What are you playing?

[Kugelfisch]

What character? So far I like Fuck Norris best.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

The waifu's pretty dope.
But really all 3 characters are fun, even the race traitor.

[rabidtictac]

What character? So far I like Fuck Norris best.

Iron Bull. I was practicing Fuck Norris for a while. Iron Bull is a very easy clear if you can parry at all. He has that whole Hugo thing going, where you can tap a single parry and then chain slam the entire room while invulnerable to damage.

His pokes and short combos are also highly damaging.

Norris is cool too but you have to figure out all his links from air to ground. He's more technical than Bull but less of a pain in the ass than Gal. I really don't like the way Gal plays at all.

[Kugelfisch]

Ricardo is a bit less flexible but he hits like a truck. He's not as slow as one may think at first. Dash inputs on a hitbox are nearly instant, which also helps with target comboing into a grab via dash interrupt.

Just the fact that such a discussion is even possible is a plus for the game.

[rabidtictac]

He's definitely not as slow as he seems at first. You have the short dash and you have some limited, very powerful pokes in the air. Plus a shoryu style uppercut for hard antiair or his version of chaining into air combos. His desperation attack is fucking ridiculous, with a hitbox that covers about half the screen. Then there are the copious i-frames he gets from all his grapples and how you can cancel grapples into other moves or select specific grab chains for mobility.

Ricardo is basically Haggar but with a shitload of extra power on top.

Fight 'n' Rage is one of the most technical *and* balanced beat em ups I've played. There are a lot of beat em ups out there with mechanical depth, but a lot of them have arcade jank and unfair bullshit thrown in. Fight 'n' Rage has no cheap shit. There is one raft stage that nobody likes, but taking that route is optional.

Compared to SoR4 for example, SoR4 has the tiresome habit of abusing bosses with hyper armor attacks. It's not bad per se, but becomes repetitive quickly and the strategy for countering them is to usually spam your own invincible or hyper armor attacks. Lame. Very few enemies or bosses in Fight 'n' Rage have anything like that and those who do (Dobermans, Cats) have both clear tells for when they're about to do the move and obvious (no meter) counters to them. Like with dobermans, if you just neutral jump the charge punch every time, they land in front of you on recovery with egg on their faces.

[Kugelfisch]

Did you know that Ricardo can do a Ken-style double shoryuken? Negative edge and buffer a dash during the first one. Release the button on landing and you'll instantly do a second one with even higher reach.

I really like SoR4 still and have been playing it as well. But the mentioned hyper armour on bosses is ubiquitous and there are too many "no fun allowed" enemies or even sections.
Low tier Donovan or mid tier Dylan on screen? No aerial moves for you! Did you know that Max's dash move counts as aerial as he does a tiny hop at the start? I sure as fuck know!
Or the entire tanker level, stage fucking three, where there's no verticality and they just put Dylans in your way. You can not engage with Max here! His aerials will get countered by the Ryo signature Kyukugenryu Karate style Hien Shippuu Kyaku, only that it's not a fucking charge move and they can approach you.
There's a reason it's a fucking charge move in Art of Fighting, you dense joggers!

So, it's Rolling Grab city up in that bitch. Granted, it works very well but why should I have to even spend health bar for an unlock able special as my only option?

[rabidtictac]

Yeah, I know about Ricardo's double shoryu, where the second one comes out almost like a hyper or super shoryu. There is a slight lag on landing between the two, however, so it's not really a move I think of as spammable. Not like the slam dunk grab chains, where you dunk a guy while positioning for the next grab and then immediately dunk the next. Or his air double hammer fist into splash kick. That shit is a godlike neutral tool.

SoR4 has very "puzzle-like" enemy design. I'm sure some people love that. Obviously, every beat em up should have enemies who require different strategies to defeat. But yeah, there are too many moments where SoR4 just throws up a wall to certain strategies because the enemy on screen will 1-frame hard counter that play.

SoR4 isn't a shit game, but it does have that element to the combat that reminds me of Doom Eternal. Where each enemy type has one Und Only Von counter, and you are intended to use your kit at the exact points where the game expects you to. The hyper armor is just one egregious example of this, since you either use your own i-frames or you avoid the boss until its hyper armor wears off. Older beat em ups were/are much more freeform and Fight 'n' Rage is extremely so. SoR 4 feels rigid at times.

My main character in SoR4 is Adam. I like the short dash and I like boxers. He's pretty fucking op. Max and Adam are two characters they got right. Shiva feels good to use but the lack of weapons is painful in sections of the game where the devs intended you to use weapons. Max is fun in SoR4 but I prefer playing SoR2 with that version of Max. Because I think SoR2 is a better game than 4. There are bullshitty bosses in SoR2 as well, but I like the stages, music, enemies and design more.

[Kugelfisch]

Puzzly is exactly right on. There are just arbitrary parts that you have to learn.
In Fight'n Rage you just combo and counter. Fucker died a cool three hits ago? Cool, hit his skellington some more!

Just no fucking chill!

(That's the start of the Deathhammer album. No intro.)
Just keep hitting that faggot!

[rabidtictac]

I'm currently playing all the Makaimura games (Ghosts and Goblins) including Resurrection. They're fun.



It didn't take me 11 hours to beat stage 1 because I played on Knight and used magic.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Filthy casual.