Skullgirls

[Zeiram]

I played a build of Skullgirls back at NYCC, and enjoyed the couple rounds of it. However, I'm not really a fan of the actual game now that it is released.

Cons:
- No MoveList in the game. You have to go to their website and download a nearly 30MB PDF file (which is only 9 pages long, by the way). It's not even hosted on their site; they have it on Mediafire.
- Loadtimes are a little longer than I would like (XBLA version).
- No pausing in Single Player
- Difficulty seems too hard to me, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but does seem out-of-whack. Couldn't get past the first stage on Normal. I turned it down to "Sleepwalk" setting to see more of the game. I STILL got trounced the one time I tried on that setting. Maybe it was just that I was attempting to play a charge character, but eventually I was able to progress on Easy with a different character.

Pros:
- Yamane's soundtrack and the general aesthetics
- Someone on the staff owns a chihuahua named "Leeloo Dallas Multipass"

[Juese]

There is a pause, you just have to hold down the start button for a couple seconds. I agree that it's a dumb way to do that, but it's there.

The move list was odd to me too. I used the Skullgirls wiki, but mostly I'm just figuring out a lot on my own. I've gone through story with Peacock and Filia. And yes, I bumped that down to easy. But I think I might be able to handle normal now, I'll find out later.

It goes without saying, but man what a good looking game. I did a quick dare and compare for shits since PS3 has a demo up, and I will say the PS3 has what looks like slightly larger and more crisp sprites. More interesting than anything else for me.

I need a damn fight pad like whoa.

[Ekkebus]

The pause delay was probably done deliberately to avoid an accidental button press from disrupting a match. It's certainly non-standard but I can see the idea behind the choice.

The lack of an in-game move list is kind of bizarre considering that's been the standard for 10+ years now. Maybe they wanted people to spend more time experimenting and figuring things out on their own rather than combing move lists. I dunno. Seems like at least having the option in the game would have been preferable regardless.

So lots of talk about design choices and awesome graphics but uh, is the fighting good?

[Wood]

Well, not having a reliable way to download this game, even though I own it now, I have been able to do a lot of reading on the game. The reason there's no in-game moveset is because there just wasn't enough time to get that in there. Sounds like that sucks, but considering how good their tutorial system is, I can be ok with that choice. one of my SoVA fighting game buddies mentioned there one the tutorials teaches you option selects. Where as every other game has you do combos, or "Throw a Hadouken! Excellent!", it feels like these guys really want you to understand the nuances of fighting games.

[Wood]

Ok, so it's a 6-button game (3 Punches, 3 Kicks), pretty crazy game. Only had time for the Tutorial mode, but I finished the whole thing. It starts off extremely simple (Press up to jump!), then goes into explanations of pokes, pokes into grabs, hit-confirms, OTG combos, launch combos, and what floored me was the last one about air-dash cancelling combos. The game TAUGHT me about air-dash canceling to continue an air combo. Holy SHIT is that awesome!

I got the movelist downloaded, which sucks because it's not included in the game. Another thing I like is the main grapple character (Cerrabelum) is very different than other grapplers. For one, the command grabs are just quarter circles + grab (lp + lk), and a shoryuken + grab. Also, she has a double jump/air dash.

So, I'm really liking this game so far, though it doesn't help I have a boner for Steampunk and Dark Deco (that last one is Revenge Lab's words, not mine). Crazy characters, good take on the VS formula, a tutorial teaches solid fighting game mechanics, instead of just special moves and combos. I look forward to playing you all at it when I get home.

[Ekkebus]

I got Live access again today and this was my first stop.

The Tutorial mode is amazing. Any other fighting game Tutorial mode I've seen, you pick your character and run through their moveset and some combos. This Tutorial actually explains the broad systems and strategies at work in the game, something I find to be a lot more useful. Like you said Wood - pokes, mix ups, move canceling - these are all things that exist in other fights but I'll be damned if I can recall any of them actually explaining this stuff.

