Great game mechanics: Fighting game edition.
Supers, as first implemented and popularized by Super Street Fighter II X. Unfortunately, SNK gets a bit shafted here, since they technically had some form of "super" in games that came before SSF2X. But man, here it was a game changer, quite literally. When your opponent's bar fills up and reads "SUPER," it could
completely change the flow of a match. Boxer, Ryu, Chun, and Honda (the latter two because of the "super storage" bug in the original game) with a full Super bar are truly, truly scary people.
But even beyond SSF2X, Supers became a standard thing. Practically every fighting game that came afterwards had some sort of "Super" bar. Today, we take it for granted, but it's an important mechanic that is still very powerful in its original game, and helped shape fighting games forever forward.
Parrying, as first implemented and popularized by Street Fighter III: New Generation. And
again poor SNK (
) gets the shaft here, since I think they had something similar to parrying as early as the second Samurai Spirits game. But the thing is, that Street Fighter (specially the Street Fighter II series) could become a projectile-fest, where Ryu (Hyper Fighting) or "old" Sagat (SSF2X) could be very mighty and intimidating with their projectile prowess.
But you know what? Parrying meant you didn't have to be scared of projectiles anymore. No more trolling from Hyper Fighting Ryu or old Sagat types. It was almost the perfect mechanic, too: You get rewarded for parrying by leaving your opponent open for a counter-attack, but if you mess up the timing, you get punished! (Which is honestly what Garou: MotW got wrong; there's no punishment for a failed Just Defend attempt.)
I mean, it's the mechanic that gave us "Evo Moment #37." Enough said...
