Évaluations récentes de Eurobeat Strider

I wrapped up my Artifact run on Survival today, resulting in a platinum. I don't recall a game that managed to evoke emotion so strongly, certainly not tears, certainly not three times, and certainly not to the point where I felt compelled to check in with loved ones only five or so hours in to a nine hour playthrough. The sorrowful and oppressive atmosphere is so perfectly realized that I felt a genuine threat to my real world mental condition.

I bought the game expecting sci-fi Project Zomboid but when I saw what it really was, I could never look away.

10/10 will need therapy again.

I spent enough time in the game to get to top 4000 MR globally, I suppose I should have a worthwhile opinion.

This is a fun casual game if you play it with your friends who snicker when they hear 'DP' because they don't know what it means in this context, but as a comp game the experience is just plain horrible. This game feels too much like GGST. Instead of resolving the issues I had with SFV, it just repackages them into Drive Rush or limits them to two or three characters who can do it without, who all end up being top tier as a result. No Capcom, plagiarizing GGST's gameplay mechanics and crack addiction "balance philosophy" isn't new or unique, and as a result SF6 is a good fighting game, but an awful SF.

SF6 has many of the same problems we saw from Guilty Gear Strive. The meter problems are arguably worse, since Drive Rush Canceling doesn't inflict a meter gain penalty if the cancel option is blocked, and there's no additional protection against throw after blockstun. Characters like Manon and Marisa can run away with the game by forcing you to eat highly damaging strike/throw mixups that refund half the meter they just spent on it, and plus on block characters like Ken, Luke, and Juri will just get all their meter back while you're stuck in a blender you can't press out of.

The balancing is slightly better across the board to SFV, but this isn't saying much. The roster is half the size, mostly everything's been buffed to insane levels and shared system mechanics are increasingly powerful. Drive Rush is an overcentralizing game mechanic that makes characters with good ones very difficult to stop and gives them free mixups on block, blocking now costs meter, and the characters with plus on block mediums and even heavies are the only ones with decent meter gain. Drive Impact has much less of an effect than was expected by many earlier in the game's life, such to the point that it does little to discourage any sort of zoning outside of Ryu's fireball and poke normals.

Speaking of Ryu, he's an unfortunate victim of all this power creep, arguably weaker than his last SFV incarnation because he lost many of his damage confirms and fireballs are even riskier because of Punish Counter. Both Ken and Luke massively overshadow him, and it's a little strange that the balance team would think to allow him to ship in this state.

That's assuming they still think anyways. Daisuke probably shared his cocaine stash "vision" with them.

If you play this game for a while, these words will be on your lips too. ArcSys' design teams aren't highly renowned for their foresight or balance and Strive is just the latest of many reasons.

TL;DR Strive is an awkward mix of old Guilty Gear paradigms mixed with "accessibility" changes that creates an incredibly volatile environment that's more frustrating to play the longer you stick with it. Strive is more pachinko machine than fighting game, right down to the "fishing" to get that music track you want. (They still haven't added Keep The Flag Flying please kill me.)

GG has always been about doing crazy ♥♥♥♥ and mashing buttons, but where AC+R demanded and rewarded mechanical execution and deep character knowledge, where Xrd gave varied system mechanics that warranted smart meter management, Strive instead has big damage tied to incredibly simple to execute blockstrings and mixups in a game where defensive mechanics and movement are both nonexistent.

The concept of "anyone can do it" has real consequences for competitive balance. Simplifying everything to the degree that Strive has greatly reduces skill expression. Strive rounds are guessfests with very homogeneous gameplans where risk-reward is dictated by how meta your character is. Once you've seen one Celestial Nago or Happy Chaos' gameplan, you've seen all of them, and these guys are painfully common. If you're not playing a character that can gorilla hard, you're going to find yourself going back to match replays and seriously finding that many defensive situations have no real solution. It's incredibly frustrating to see the same safe offense played out over and over again and have the outcome decided purely by if you can mindread your opponent's RPS option 6 out of 8 times per round.