After going through the Tutorial I took Cerabella into training, ran down her move set, figured out a couple combos and then felt fine playing on Normal difficulty. Just a note on her command grabs, I remember reading in Dave Sirlin's blog about HD Remix that they deliberately changed Zangiefs 360 motion inputs to make the character more playable. Assumedly the same idea applies here.

I really like this game so far, I think it's going to be a lot of fun going through, learning characters and figuring out strategies.

[Juese]

I posted "Fuck yes" as a response to how the fighting is, but apparently it didn't show up.

So, fuck yes.

[Wood]

Yeah, I felt that it was really easy to do a standing 360 grab move. No more having to mask that input with an empty jump. Been patiently watching a video to load with Mike Z and Alex Valle doing commentary about the game. Mike Z described his game as "Guilty Gear x MvC2", and I really think that applies here. One thing I should really learn is to take advantage of the custom assists. Just that opens up quite a bit of strategy with your other characters. For instance, If my striker has a really good normal move, I can set that up as the assist. Mike Z said on a podcast with James Chen that you could assist with a standing jab. When Chen asked why would you bother with that, Mike Z responded with "tick throws". Because the hit/block stun is much shorter on a jab, you could end a combo with a heavy, assist jab into grab (because you can't grab an opponent in a hit/block stun). My mind was blown at that point.

Seriously, if you're waiting for a deal to drop on this game, I really think you're doing yourself a disservice because the game is amazing at $15.

[Ekkebus]

I forgot to mention how awesome it is that the training mode lets you turn on Hit Boxes and a meter for Hitstun. They really made a big effort to make improvement in this game accessible to broader range of players than just the pros who are already familiar with these kinds of things.

[Wood]

Had a discussion with my fighting game friends in SoVA about Cerebella. She has armored moves, awesome grabs, dashes and double jumps. Ladies and Gentlemen, Potempkin with big rocking titties.

Only had a little bit to play with, but I really like using Filia in this game. I'm not sure if she's up to snuff as a one person team, so I'll add someone else for double team. Though Cerebella looks really good, I'm wondering how well she meshes with Filia. I do want to experiment more with Double. She's got the best normals from the cast, but her specials seem kinda weird. Her dash is great as it's a lot like Slayer's (where it's invulnerable except for the beginning and end of the dash). Plus her level 3 turns her into an Easter Island head from Gradius, shooting rings and everything!

[Juese]

Had a discussion with my fighting game friends in SoVA about Cerebella. She has armored moves, awesome grabs, dashes and double jumps. Ladies and Gentlemen, Potempkin with big rocking titties.

I remember early on, they were talking about how MikeZ (co-creator/tournament big wig) was a Potemkin player, and he wanted to make sure not to nerf their heavy characters and keep them very playable/versatile.

Beat Story mode and the tutorials. Nice to be interested in the story happenings, as short as they are. This series really deserves a Jojo's Bizarre Adventure-like companion cartoon. AND OH MY GOD A CROSS OVER! Calling it now, Skullgirls x Jojo's. Projected Summer of 20never.

[Ekkebus]

So far I've just been taking a a character through training to learn their specials and some combos, then going through Story and Arcade mode back to back. I really like Cerebella. She has a good variety of effective combos and ways to get in close on an opponent. Parasoul is a bit trickier. I wish her napalm traps lasted longer but she has some really good normal moves. Her crouching MP attack has really good range, speed AND it hits twice.

[dave auto]

It wouldn't be fair for me to say that Skullgirls is a bad video game. It's not. But I think it's fair to say that, based my playtime with the demo, I won't be buying this game.

