First of all, let me say that I am not really interested in competitive fighting games where you have to figure out the counter-counter-counter-counter-counter move of your opponent. My favorite fighting game is the Soul Calibur series because it's the game where you can fight and do things that actually look pretty cool by just hitting buttons at random. So I'm not terribly concerned about balancing.
I always wonder why you can't make a fighting game where people with like say having 2 characters in Soul Calibur's demonstration theatre, or the Soul Calibur 3's Nightmare vs Seigfried fight where two guys swing for a bit and ends with one falling down. A game where people are actually fighting each other at the same time, not this I do one combo on you, and then you do a combo on me, and then someone eventually dies.
I believe the root of this is that all fighting game really are turn based. If it's my turn to attack you can only defend or get hit. Now if you do the right counter that swaps the role around. You can have counter of a counter and then swap that around yet again. But in the end only one person can be attacking at once. This is because there can only be one winner when both people attacking. If you're using Bison and do a psycho crusher, and I'm Chun Li doing a kick, my kick always has priority over your psycho crusher (at least in the original SF2) so your psycho crusher is always stopped. In most fighting games an attack, no matter how weak, invariably puts the enemy in some kind of hit-shock animation. Therefore it is not possible for both characters to attack each other at the same time minus the cases where both attacks have the exact same priority.
It should be a valid option to attack as a counter to being hit, even at the expense of continue to being hit. Bison's psycho crusher should hit Chun Li attempting to kick into a human torpedo and still do damage (he'd take some damage too). If someone's going to poke you 10 times you should be able to just counter with a big move. Fighting games just won't look very cool if there can only be one person attacking at any given time of the match. Yes this likely to cause some balance problems, but I don't think it's be any harder to balance than a whole mess of imbalanced fighting game there. And it's not like having a balanced game is a necessary criteria for success (for example, MvC2).
I always wonder why you can't make a fighting game where people with like say having 2 characters in Soul Calibur's demonstration theatre, or the Soul Calibur 3's Nightmare vs Seigfried fight where two guys swing for a bit and ends with one falling down. A game where people are actually fighting each other at the same time, not this I do one combo on you, and then you do a combo on me, and then someone eventually dies.
I believe the root of this is that all fighting game really are turn based. If it's my turn to attack you can only defend or get hit. Now if you do the right counter that swaps the role around. You can have counter of a counter and then swap that around yet again. But in the end only one person can be attacking at once. This is because there can only be one winner when both people attacking. If you're using Bison and do a psycho crusher, and I'm Chun Li doing a kick, my kick always has priority over your psycho crusher (at least in the original SF2) so your psycho crusher is always stopped. In most fighting games an attack, no matter how weak, invariably puts the enemy in some kind of hit-shock animation. Therefore it is not possible for both characters to attack each other at the same time minus the cases where both attacks have the exact same priority.
It should be a valid option to attack as a counter to being hit, even at the expense of continue to being hit. Bison's psycho crusher should hit Chun Li attempting to kick into a human torpedo and still do damage (he'd take some damage too). If someone's going to poke you 10 times you should be able to just counter with a big move. Fighting games just won't look very cool if there can only be one person attacking at any given time of the match. Yes this likely to cause some balance problems, but I don't think it's be any harder to balance than a whole mess of imbalanced fighting game there. And it's not like having a balanced game is a necessary criteria for success (for example, MvC2).