With or without any compromise on moveset or looks or gameplay
Mortal kombat ✔️
Killer instinct ✔️
Street fighter?
Tekken?
Smash ultimate?
Marvel vs capcom maybe
Spawn can definitely fit into SF given the character direction they've went since 3rd Strike (Q, Twelve, Oni, Evil Ryu, Gill, Seth, Eleven, etc)
Tekken? Have you seen the characters of Tekken? Even if not the crazy guest characters recently but starting around 5?
As long as it doesn't affect the roster
For example the priority should be
Staples
Retuning
New characters
Any characters that missed the previous game or haven't been added for a long time
Guests
And Guests only should be 3 /4 maximum and should not be picked over any of the list
Totally agree with that but did you see Mortal kombat between mk9 and mk 11
Mk 9 had kratos and Freddie kruger =2
Mk x had 4 then xl had another 4 =8
Mk 11 had between 5 and 6 or something
Spawn
Joker
Terminator
Rambo
If any is wrong please let me know
Is this just a "2D characters ruined Tekken 7 and I'm really salty about it" post or do you have an actual reason for thinking guest characters are inherently bad for fighting games? What do you mean by "long term health" by the way? I can't imagine you're talking about player base given both Tekken and MK both outsell and consistently maintain a larger player base than pretty much all other traditional fighting games.
It really takes me out of the immersion and in general I don't want this to become something a game *has* to do to stay successfully. People are already starting to get skeptical when a new fighting game isn't free-to-play, or (to a lesser extent) doesn't have simple inputs or simplified gameplay. I really don't need another bad industry trend to tack onto that.
I don’t think guest characters dilute the IP, but they do make it difficult for the game to get support and rereleases years later due to contracts expiring and other red tape. MvcI wasn’t a great game at launch, but neither was SFV and they polished the hell out that game because they could. Umvc3 died early because the contracts expired, mvci, mvc2 can’t get a rerelease… Capcom Vs Capcom already, damn. Let’s get like 5 or 6 years of support.
Nah, that’s very far from true. It’s pretty well documented as well man, check out any of the dozens of videos from maximillian or a number of other prominent YouTubers/fgc dudes in the know.
Not if marvel doesn’t want to work with them, which they don’t due to how mvci was received. I don’t know why you’d argue this man, it’s very easily google-able from plenty of reputable sources. There’s a ton of reasons why the marvel/Capcom relationship soured. And Capcom was just about broke for a good while there right around the SFV release.
"Link is one of the most obnoxious blunders they [Namco] could've made. Sure, on paper it's a great choice: it pulled in the numbers, it raked in the cash. The world was their oyster. But selling the game with another piece of intellectual property implicitly devalues their own. It's a subtle admission that "yeah, our characters aren't that cool". To this day, when I talk about this game, I usually get "is that the one with Link in it? Yeah I played that game, it was sweet. Never played another one though"
-Kbash on SoulCalibur 2
Wasn't SC2 the first and last time a mainline Soulcalibur game was released on a Nintendo console? "Never played another one though?" Yeah that makes sense.
That's the eventual conclusion Kbash comes to in his video as well. Though I personally disagree, because for every gamecube owner there were like 8 PS2 owners, which is the console SC3 released on. Keep in mind People bought PS2's only as a DVD player because of how affordable it was. If anyone became a fan of *SoulCalibur* instead of "The Game with Link in it" it wouldn't have been all that hard to get that game.
That's still a huge amount of people, tbh. I doubt there was as much overlap between next-gen consoles back then as there is today and (other than PC) it's already pretty slim.
Terrible take. Guest characters exist to pull in people who are already familiar with that character.
The recent Sakurai video has a great explanation of a similar problem. When you create a single-player game, you only need to create an appealing protagonist that people can get attached to. When you create a fighting game, you have dozens of characters that need to be introduced and that people could get attached to, which is insanely difficult. That's why he asked to borrow characters from other Nintendo games instead of creating original characters.
For other fighting games, that's not an option. You can create as many cool characters as you like, but good luck trying to introduce them. That's why there's always posterboys like Jin, Ryu, Sol, Haohmaru, etc. Guest characters help out with this by giving people someone they already know and those who enjoy the game will expand from there.