The graveyard of the 90's is littered with fighting games whose reliance on audiovisual gimmickry precluded any attempt to actually make a fighting game that played as well as Street Fighter II. Skullgirls' remarkable triumph is that a group of fighting game fans have produced a game whose feel is a dead-on ringer for Capcom's finest. The movement and collision is uncannily identical to Capcom's VS. games. I think it feels more like Street Fighter than SFIV does. It's astonishing that it took a small independent team in 2012 to finally realize that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. In a genre that was perfected 20 years ago, there's no shame in cribbing from the best.

That said, this game looks like it was scrawled in the margins of a 10th grader's algebra textbook. Not an untalented 10th grader, mind you. But whoever decided to pay this artist for work that would appear in a serious commercial enterprise did not get their money's worth. The character designs are embarrassingly adolescent. Though there has apparently been some controversy over the sexually suggestive nature of some of the characters, I am of the mind that there's nothing wrong with adolescent fantasy, as long as it's rendered with creativity and style. But neither are on display here. The best word I can use to describe the game's look is "amateurish." One might charitably describe the game's roughly-sketched look as a stylistic choice, but I can't be the only person who thinks that this game would look more at home over in the Indie Games channel. Or running on Flash in a browser window. The wonderful animation is the only visual quality that belies the amount of effort and care you'd expect from a major publisher. But fluidly animated shit is still shit, and if I were Konami, there's no way I'd let a game that looked like this out the door with my name on it.

I could forgive the game's look more easily if there was a single character in the cast I were remotely interested in playing as. But I'm no longer 14, and a sexy sadistic nurse does nothing to make me the slightest bit curious about her moveset. I've heard the characters described as "over-the-top," but there's nothing over the top about the sad parade of cliche and pastiche that is the cast of Skullgirls. And perhaps no two characters exemplify this more than the two characters made available in the demo. Filia and Cerebella are both examples of a type of character Capcom began to abuse all the way back in the first Darkstalkers: the "I have a crazy shape-shifting monster attached to me" character. When your limbs, and by proxy your attacks, can be anything, it becomes meaningless to assign them to buttons labeled "punch" and "kick." They stop being logical extensions of the joy of the kinetic movement of fighting, and start being exercises in abstraction, whereby upon pressing the "kick" button, you must consciously remove yourself from the game enough to remember that by "kick," the game actually means "a series of spikes coming out of my back that strikes downward with a broad attack box and might hit twice."

No doubt this is exactly the kind of game that the fighting-tournament pros behind Skullgirls intended to make. But that merely makes this a highly technical game instead of an inspired and brilliant one. And in a digital marketplace where Skullgirls must sit alongside the very best that the whole history of the genre has to offer, at the same asking price, Skullgirls stats to look like a very ugly duckling indeed. And surely not every character plays like Filia and Cerebella. But if the intention of a demo is to sell copies of your game, I don't think Skullgirls put its best foot forward.

I'm sure I'd have more fun with this game if I was playing it with friends. And I think it says wonderful things about the state of the industry that a small developer has a venue to make and sell a 2D fighting game. I'm very hopeful for the games that come after Skullgirls, but this one is not for me.

[Wood]

After reading your review, I can conclude that there's absolutely no way I can change you mind about the game. It's impossible to argue taste with someone. However some the points you're throwing up here are very debatable, and mis-informed at points. The character design I think is actually very good. These aren't some weird abstraction of the trend that DOA and other anime fighters have been putting out. These are't well-endowed woman with pencil thin limbs that have no business in a fight, let alone a serious fighter. Each fighter either draws from previous fighters before it, or they're drawing from old timey cartoons. Filia is down right analogues for Millia Rage from Guilty Gear. Valentine is definitely based off Mai from Fatal Fury/King of Fighters. Peacock makes a parody of those old-time Disney bros. cartoons. What I'm getting at that these aren't just busty women for the sake of busty women, like DOA. They're meant to be drawing on the games that the designers LOVED to play. And even with that, all of these characters exude their own style. There's no mistaking these characters for anything else out there. To say that these sprites are not rendered with creativity or style is simply close-minded.

