Rhiya

Whenever I heard good players complain about P4A, it was one of three things: -Characters are too linear. There's not a lot of room for choice in playstyle. -Too much of top tier was just setplay with no good counter, so once you got hit, you could probably put down the controller and it wouldn't be too different. -Low tier wasn't viable enough. Liz and Kanji were just sad, and the people above them were still not viable enough in comparison to just playing top tier. People found more tech later, which made this slightly less of a problem, but the problem was never really solved.

Tbh, at this point, it feels like they're making an entirely new game out of P4A's base -- not an update, and gameplay-wise, I don't even know if I'd call it a sequel as much as a redesign. It seems more like the transition from MBAC to MBAA than MBAA to MBAACC, for example, and definitely nothing like the transition from CS2 to EX. I wouldn't really take nerfs/buffs (especially loketest nerfs/buffs) worth a grain of salt until we see them in context, since it seems that everyone is getting heavy changes.

One is "Shabrys," and the other, "Slabrys." Problem clearly solved.

Double megido probably is taken out to make Shaigis look cooler when she does quintuple megidos on your face.

@Site Mods: Will Shadow charas file under regular forums, or be given their own? They look significantly different, but they're treated as the same chara at character select, so I'm curious.

Also -- anyone else wondering if this was such a surprise announcement because they were trying to get the game out the door before ATLUS got sold?

This. Do you know of a US arcade with a P4A machine to even get this update? There's no way it can come to the US if it's arcade only.

I find a lot of these changes hilarious. Some are neat (Kanji can command grab even during Persona Break), sure, but stuff like "Yu sweep no longer goes into 5D" is just lol. It's one thing to nerf his oki, but remove it entirely? That's basically asking for a total character redesign. Also, @ Liz mains: I'd hold out hope. Most of what Liz needed was hitbox buffs, right? Those'd be a little harder to notice.

Shadow characters sound nutty as fuck. Because they're so swingy, they'll probably either be nuts good or nuts bad with a couple of exceptions either way. All this different meter shit and legions of clone charas makes me feel like P4A is turning into Melty

True, the meter divisions are probably necessary even without 25% moves, because it'd be hell to tell what your meter is at without them. There's no numerical indicator.

What bothers me is when people see something they don't like and think "I don't like any of this medium or genre," as opposed to, "I guess I just don't like this title/show/game/work." What these people are doing is like shrugging off Western animation entirely after seeing one bad Disney knockoff on Netflix. It's gross overgeneralizing, shoving things in larger boxes and categories than they actually fit into just for the sake of making things easy. There are plenty of bad anime, and plenty of anime someone will find unappealing, just as there are plenty of awful books, or plenty of TV shows someone might find unappealing. I don't like it when people refuse to look at things they might enjoy for poor reasons, and this kind of overgeneralizing is one of the poorest.

Whoa, I'm surprised. Kind of expected P4A to be a one-off. And this looks like a full update+rebalance, too. Damn. ArcSys is shoving out games like nothing right now.

I think the problem is more people's thinking "anime=bad," despite people having had positive reactions to things that are undoubtedly anime. It's basically a case of people being closed-minded about something when there's a counterexample to their mentality they've already accepted. I may be wrong, but I think that's the gist of what he finds infuriating. Something I find infuriating is the preconception that anime is essentially a genre by itself, when it's a sub-medium of film and television. All "anime" says about a show is that it was produced in Japan, and it's animated. Says nothing about the artstyle (see Panty and Stocking) or the genre (see, well, anything you'd like). Saying you hate one anime comedy so you won't watch any is like saying you hate Scrubs so you won't watch Arrested Development. Makes no sense.

It's a stupid label, but it's one that gets tossed around like candy in Willa Wonka's factory. May as well know what people do and don't mean when they say it, or if -no one- means the same thing when they say it.

For better or worse, that's what people mean when they say "anime game." It's not about the artstyle. It's about the gameplay commonly associated with that artstyle.