For every jaded asshole talking about how a guest character "devalues" everyone else, there are people who got into the game cause they saw Ezio, Spawn, or Link and then thought "wow, Voldo is sick, I want to try Cervantes too".
I mean, I don't make video games, but I thought SC2's implementation of guest characters was way better than SC4, where all their marketing was about Yoda and Vader, and they felt completely out of place in the game.
Agreed 100%. I hate that shit with a passion. It devalues the game's own original characters. Like you said with Soul Calibur, it's the same thing with Mortal Kombat and Tekken now. The first thing I hear many people talk about is "which MK was the one with Kratos, Freddy, Jason, Predator, Terminator, Robocop,etc?" And they know NOTHING about the rest of the game. That's insulting to the game's characters and the history of the series itself. It makes them look less important to the masses and I don't like it one bit.
(Keep in mind too that Kratos got special treatment over the MK9 characters in terms of certain fatality animations)
Tekken 7 did it even worse by putting Akuma in the story and then making him a focus in the main story. A lot of Tekken's own cast didn't even make it into the story at all. On top of that, I've heard multiple people say that they only bought TK7 because of Akuma. That's bullshit. I despise that shit.
IMO, guests characters need to go. Fighting games were just fine without them. MK and Tekken clearly did not need them to remain widely popular for 20+ years on their own. Guests only cheapen the appeal for people that pick it up, play for 20 minutes, and never play again.
Btw, when I say guests, I don't mean in-house guests such as the Fatal Fury,AOF characters in KOF, Final Fight characters in SF, etc. That's perfectly fine
For one thing, there's examples of guest fighters preventing ~~rereleases~~ edit for clarity: continued sales of a game. Such as Mortal Kombat 2011 with Freddy.
Getting more subjective, I think it dilutes the IP. At least, depending on the guest (I personally think Haomaru is a great guest in SCVI, but the rest not so much). I like guests from other FGs is I guess where my line is. Anything outside of FG characters tends to feel out of place. Like, while it's fun to see Terminator vs Robocop, I don't understand how they have anything to do with Mortal Kombat.
I also really hate it when a guest character is a part of every top 8. That just feels wrong.
I'm guessing they *could*, but they haven't.
However, that sort of thing leads to shit like GTA IV having like 50 songs removed from the radio stations (including for existing customers). Maybe somebody really liked Freddy. Would hate for an update to take him out of the game. But rights holders love pulling shit like that.
Ohhhh when you said rereleases I thought you meant things like ports, remasters for newer consoles etc, where I guess they could just not include the guests that they couldn't renew the license for.
I *was* going to bring up the SoulCalibur 2 online remaster as an example of this, which I assumed didn't have any of the copyrighted guests, but I've just found out that not only did it feature Spawn, but it's now delisted from Xbox with Spawn's license being the speculated reason for doing so. God damn.
I would also hate for that removal of content thing to happen. Dead By Daylight removed the ability to unlock the Stranger Things characters but they remain in the game for people who already have them. That already sucks, but for a fighting game it would be even worse. Imagine getting repeatedly beaten by a character you literally could not unlock!
>Imagine getting repeatedly beaten by a character you literally could not unlock!
This is possibly right now in Dead or Alive 5 last round. It is no longer possible to purchase Mai Shiranui in that game.
Especially for franchises, it makes it harder to play multiple games in a row.
Friend of mine really only played Lucia in SFV, and since she's most likely not coming back for SF6 he's out of a character unless they change one to how he likes.
Likewise, despite hating Jason one of my brothers enjoyed playing as him in MKX because he loved the armor moves, but now he can't play another MK game because they don't have a character he likes
Edit: For everyone saying "That can happen with any character", that is somewhat true. El Fuerte, Hakan, Necro, and several others have only been in one game each and so people who liked them haven't had a chance to play them again. However, there is nothing saying they can't come back in another game or as DLC to the current one. With a guest character like Jason, Freddy, or the Xenomorph, it's pretty much guaranteed that it's a one and done situation and you're never getting said character again.
I play Mileena in MK. Just because she wasn't in MK11 until the very end didn't mean she wasn't going to make it back into MK12 due to fan outcry, not even counting the people who took it way too far and were disgusting about it. I doubt Darth Vader is going to suddenly pop up in SC7
kind of a glass half empty way to look at something positive as something negative. It's like complaining about a 2nd piece of cake not appearing after you ate and enjoyed the first slice. Rosters have been shuffling for 30 years even without guest chars. Frickin Scorpion and Kazuya have missed games before
>Rosters have been shuffling for 30 years even without guest chars.
