I Prefer Linear Storytelling

Yesterday, I was playing Cave Story, and I got to a point where an important side character had apparently died. I wasn’t sure if she was really dead or not, but I found out while reading a GameFAQs guide to get through the next area: as it happens, I could’ve saved her if I’d picked up a particular hidden item beforehand, but since I didn’t have that, she was doomed to die. Gay.

Here’s a problem I have with an enormous number of Japanese games: I don’t want to play them over and over again to get the whole story. I’m not a gamer to begin with, and it’s hard enough for me to get through a video game once, much less do it over and over again until I find everything. Most of the games I end up beating are shorter action games for this reason: I can play through it once, and then I’m done. Maybe I’ll play through it again later, like rewatching a show or rereading a book. 

This is compounded by the fact that video games already require repetition to get through once. It took me ten+ tries to beat “Monster X” in Cave Story, and I’ll be damned if I have to do that again because I fucked up something and ruined the story. I found out that Cave Story has 3 endings, and I’ve really got no desire to play it three times to see all of them. More likely, I’ll just read spoilers for everything.

Actually, reading spoilers is my solution to a lot of these problems, though I feel that’s pretty lame. I don’t mind being spoiled, but doing it as opposed to playing the game is lame. Nonetheless, this is pretty much how I have to get by to keep up with things. Like, no way am I going to count on myself playing Fate/Stay Night all the way through, then doing it again for alternate storylines, in time to stop from letting people spoil the whole thing for me in the comments of my Fate/Zero posts.

I have too many interests.

Continued Time With Marvel Vs. Capcom 3: FUCK HULK

The Hulk is a cheap, unbalanced piece of shit </obvious flaming>. I guess he’s supposed to live up to the whole “no one in the Marvel universe can kill the fucking Hulk” shtick. Hulk has the ridiculous damage-dealing capability and high defensive power that you’d expect from a large character, but he’s also much faster than his other heavy counterparts and is able to pull off combos easily. He breaks guards and combos with ease, and his combos are very hard to break out of.

But the worst part is, he also has great range with his long-ass arms, so he can pull off all of his overpowered combos while fast close-ranged fighters are just trying to get to him. When the Hulk catches someone in even a really simple combo, they’re likely to lose half of their life bar in seconds. His average combo does as much damage as a combined three-man super attack.

My friends and I were met with unspeakable terror today when it became apparent that my 13 year-old brother, who specializes in big characters, could kick all of our asses at this game.

That’s never true. Ordinarily, once everyone gets used to a game, his 13 year-old button-mashing tactics fall apart. The trouble in this case has a lot to do with the fact that we fight using 3-man cells.

My brother uses a team of Hulk, Sentinel, and Dormammu. There’s a chance he’ll be replacing Dormammu, whom he’s least good with, probably replacing him with Haggar.

The Hulk and Sentinel combo is the dangerous part. Hulk is not only hard to kill but does enormous damage, and when he starts to get a little lower on life he gets switched out for Sentinel, who’s a lot less dangerous but also takes about ten thousand attacks to kill; and while he doesn’t have Hulk’s ability to easily string together combos, his attacks still do a lot of damage.

No Name is the only one who can come close to or occasionally beat this team, since he’s a fighting game expert and has figured out how to do better combos, but still has a hard time of it. We figured out that the only way to keep Hulk off of our asses is to constantly juggle him, but because his life bar is so long and his attacks so powerful, it’s nearly impossible to take him down without losing a significant amount of life, if not a whole character. 

Sentinel is a huge punching bag, so if Hulk is retreated, he’s almost guaranteed to make a good recovery while Sentinel is buying time sucking up damage. And then, once Sentinel is finally taken down, Hulk is back out, and by then, the opponent’s forces are weak.

Even if they take down Hulk and Sentinel, Dormammu is still there as backup. He may not be as threatening, but he’s no pushover, either. What makes him easier to fight is only that he’s a lot easier to hit because he has less effective short-range attacks and is very slow. However, his ranged attacks do a lot of damage and are highly effective. One is a projectile that does a lot of damage and also knocks a character back, and is easy to get hit by a few times in quick succession. If the only remaining characters are low on health, they won’t be enough to take down Dormammu’s entire life bar.

As for me, my style makes this battle absurdly hard. My best characters is X-23, and using her, I can get a hell of a lot of damage on any of the opponents (I usually take her out to fight Sentinel so that I can get his damn life bar down) because she’s fast and hits a lot. However, she has low defense, so if I get hit just a few times, she’ll be torn to shreds. 