Much of this ties into this game's meter system. Tension only has use in 50% increments, as opposed to the 25% seen in previous titles. Tension gain for attackers outstrips Tension gain for blocking by orders of magnitude. Because Roman Cancel both eliminates the risk of a failed mixup and increases the reward for getting a stray hit, this frequently snowballs games in favor of characters that can force and reset blockstrings to crank RISC for damage boosts on hit. (Currently, Nago, HC, Leo, Ram.) Previous games had Dead Angle Attack and Xrd had Blitz Shield to stop blockstring mashing of this sort, but this game only has new YRC, which creates a risky scramble weighted against the user on succeeding. While the user is given some frame advantage, anyone hit by it can simply hold up+back; throws will whiff and get punished hard, any attack that hits the jump startup gets scaled and does negligible damage.

There also seems to be a lack of planning in how different characters contextualize each other. Leo, Testament, and now Bridget are just better versions of Ky at this point, with safer and more effective tools that do the same jobs in addition to some unique to them. Some characters are prone to having key tools completely invalidated, such as Faust's lanky grounded options getting beaten out (into a hard knockdown!) by 6P; a universal anti air.

Patches have only exacerbated this.

When players almost universally complained that combos were too simple and damage was too high, Red Roman Cancel was buffed to no longer scale combos with its shockwave effect, which at once wildly increased the damage possible off of very simple conversions and made having Tension even stronger. Again, this heavily skewed the outcome of a round towards RPS style guessing, rather than smart and snappy decision making, something that anyone who spends time with the game is going to hate eventually.

When Happy Chaos' Steady Aim loops were the subject of everyone's ire, ArcSys made an uncharacteristically smart decision to nerf the offending tool. They increased his resource cost of using Steady Aim, giving him some close combat buffs to help smooth this out. The only problem is, they increased the cost of holding Steady Aim, which nobody was doing. ArcSys buffed the strongest, most uninteractive character in the game on accident because they weren't paying attention. This hasn't been fixed for almost half a year. Nagoriyuki was subject to flat out buffs on the same patch while he was already considered to be one of the best characters too. ArcSys didn't even try to hide the big dumb there.

Ultimately, GGST is a game so offense heavy that not attacking is tantamount to losing. It has followed that mid or even high level players frequently lose when their play is more solid than their opponent simply because their opponent's character could simply attack more often and more aggressively.

Pick a top tier or don't play. That's not a warning or advice, it's just how the game goes.

The game at its core is great, but the time to pick up and play this passed a long time ago. The animation and graphics quality are amazing, and you can play your whole life and always improve at Tekken. On the other hand, you can play your whole life and still be bad at Tekken. Newcomers, even those with extensive experience on other fighters, are going to be hard pressed to enjoy themselves here. The offline modes are about as poor as you'd expect from a fighting game, complete with another meme-worthy story mode. The online's netcode is a significant improvement over SFV's janky rollback and SSBU's delay base, but the online community has withered away. Anyone in beginner ranks will rarely find anything but laggers, smurfs, or worse yet, empty lobbies. The game's barrier to entry isn't very high, but the barrier to enjoyability is about 400 hours or so.

A quick disclaimer; I have not played any Castlevanias beforehand, the closest comparison I have being Metroid Fusion (GBA).While this means that the mechanics of the game might be new and fresh to me, they may be repetitive for some who have been around to play those older titles. With that out of the way...

The game can be challenging at times. Bosses can sometimes feel like they're damage sponges, and the game can be stingy with healing items and save rooms. The distance between save rooms can also prove punishing for the incautious wanderer, who may lose an hour of play simply because they forgot waystones were a thing. But all these things are a difficulty thing, and mostly stem from my stubbornness about using consumables. Overall, the game feels well designed and executed, and the minor objective complaints I have lie mostly with minor bugs and the way cutscenes are framed. That aside, everything feels like it should. I'm told, that in true Metroidvania fashion you can even perform sequence breaks later in the game.