I'm not sure how this feels like Street Fighter at all. This doesn't feel like SF2, 3rd Strike, or even SF4. During an interview, Mike Z simply compared this game as Guilty Gear x MvC2. Over the top characters with a free form combo system of a vs game. Yes, SkullGirls does share the same 6-button set up as Street Fighter, but the similarities end right there. You also complained that the "Punch" and "Kick" buttons don't correspond with throwing fists or feet at an opponent, so you say that it loses that kinetic feel of a fighter. However, I must point out that I play Balrog (Boxer) in SF4. He doesn't have kicks at all. So instead of having a short, forward, and roundhouse kick, he instead gets access to another set of punches. Yet this doesn't break me from having to translate what that means to the game. When I press down and "Roundhouse" with Balrog, I'm still throwing a sweep, regardless. Or maybe Guilty Gear is more appropriate. When I play Slayer, who has no weapon asides from his limbs, what does Slash and Heavy Slash mean to him? He's still hitting people with some closed fists. Or BlazBlue, where the buttons is simply A, B, C, and Drive. Or Marvel 3, which is Light, Medium, Heavy, Special, and two assists? What I'm getting at is you're too hung up on expectations of what "think" the kick button should do, rather just understanding what the game says is a kick.

You're also calling this a game a highly technical game instead of an inspired and brilliant one. Tell me, Dave, what do you think is a revolutionary fighting game whose mechanics makes it stand out from its peers. I will argue this game's anti-loop system is a very creative solution to combat infinite combos. Previous methods are hit-stun decay and damage decay, or both methods. That is, the diminishing returns for each hit in a combo are such that if it's too long, your opponent will simply just recover out of the combo, as game like BlazBlue and MvC3 does. Or each hit in a combo does less and less damage inside of a long combo that it is not longer worth keeping a long combo going, and instead rewards a player that can do a short damaging combo and then go for a reset. In SkullGirls, if the system doesn't think it's a loop, it's a legitimate combo. If you repeat a pattern, the game will just stop the combo right then and there. This is the only game that does that. If that's not creative, how about custom assists? I'm able to, at the character select screen, input any ground move, and everytime I call for an assist, that's the move that comes out. It could be a special move, a normal move, a grab, whatever I want, as long as it's a grounded move. I can call a standing jab assist, just so I can tick grab opponents. I can do whatever creative set up I can go for.

Or how about we talk about this: This is a BRAND NEW IP in the world of fighting games. That ALONE is an impressive feat. This is a brand new game that asking for the same amount of money as some classics, some of which are actually more expensive if I remember correctly. Wasn't 3rd strike $20? This isn't a browser game, nor is this an indie channel game. There's enough work in here to absolutely warrant the asking price. This game has more going for it than even Street Fighter X Tekken, which is asking $60 for the base game, and $40 for costumes, and ANOTHER $40 for DLC characters that are on the disc, but can't get because the Vita version isn't out yet. Konami should be PROUD to publish this game, even with the flaws of being rushed out. If you disagree, then you need to play Castlevania: Judgement. That has Konami's name on it, and it's an absolutely terrible 3D fighting game. SkullGirls, on the other hand, is a love letter to fighting game that took 2 years to craft. I think you need to take another look at this game, sir.

[Ekkebus]

I basically agree with everything Wood said regarding the technical side of the game. I'd also like to point out that Cerebella's punches are actually all punches, and her kicks are actually all kicks. Even in Street Fighter, a punch might be a punch but you still have to take into consideration where/how fast a characters move is going to come out. It's just part of learning the game.

I think the game looks totally fine though. Great even. The thought of "wow, this looks like amateurish doodle-shit that belongs on Xbox Indie Games for 80MS points" didn't even cross my mind and like Wood, I think the game is an absolute bargain at $15 in todays market place. Hell, I'd argue it looks better at that price than a lot of classics that are just a straight port of a 15 year old game with some netcode slapped on. But if you don't like the character design, you don't like the character design. Ce la vi.