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.