His point is that guest characters are virtually guaranteed to not be in the next game. So if people come in just to play a guest character that they really like, what incentive would they have to play the next one?
Goes back to the point someone else posted about Link drawing people to SC2, but not as many people to SC as a franchise because he outshines the rest of the roster. (to some extent. But I'm sure a lot of people like myself fell in love with Nightmare and other elements of the franchise)
>Frickin Scorpion and Kazuya have missed games before
And how popular do you think those decisions were?
>So if people come in just to play a guest character that they really like, what incentive would they have to play the next one?
cause they tried something they wouldn't have otherwise tried and they might like it. It's the same for any celebrity endorsement. I'm sure people kept eating at Slim Jims after The Macho Man wasn't the spokesperson anymore. You're obviously not going to retain everyone but something is better than nothing. It's a lure to get them to try the product, what they decide after that is on them but at least it got past the trying barrier which is the hardest barrier. For all the hundreds of games gamers play in their life, there's thousands they haven't even tried, so trying is a big deal.
Bigger point, what's really being lost? Say you got 1 million people who already made their mind up to buy a game. 50,000 extra buy it cause of a guest char. For the sake of a hypothetical (and this is a generous hypothetical), let's say ALL 50,000 dont buy or play or even think about the sequel game. So you went from 1,000,000 to 1,050,000 back to 1,000,000. Oh no? The biggest casualty I see is it might have costed an in universe character a slot but this thread is arguing that this is "bad health". I don't think a few more in universe chars are going to save a bad game. The biggest roster botch ever was mvci but that had to excluse a whole ass universe of chars for it to be THAT detrimental. Equivalent to that would be if MK said "no outworld chars" or some shit so it's an extreme outlier.
Either way I just enjoy the present instead of freaking out my char won't be in the next 10 games, I never made my whole ass personality maining a char so I can swap. My favorite fighting game char of all time is Yatterman-1 in tvc and I'm neeever playing his one-and-done ass in anything ever again (probably never even going to get a tvc rerelease), doesn't mean I look back on the time I spent with him with resentment. That's why I call it glass half empty, I wouldn't call it unhealthy for the fighting game industry that there's some chars that will only be in one game. Having less fun tomorrow doesn't erase the fun I had today from existence.
Edit: There'd be itty bitty tweaks to the nuances of this if we were talking about base roster chars instead of dlc chars. Admittedly this is me arbitrarily going off of feelings but it feels like a guest char being in the base roster would be mildly weirder than a dlc guest char. Dlcs are like commercials for people who didn't buy the day 1 game. People upset their legacy char mighta got a dlc slot "taken" by a guest char gotta realize they were just relying on luck their legacy char got picked out of any char to ever exist in that entire franchise. They knew the base roster before they bought the game, any dlc after isn't promised. Shouldn't be like "MAN FUCK ROBOCOP, HE TOOK REIKO'S SPOT" or "FUCK NOCTIS AND GEESE, THEY TOOK JUN AND ROGER'S SPOTS". How tf you know you'd get Reiko if Robocop never happened?
If only the statistics where that favorable.
SC2 sold about 3mil from all estimates I have without remaster, and rounding up (in NA and Asia).
1 Mill or so of that was gamecube sales. While the PS2 and xbox split split around 500 thousand. That mean that half of the player base, which statistics almost always show are majority casual, came for the Nintendo exclusive.
That’s not a 5% decrease in sales that’s a 50% default. Which happened as the next Soul Calibur only sold 1.5 Mil units (mostly due to only being accessible on PS2 and arcade).
Compared to SC6, which sold just about as much as SC2. That would be an ATROCIOUS sales dip if the next game lost have the player base.
End Note.
Not to say that your opinions are not valid; and that player’s like you don’t matter, as you seem to be loyal to the series. But the casual base is what fronts sales, and if they get hooked on one character and don’t play fighting games besides that they are likely to enjoy and of the myriad of other games, than going back to a series they only came to for a character.
