ASB League Groups C and D Full Fights

Watching the full fights for this one is making me think and notice a few more things. I didn’t realize until this time that the stage hazard has a zone on the floor where you have to stand to make it start. It takes a little bit of being there too. That’s good because it means that if you’re careful enough, you can probably go the whole match without triggering them. I’m still hoping for an option to just turn them off, but this is something.

I’m also really hoping for an option where you can turn the damage up or the health down and also to make the special gauges rise slower. I’m sure that there will be, I remember it being in other fighting games I’ve played, but these matches are a little long and dry. I think the real problem is that stand characters are overly stand reliant, Echoes looks like an impassable wall and Rohan can pull off his supers way the hell too easily, and I’m not sure if that’s an aspect of the AI players or if the game is geared towards that. I’d like to see if human players would rely on the same tactics of throwing out stand attacks over and over in the hopes that the opponent will fall into them. The worst offender of that is the fight between Jolyne and Koichi that ends in a time up. By contrast, Will and Wham’s fight is more interesting overall because they have to be in each other’s faces, times where Will decides to do ripper cutter spam not withstanding.

To that end, I think this game would benefit if they took further cues from the Capcom JoJo’s game and brought back the stand meter and stand breaks. I’m not saying it has to go full on P4 Arena where stands are only used for special attacks and can’t just generally be out, but cutting down on how much the characters can use them might help bring the fighters closer together instead of that back and forth stand shoot stuff.

Anyway, now you can actually see why Giorno lost his match with Gyro. It looks like a bad move on the AI’s part because he jumped back and did the tree thing instead of just hitting him. The more I watch these, the more I wish we were watching human players play. Maybe after this tournament thing is all over.

The final groups, E and F, will stream next week on Wednesday.

ASB League Groups C and D Highlights Reel

The Nico recording highlights are up, and I’m starting to sense a trend in these fights.

Group C

Group C was another grouping of stand vs. non-stand. Rohan was  of particular interest to me because when this game was being announced, Rohan was someone I was sure wouldn’t make it into the roster. Heaven’s Door is cool and all, but it didn’t seem like it would be suited to a fighting game.

As before, if you’re waiting for the full stream to see who won, be aware I’m posting the results table below the link to the fight.

Turns out I was totally wrong because Rohan is the taker of today’s first blowout victory. His ability to seal away parts of or all of your attack just destroyed the opposition. Part of that is probably that the CPU doesn’t take into account that they can’t do any moves, so after getting hit with the seal, they’d just sit there twitching while Rohan hits them in the face. That let him get strong rallies where he might have otherwise lost.

Kira vs. Wham was a pretty nice fight because the technique is very key. Kira is suited to keeping his enemies away and picking at them with bombs where Wham is a close range brawler. Once Kira was able to get him away and use Sheer Heart Attack to deal with Wham rushing towards him, he had a better command of the fight, but when Wham was in his guard, there wasn’t much he could do.

Will was fine. His moves are pretty good, and I like that he has a good agility. It just didn’t serve him too well in this fight. Rohan and Kira move on to the Top 16.

Group D

Stand users abound and also a horse, which I think is a fair balance. Based on how well Johnny was able to do with Slow Dancer, seeing Gyro fight on horseback was going to be interesting. Giorno was also important because him having GE Requiem was a cause for concern with how ridiculously powerful it is.

Not that it mattered at all. Not even with that he is invincible while transforming could Giorno get away from being the one shut out in this group. That’s the trend I’m noticing. It’s confusing, though, because his fight with Gyro ends with him getting a counter that knocks Gyro off Valkyrie, but then he loses. I don’t get it.

Koichi is this group’s star. His ability to keep his opponents at a distance is what allowed him to completely control every match. The only person who really had a good beat on him was Jolyne, who is suited to barricading herself while hitting the opponent with her longer than normal range stand shoot. She also combos very well into the baseball move. Koichi’s, I guess, zoning is what makes him able to wreck everyone.

Gyro is somewhat lopsided. He does fantastic while on horseback, completely wrecking Giorno’s shit in the first half of their fight, but the moment he fall off, he doesn’t seem to be able to handle himself as well. This is why Jolyne and Koichi were able to handle him so well, and may be why Giorno lost if he did which I’m not sure about. With their longer range moves, they were able to knock him off very effectively which kept his stronger mode largely held down. Koichi and Jolyne move to the Top 16.

Look forward to the full stream video sometime this weekend and the Groups E and F fights next week.

(Thanks to JoJo F2C for posting this. You can also watch the videos there if you prefer them to Polsy.)

Edit:

As a bonus, remember the punchable Friend Frog?

Yeah…