akward. Very much appreciated.

Eko's pretty much just a super RTSD type character. You want to get in their faces, launch them into that faust looking combo with the sword if you catch them in the air. If you catch them with a string on the ground just keep applying pressure until they break and then combo into train super. The castle super stuffs cross up attempts so you've got that to escape other pressure characters.

It does seem that Eko gets raped by Kira, or any character with a strong command grab for that matter. I don't think she has all that many options besides her castle super to escape solid pressure, so there's that as well.

Hope this helps.

[agp24]

Thank you very much. She's still a solid candidate for me along with Scharlachrot, Elsa, and Dorothy... Out of these 4, who would fit the description of "easy to pick up, difficult to play well" the best?

[C.Roika]

I honestly can't say. The only characters I've seen that could be described as easy to pick up are zenia and saki. I don't know anything about Scharlarchot, except that she's been raping pretty hard lately with those chains of hers.

If you really want some in depth analysis of each character's playability and skill reqs, I guess you could go here:

http://shoryuken.com/f2/arcana-heart-3-xbox-360-ps3-breakdown-countdown-dec-23rd-244582/

It was probably posted earlier, but whatever. It's better than me just repeating what a friend who actually played it told me.

Also, please disregard what I said about Kira owning Eko. I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that.

[Wing]

well, never played AH before and would like to know what's that samurai girl's name and how good is she?

might main her

[Narcowski]

Kamui, or at least I think that's how it's spelled. She was godlike in AH1 FULL (guard cancels always led to untechable knockdown, so long as you had a meter), but I don't know much about any characters' placement in AH3.

[Reioumu]

I honestly can't say. The only characters I've seen that could be described as easy to pick up are zenia and saki. I don't know anything about Scharlarchot, except that she's been raping pretty hard lately with those chains of hers.

If you really want some in depth analysis of each character's playability and skill reqs, I guess you could go here:

http://shoryuken.com/f2/arcana-heart-3-xbox-360-ps3-breakdown-countdown-dec-23rd-244582/

It was probably posted earlier, but whatever. It's better than me just repeating what a friend who actually played it told me.

Also, please disregard what I said about Kira owning Eko. I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that.

No Scharlachrot doesn't rape everyone. She loses to rushdown characters who can get in her face like Heart, Konoha (especially with 236A+B punishing so much) and I would also say Elsa. I have trouble with Saki getting in, but not much else though.

Also, they made Kamui pretty bad this time around (still very playable though).

[Selphy]

Can anyone tell me who akane matches up well against and who loses to? Of course this assuming optimal play.

[Reioumu]

She should be beating just about everyone seeing as she's one of the top tiers.

Watch videos or something.

[MouseWonder]

Is AH3 actually as balanced as I hear? I know with the ability to choose arcana always can drastically change a match, but overall just evaluating character match-ups.

[4r5]

It's hard to evaluate characters outside of the arcanas. Arcana selection really does matter, except for maybe the supposed top-tiers.

I dunno if AH3 is balanced. But as of right now it feels balanced. Rather then say the game is balanced, I would say the game is largely unexplored. If you consider each character+arcana combination a different character (which I do) then that's 23 x 23 = 529 characters. So that's 529 x 529 = 279841 matchups. Guilty Gear only has 529 matchups. If we start at XX, people didn't really start knowing the game till around 3 or 4 years in. Super Turbo has 1024 matchups. It's over 15 years old and I hear people are still finding new wrinkles. Arcana Heart only has 4 years of accumulated knowledge, and AH3 brought about some big changes. So everything is almost reset. How long till we can start being confident about what we know?

Asking if AH3 is balanced is the wrong question. No one can answer that question with confidence, and I don't think that question even matters. Right now, AH3 is fun. And part of what makes AH3 fun is how much of the game is simply unknown. There's so much to the game left to explore and every character seems to have boundless potential. So what if the game turns out to be unbalanced. How many years is it going to be before we figure that out? By that time, we might of gotten so good and have such a deep understanding of the game that we'll be like those OG ST players that make Zangief vs Dhalsim look 4:6.

[MouseWonder]

Haha I guess you are right, the main reason I've probably heard it's "balanced" is due to the arcana themselves causing such varied gameplay for each character; want your grappler to have projectiles pick Love, or want your rushdown queen to have a command throw go for Water, etc. etc. I'll merely have to wait and play the game myself once the console release comes around; seeing as an arcade with AH3 is nowhere near me as far as I know.

[Danny Schme]

The more videos I watch of this game, the more excited I get to try it. Despite the dumb sounds her broom/cat thing makes - really wanna try Yoriko

[agp24]

Danny, I'd say start with AH1. Here, next time I see you at BG, we'll get some AH1 matches in. Yoriko is in it. :P

[Wing]

is there a pc version of any of the AH games? would like to give it a try

and by "pc" version, i mean well you know...

[Narcowski]

Buy AH1, use Pcsx2 to run it

[Akira]

Buy AH1, use Pcsx2 to run it

Buy sugocana instead. It runs pretty well on Pcsx2 :3