captnb2thep said:
It isn't perfect, I still think Smash Bros Melee is a better game, (I enjoy All Stars better than Brawl though), and I don't think anyone can ever expect any company to build a roster of better characters than the great Nintendo has over the years (except if Disney did a mascot brawler, THAT would be interesting haha) but don't judge it on those merits. Judge it on how fun it is to play.
I kind of find it funny that right before this you spent a good deal of this post talking about the characters, because WHO the characters are is about as important as the colour of their areolas. They could each be a randomly coloured blob and so long as they played differently and smoothly it wouldn't matter in the slightest in terms of how fun the gameplay is.
Speaking of gameplay, I'm underwhelmed with All Stars. While I'm not generally fan of fighters (I love me some story) I can still play and enjoy them them, and All Stars does not hold up to standard. It mainly comes down to two major problems.
First, while the basic attacks are decent in execution, unfortunately the only way to knock out a character is to get your character's ulti, making most of the match equal to who grinds to their ulti first. And IF you somehow manage to miss with with your ulti, you have to grind all over again to just get another crack at bringing the match to a conclusion. That takes away a lot of the flow and pacing that most fighting games are built upon, and when a fighting game experience starts to feel like World of Warcraft, something has gone very, very wrong.
Second is the fact the the ultis are very much overpowered (though seeing as it's the only way to get a kill I'm not mystified as to why). A single clip from most ultis simply makes opponents die with no regard to how long they've been in the fight since last spawn or how much damage they've taken. Once certain characters ulti it is very possible for them to just "spawn camp" (for lack of a better term) their opponents and net several lives in the process. One match between two of my classmates had Dante's ulti kill the other opponent's Jak 3 times in the duration of it, effectively ignoring the mini-invincibiity a new spawn garnered because it lasts so little in comparison to the ulti. Now in most fighting games an ulti certainly gives you an edge, but it still needs to be timed right and even then just spamming it against a newly spawned or swapped character is unlikely to net you a kill. It takes the right moment to use it, and it should not be a necessity in finishing the match.
Overall I feel the game is drastically missing the point of how fighting games are fundamentally supposed to function. The fights should be about who plays their character and the situation better, who uses the environment and combos to their maximal effect. A fighting game should not be a button mashing extravagance to see who gets God's SMITE button first. I personally would not recommend it to my friends, and I really do consider it a knock off to most of the big name fighting games. Most of what it does is just like other fighters, and what little it does different is actually worse than the conventional methods. You'd get more money's worth from any other major fighter, and considering most of the latest versions have already been out for a bit, you'll probably get them at a better price to boot.