And manga are comics. ^_^ In all seriousness, it's the mechanics. Marvel shares far more mechanics with games like BB/GG/MB than it does with SF, and it even takes some of the crazy stuff in BB/GG/MB to crazier extremes. If you thought Litchi combos were long, how about infinites? There's plenty of characters with unconventional movement options, like flight and airdashing. MvC3 is a four button game, like most anime games, and noticeably unlike SF. The list goes on.

FRC isn't really an advanced tool. Lots of characters have gameplan critical FRCs (like gunflame FRC, to use the cliche example) that make a massive difference, and they're things you should learn as soon as you feel comfortable learning them. That being said, the difficulty of the majority of FRCs is definitely exaggerated. I think people hear about the most difficult ones (that one Axl FRC that's a 3f window -- 2f are whiff and 1f is hit, so you should know both timings, for example) and assume they're all that hard, when they're just not. Blocked Millia haircar FRC --> instant overhead j.p is something you could reasonably get first try. Killer Joker FRC is something you could learn in a few minutes. Most of them aren't as hard as they're made out to be.

Doesn't matter if every player mentors someone, but what does matter is if the players who have both the knowledge and willingness to mentor do so. If you could get everyone with those traits to start helping inexperienced players, that'd be huge by itself. Most of the people like that probably aren't mentoring someone, have never considered doing so, or haven't found someone to mentor. The scene's quality would flourish if you got even half of those potential mentors paired with a mentee.

FRC is important, and not as hard as it sounds. You can see FRC points on the training mode input display; if you input a move that can be FRC'd, the bar will flash white, then fade to blue. The white flash is the FRC point; the blue makes it easier to know it happened. Just try to match the white flash. You should be able to get it after a little bit.

Mentors and rivals do miracles for a person's development. Fighting games aren't something you can understand outside of the context of playing the game. If you explain to someone what neutral, pressure, mixup are before they've even played a match, they'll get lost. Teaching someone fighting games is about making it easier for them to discover what these general things are, and making it easier for them to discover answers to what you do. Everyone learns best by doing, and, by extension, everyone will learn fighting games best by playing. I guess, if I want to tie this back to the OP, I think more available knowledge is good -- but the knowledge needs to be passed from one player to another more than it needs to be on a wiki, at least for getting someone started on the genre.

This is the only place where I've seen anyone mean anything other than what I said by "anime game." There's a reason people say Marvel is more anime than most anime games.

Anime game =/= having anime artstyle, etc. in this context Anime game = airdashers/games with lots of movement and mixup options, which typically have anime artstyles

Unlikely, I think, but I also find it odd we'd get a wrong rumor from a reliable source like we did. Makes me think they found a last-minute issue they needed to rush to correct, or something, so we may get it yet.

Let's be honest: no good competitive game is easy to learn for people who want to play competitively. Some games just mask that fact better than others, and those are the games that make money and have huge playerbases. LoL really -is- a good example. The vast majority of the stream monsters and low-level players don't and won't care about leveling up, but the game is playable for them because there's a ton of other low-level players to fight and the game isn't hard to play and learn on a low level. GGAC doesn't even have move names in the damn movelist, let alone tutorials. It's hard to get into without someone to help. That's definitely a factor. Also, -no- fighting game worth its salt has a low learning cap. Melty, BB, and P4A have a lot of stuff to learn, and an amount of system and character quirks that are at least -approximate- to GG's (compensating for cast size, anyways). The main difference is that people find GG's difficulty more up-front. Melty has character-specific delays for lots of bnbs, depending on who you play, and the exec can be pretty rough, but that's a lot less scary when you can do launcher>j.bc j.bc AT as a low-level bnb with the vast majority of the cast. Most people don't see that easing-in for GG, or at least, if it exists, they never get to look at it. The game doesn't show it to them, and it's hard to find players that aren't already doing the complicated stuff.