Originally Posted by
isCasted
"Fluidity" doesn't mean jack shit when it's achieved at the cost of player's agency, the most important aspect of action games. You might as well be saying Easy Automatic is the superior way to play Devil May Cry games, because mashing a single button produces all the stylish combos you'd need. You might as well be saying anime is the superior form of art to videogames, because you can see all of the action by pressing a single "Play" button.
The whole point of making things more fluid is to make players feel more in control. And I don't mean "control" and in absolute control over the situation, I mean better means of engagement with the game's world. What's the point of having tons of enemies attacking you if, instead of planning your maneuvers around them, you can hold down a PA button to negate all of the incoming damage and be rewarded with a full PP bar? Those enemies might as well not be there. The game might as well not be there.
Hero might have a huge amount of block and iframes, but to actually do well you have to use riskier moves. Hero's fluidity was not achieved through infinite invulnerability, it was achieved through careful consideration of each animation - how long should each part of a PA take, how should it look, how far it should move you, how does it relate to player's input, when and what kind of freedoms should it give you etc. Quite a few of essential Hunter's PAs, Ranger's attacks and techniques have delays from the moment the player does the input to when the attack begins (for example, Sacred Skewer-T0 throw animation, Launcher's reloads on basic attacks and Divine Launcher T-0, Rafoie's cast animation), creating a huge perception of disconnect between player and the character. A fuck ton of ranged PAs have issues with camera control in TPS mode. Quite a few melee PAs have no reason to move your character away from the enemy, yet they do. This is the kind of thing they should've focused on.
You've been talking about "coherency" in how classes play? Well, here's what we got. Over End, a PA that was supposed to be the ultimate attack that rendered you vulnerable, was shit due to shit damage. It still does shit damage, but now its sole identifying element is gone, because you can just cancel it at any point. Rodeo Drive T-0 now has a turning radius of 0, but its animation hasn't changed at all; it doesn't lean on turns (you know, like motorcycles and jets), so it looks and feels like shit, despite practicality and decent damage. Same thing's about Asagiri - at its old speed it simply felt right, now it's just uncanny. If they at least gave it a bunch of sparkles at the start of the animation and on turns, or maybe made a camera go to the enemy before the character to give it a more cinematic feel, it'd feel so much more satisfying. DB's weapon-defining throwing blade gimmick is still vastly inferior to Hero's sword, despite adjustments. S-Roll Arts render everything else useless, yet S-Roll itself feels like ass to use with its small range and heavily restricted maneuverability, which is a sin for a class that usually prided for its mobility. If S-Roll allowed you to somewhat freely "slide" around during its execution, like in Bayonetta or Nier Automata, it would be the sickest shit. WLs are still utter ass, as it's been said before, and making them deal more damage only makes players have to deal with their asinine design much more often. Man, I could go on...
Yes, we did get some actually good changes (had to wait way too long for some of the best ones, like First JA and some skill rings becoming defaults, though), but the other shallow buffs simply overshadow them, as the game ultimately feels way less like an action game and more like a glorified rhythm game with ridiculously long input windows.
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