Battle Arena Toshinden

[Don]

I recently went back and checked this game, and I think this is one of the few games that was fun over complete. It reminds me of Soul Calibur in that it's both very fun to play and it somehow got progressively worse in newer iterations. Toshinden had all kinds of whacky balance issues, but the game was fun to play. The special moves are actually special and do insane damage. Combined with the hit from behind factor you can take off half of someone's life in one move if you rolled behind them. But I actually like this over the more technical games where special moves are generally slightly more powerful than the equivalent of fierce, and sometimes not even that. There's also Sho, the Shin Akuma before there was Shin Akuma (there was no formal distinction between Akuma and Shin Akuma until Street Fighter Alpha 2 if I recall, because he's either always super powered or not until then). There's obviously nothing fair about him as he has elevated damage, reduced damage intake, and his hit recovery is so fast he can flat out avoid moves that'd combo on anyone else in the game. There's nothing fair when you use Sho (or face him) but that's why it's fun, especially after you lose to an Ellis infinite (which Sho can actually roll out of).

In fact, the game's inconsistency is actually what makes it interesting. Ellis's strong dragon punch does not always knock down. Her ultra cheap desperation can very rarely be blocked even if the initial hit connects. Speaking of desperation moves and the Sho secret moves, they're some of the coolest moves I've seen in a fighting game. Some of them are literlaly "What the..." when someone pulls one on you, and sure you can literally just do nothing but Ellis's desperation and win half of the time since two of her desperation kills almost anyone. I remember killing someone from full health with Sho's secret move, which is actually not that hard to input compared to some of the more insane stuff.

To me Toshinden is a good example of what a modern indie game should be. It's certainly not very big in scope (10 total characters). It's not really too concerned with stuff like balance. Pretty much everyone had the same commands, and balance was pretty much way out of the window. I think Mondo's strong dragon punch is guaranteed to get you a counter hit even when you knocked someone down because he does a Yoshimitsu helicopter move and takes 10 seconds to come down, but just doing that move is cool enough to worth the risk.

[Julius Seeker]

I've not played any of the Toshinden games aside from the first PSX version.

Soul Caliber, I wish I could put my finger on why I like the original better than the sequels - which are more advanced.

Similar things happen with certain other games in other genres too: Civilization 2 and GE007 - each game was clearly advanced upon by its sequels and spiritual sequels, but those later games just never ended up being as fun.

[Don]

I think the problem is that a more complicated or even a more balanced game isn't necessarily always more fun.

The first Toshinden had moves that take half of your life off, but it was fun.

Soul Calibur I think just tried to add too much to the point doing the extra stuff become a grind.

[Eric]

3D fighters have gone through a pretty weird evolution over the years, juggling a char to a corner or a wall or ring out seems to have become the depth norm for most of them. I think they're in need of something to really revitalize the scene.

Battle Arena Toshinden at the time was a really pretty fighter, but like you said the game had special attack syndrome, where making good reads, and any button outside of a random special was pretty much a waste of time because the risk/reward was too great.

The first Soul game, Soul Blade was basically just Tekken with weapons and a weapon gage that would cause your weapon to break if you blocked too much. Every game past Soul Blade in the Soul series emphasized actual weapon combat and a greater emphasis on matching real life weapon use, they also got rid of weapon breaking(Cause why take away what people like about the game), introduced parries, weapon clashes, meter etc. The characters in Soul Blade weren't all that different, I think Mitsurugi and Hwang for instance played identical to one another, where as in later version Mitsurugi actually took on a samurai-like fighting style.

[Don]

The thing is I don't think doing some combo that did 40% of someone's health is really any different than say Kayin or Ellis's backflip kick can take half of your life off. Usually the combos aren't even hard to do. If you look at a move like Duke's Southern Cross, in a VS type game it'd probably be a 25 hit combo, while it's just one move in Toshinden and it does about as much damage as 25 hits put together.

Also doing two fierces took off a ton of life. Someone like Mondo you can basically just do fierce because it's better than his special moves. Rungo you just do his crouching fierce and that took like 25% someone's life too if it connects, and it counters air attack better than his or for that matter most character's dragon punch move. It's also pretty interesting in that dragon punch doesn't always counter air.

