Free movement 3d fighters are rarely seen. This is a style of game that really isn’t worked on much, and when games are released they usually aren’t made deep enough to be taken seriously anyway. Recently I have been looking at many of videos of games like Marvel Nemesis, DBZ Tenkaichi, and Power Stone to see what was right and what was wrong with each of them. I would think that most of these games have never been taken seriously by the majority of you. And it is for good reason that they haven’t, from what I have seen none of these games really have the capability for high level competitive play.
For those of you who have played many free movement 3d fighters I want to know which ones you liked the most. Why did you enjoy these ones over the others? What are the vital flaws in the game that cause for deep competitive play to near impossible? What improvements do you think can be made in order to make the game deeper but still retain the fun value that they game gave?
Recently I have been looking at Power Stone 1 and 2. I am guessing that a lot of people here have played the Power Stone games and know the basics of them so I won’t go to far into them. I really enjoyed the first power stone game but it was limited in depth for quite a few reasons;
The escape system is a bit overpowered and was placed in the game because I feel they could not think of a good way to apply a blocking system. Really I have not solved the problem of making a blocking system that feels fluid in environments like this and work effectively. We need a new way to guard or avoid attacks.
Items kind of limited competitiveness I guess, though not enough for me to really have a problem with them (in the first game anyway).
Lack of moves. It could be hard to apply specials to a free movement 3d fighter right? Cause quarter circles would be pretty weird, I mean what if you are facing towards the screen. Anyway, I tried to think up a solution and the best I could come up with is taking an idea from Primal Rage. In Primal Rage, you would press the attack button and then do the stick movement in order to do specials (instead of the other way around). This could work for these kinds of 3d fighters. Press the punch button, and then press Up+Down+Right quickly for one of the special for an example. It could be made so the movement is exactly the same no matter where you are facing. The problems may arise from the time it would take to have to determine your move however, which could become a major issue.
I am really hoping that we can come up with some good ideas on how to fix this kind of fighting game so there will be more variety in the games we receive in the future. I really enjoyed Power Stone and would hope that there would be some way to fix the system that it used to make a competitive fighters. Please post whatever ideas you have.