Okay come on now. The game needed work but it was by no means bad.
The gameplay was really solid albeit in need of tweaking. Combos, blocking, assists, chases, precision abilities, ability chaining, wall running, dashing, dodging and plenty of other elements made this a solid fighting game.The RPG system felt kind of tacked on but it wasn't terrible.
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I mean I certainly respect that it's fine to come to a different view on it than me, but as a guy who is really particular about fighting games, it was like as bottom as bottom tier goes. It's just ridiculously unbalanced, even slight character tweaking can throw the entire thing out of balance worse than it already is by default, the actual fighting functionality is varied but not very precise at all.
It's basically to me seems like a fighting game that happened to also have action RPG elements, but it did neither its fighting elements or its action RPG elements any particular favors. Just like a really mediocre expression of all its elements.
As a guy who likes to count frames in his fighting games, the level of looseness and wonkiness with its combat system really put me off and didn't feel like a good application of ones skills versus any number of zillion other clearly superior fighting games. Which is not to say it doesn't fill a niche, but since I don't really have a dying desire for Final Fantasy fanservice and I do on the other hand consider the fighting game genre one of my favorites, I am extra critical of its gameplay failings.
But it's not that I don't think the potential for a FF fighting game isn't there. That's why I remain cautiously interested in this reboot, since it's a chance for starting on actual competitive grounds. I'm hoping we get a fighting game actually worthy of the competitive circuit.