[Eric]

The game has no depth. If a combo is difficult to do, it should do more damage, if a combo is easy to do, it should does less damage. Just basic fighting game logic 101, and why BAT was a bad fighting game, if not mindless fun for people who liked to press buttons and mash special moves.

[Anarky]

You kind of hit the nail on the head with the randomness of some of the old fighters. Back when Ganath and I were in highschool we'd play Bushido Blade 2 for hours just because of the shit you could do. Sometimes you'd start a round and just throw your kunni and kill the other person and queue up for another match.

[Don]

Depth is a meaningless concept to most games. You can talk to the guys who play competitive rock-paper-scissor and they can tell you there's all this depth to figuring out when to use rock and when to use scissors. If BAT was played like Street Fighter 2 for 10 years people would find all kinds of interesting stuff to do. In fact a lot of interesting matchup looks pretty similar to SF2, like Ellis/Kayin is extremely powerful when they can cross you up because the air backflip is very hard to block and does insane damage. In fact it's probably pretty hard to come up with a game with any meaningful complexity and not have some kind of emergent depth.

At any rate like Anarky said I'm pretty sure 99% of the people played a fighting game didn't start out because they want to master the end all be all of fighting games. Street Fighter 2 was a pretty fun game to play even though originally Guile was incredibly overpowered when fighting anyone who doesn't have a fireball move. It's hard to imagine Soul Calibur was ever balanced given each character has around 100 moves and very different stats but it's still a fun game to play. Even Street Fighter was hardly anywhere closed to totally balanced.

[Eric]

If a game has depth then people will play it for 10 years.

People still play Marvel vs Capcom 2, Street Fighter II & Street Fighter III, Capcom vs SNK, etc. Hell I think there was a Street Fighter Ex 2 tournament a week ago.

Evolution still has Street Fighter II every single year.

FFS, Super Smash Bros has depth, people go out and compete at tournaments for that game, does it having some degree of depth take away from it's fun factor?

A game with depth makes you feel like you accomplished something when you do something impressive. Your hard work is rewarded your effort and skill into the game takes form against somebody else's effort and skill and the better player wins. If two people just want to mash buttons and you split a 50/50 win rate because there's no rhyme or reason to who won, and you find that fun, that's fine, but don't sit up here and tell me depth doesn't matter.

Are fighting games completely balanced? No, there are always match-ups where one char may have an advantage over the other, but both have tools to deal with it, this is why people that play fighting games have 0 problems with balance updates and bigger roasters, while the 99% who have no idea what they're doing and have no aspirations to be good couldn't care less or think they're getting "ripped off" for buying the first iteration of the fighting game which has balance issues, despite no fighting game in the history of fighting games ever not having balance issues. When a match-up goes from impossible, to beatable with enough effort, that's the sign of a good fighter.

Sorry for being winded, Fighting Games are my favorite genre, I go to Evo every year and I'm sensitive to garbage fighting games deluding the pool of decent fighters.

You kind of hit the nail on the head with the randomness of some of the old fighters. Back when Ganath and I were in highschool we'd play Bushido Blade 2 for hours just because of the shit you could do. Sometimes you'd start a round and just throw your kunni and kill the other person and queue up for another match.

You might be interested to know that sometimes at suites for some FGC majors people would have Bushido Blade money matches, first to 10 wins, entertaining stuff.

[Don]

Fighting games are played for a long time because they are fun, not because they're deep. You've to try really hard to come up with a game that isn't deep if you played it long enough.

The depth of a game is usually incidental. It's almost certain whoever made Street Fighter 2 is nowhere as good as the people who play it competitively. You can argue Diablo 2 is a deep game, even though it mostly involves clicking on one button over and over again. It probably helps if your game has some plan on a reasonable complexity rather than hoping just accident, but like I said there are guys who play rock-paper-scissors competitvely too where apparently you need a good hand-eye-coordination so that you can show your hand at the last possible moment so the other guy can't easily guess what you're going to use, and apparently they got common rock-paper-scissors openings too. And I'm not saying they're making this stuff up either and I can believe people who play it competitively really do see all that depth. I think there are also guys who play Super Puzzle Fighter 2 turbo competitively too. But I'm pretty sure that game is fun not because it has some surprising depth to just spamming as many blocks as you possibly can in the shortest time.

At any rate I don't think BAT is some kind of totally awesome fighter, but it's surprisingly good for an early PSX game, that somehow got worse each new iteration similar to Soul Calibur.