Dante seemed to be the best opponent for Hulk because he has a lot of great combo and juggling moves, but I’m simply not good enough at using him. I can’t pull off his moves fast enough to kill Hulk before he can kill me or force me to switch characters. Dante was almost enough to get my 18yo brother and No Name to victory, as they’re both better with him, but it would take real proficiency to take out my brother’s Hulk performance. 

Wesker has a lot of potential to pose a threat, but only if he’s used masterfully, and I haven’t gotten nearly good enough with him yet. He’s one of the harder characters to learn, and so far, I haven’t learned enough to use him to his highest potential. Because I can’t get attacks off quick enough, he isn’t particularly useful for this match, and when I do use him, I usually either keep him in reserve as a last hope or use him to save the other characters’ lives when in need.

Trish, who’s been one of my best characters at fighting some of the harder opponents, is useless in this fight, being neither fast nor strong enough to be effective.

Eventually, I turned to other characters that I liked and started trying to make them work in the match.

Once I started using Deadpool, I quickly decided that he’d take away the Dante/Trish spot on my team, being like a faster and even more multi-faceted version of Dante. I got good with him in other matches, but in the heavy-hitters match, I had the same problem with Trish where at his speed he just wasn’t doing enough damage. 

Zero turned out to be an excellent addition, as he, like X-23, can get a ton of damage in fast, and is able to pull off combos easily. He’s harder to kill than X-23 as well, so he’s very valuable to this match. Unfortunately, all of that still wasn’t enough to push me to victory, though a match I played with him was the closest I came.

Another character I found myself really enjoying was Chris Redfield, who has an interesting combination of having fast close-ranged attacks and slow long-ranged attacks, but can’t move fast at all. The strategy I’ve got for him is to stay in one place and use attacks based on where the enemy is. He, however, isn’t even worth trying in this match because he’s too slow and doesn’t have good combos. 

By the time No Name took the game home, I still hadn’t beaten my brother once; but I swear to god, tomorrow, I will fucking crush him.

Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and my “Team Black Leather”

The very long-awaited Marvel vs. Capcom 3 came out today and No Name bough it immediately, which lead to us spontaneously playing for about four hours. 

When I play fighting games, I’ve got exactly one character type I’m good with—short-range fighters who’re fast, but have a decent number of mid-range attacks so that I can get away while still attacking. I started using this type with Samus in Super Smash Bros. Melee (who’s the only character I even know how to use anymore after 7 years of no one being able to beat me). 

SSBM isn’t your average fighting game, so Samus isn’t as easy to compare to the other characters that I use as they are to one-another. In Guilty Gear, I use Slayer and Eddie; in Street Fighter, I use Ken and Cammy; and so on and so forth. What they all have in common are a lot of attacks that allow the user to get out of the way while also dealing damage. With Samus, I jump forward and then kick backward, knocking out pursuers. With Slayer, I admittedly spam the bicycle kick and then punch people a lot. Ken has the revolving kick move, and Cammy a slide move, both of which are great for crossing the field very fast.

So when I pick up a new fighting game, I find myself automatically looking for those characters, and was pleased to find that Marvel vs. Capcom 3 has a few that fit the bill, which is great when I have to use 3-man cells. Each of them is different enough to make for a balanced team all within that one fighting style, which is totally fun for me. 

Here’s the odd part. There are five characters that I consider the most prominent in my style. One of them is Wolverine, but I don’t particularly enjoy him, so he’s not likely to be a permanent fixture. But the other four are all ones I plan to use a lot: Dante, Trish, Wesker, and X-23. And it just so happens that all four of them dress in black leather from head to toe (with the exception of Dante who’s decent enough to throw a flaring red jacket over it.) 

I’ll be perfectly honest—I’m okay with this. I like black leather. I’m not the type who’ll let the fact that liking black leather makes some pretentious people scoff at me get in the way of liking it. Dante and Wesker both look cool as shit (though the former is more his own kind of cool while Wesker is clearly a Matrix reject). Trish and X-23 wear almost the exact same fucking clothes, but they both look good as hell in them. (X-23 being the hotter of the two, IMO.)

But seriously, I look like a total douchebag going into battle with an entire team of leather-clad fighters. It looks like I went in and purposefully chose everyone who was wearing black. And then some cockass will fight me and accuse me of being some shitty goth kid, and then whoop my ass at the game and tell me “to pick characters [I] can actually use,” and then if he’s actually in my presence it’ll be even worse because I’ll be this long-haired dude in a black band t-shirt—clearly goth kid attire—but will look way too old to be a goth kid because of my beard, and instead look like some kind of sick fetishist who can’t keep his fantasies in check even when playing other people in competitive gaming.

And then I can’t even complain, because all of that is basically true.