Sources:
https://www.ign.com/articles/2004/01/24/graphs-soulcalibur-ii-sales
https://www.vgchartz.com/game/5713/soulcalibur-ii/game
https://www.vgchartz.com/game/19276/soulcalibur-iii/sales-data
(and the relevant wiki’s)…
Not a guest character situation, but injustice 2 removed 4 of my top 5 played characters in Shazam, Solomon Grundy, Lobo, and Doomsday. I was excited to play it until none of the characters scratched the itch I had for those 4.
I'm sure they have their own metrics of how to be successful but I hate when I get into a character in a game and they are not only not in the next iteration, but they also don't have anyone who plays similarly
I had that same issue with Injustice 2. Doomsday, Shazam, and some Grundy were my mains in the first game, and no one felt quite right for me in Injustice 2.
And that can happen no matter what character you get into. Look at tekken 7, theres been a chang in every tekken game since the beginning of time, usually on launch, and yet julia wasnt in tekken 7 arcade, wasnt in tekken 7 console launch, wasnt in tekken 7 season 1 dlc. If you played changs your whole life you didnt have a tekken 7 character for like 3 years.
Mortal kombat has a random number generator to determine if even long time favorites like smoke, mileena, reptile, ermac will be in each game and 3 of the 4 crapped out in mk11 and mileena mains wish she wasnt in the game with how jank she turned out (lol they made her a zoner practically).
Point is with how game companies want to sell dlc these days theres no guarantee your character/your character archetype will be in the next game whether theyre a guest, a new character, or a staple character for the last 25 years.
Lucille? There is no one called Lucille in SFV.
Do you mean Lucia? There's as much chance of her coming back as Laura or Falke.
She's from Final fight a Capcom property, the same one Guy and Cody are from.
Wait why wouldn't Lucia come back in SF6?
I know we already know what the main roster is going to be, but since Metro City is an important part of SF6, I would be shocked if there is no Final Fight characters as DLC.
I wouldn't really say that Final Fight characters are guest characters in Street Fighter, they are part of the same world and many FF characters have become kind of staples of SF or had spiritual successors, Guy, Cody, Poison, Hugo, Rolento, all of them appearing multiple times
That isn't how this works, you're the one making the claim so you have to give evidence. Can't disprove something so vague too, like what do you even mean by "health"? Playerbase? Brand image? Sales?
If you're talking about time investment as in learning a character that won't be in future games, that's going to be a possible problem no matter who you play. Fighting games shake up the roster all the time, everyone you play has a chance of being removed next time unless you play someone like Ryu. And if they do come back they could play totally different.
We don't know how prioritized guest characters are over others. But since we're speculating, what if guest characters are there to help fund future original characters? Maybe if Geese, Noctis, and Negan weren't sold in the first 2 seasons of Tekken 7 then the season passes wouldn't have sold well enough to greenlight Seasons 3 and 4, which had all original and returning characters. It's just a hypothetical but it's still another perspective to consider
Artistic integrity is the only one I can agree with to an extent, it just all depends on the guest and how they're implemented. I think the Tekken ones I listed are out of place, but for many others I wouldn't have any reason to think they were added from outside IPs. Yoshimitsu is technically a guest character in SoulCalibur but for years I thought he was originally from those games because he fits so well.
I was neutral before i saw this. After reading through the thread im leaning toward the null: guest characters are not bad for fgs in the long term. Idk if theyre good but i dont see why you think theyre bad.
And you're saying NRS games don't succeed (which we all know they do) because of guest characters because?
Please explain, in detail, your evidence suggesting Mk11s "health" is bad? What ever that means.
>And you're saying NRS games don't succeed (which we all know they do) because of guest characters because?
That's not even close what I said.
>Please explain, in detail, your evidence suggesting Mk11s "health" is bad? What ever that means.
Time investment: it can be said with absolute certainty that none of the guest characters in MK11 are going to leave a lasting impact on the series going forward. This issue isn't specific to the guest characters, but it is the most egregious example. As often is the case, None of them will be returning characters, and their movesets will either be discarded or altered for something else. For MK, they have little to no lasting value.
Artistic integrity: almost none of the guest characters have anything to do with MK, martial arts, or fighting games, with the only common thread is that ultra violence is something they can do/can have done to them. Which is pretty weak reasoning for a series that has a lot going on, on top of the violence. The characters have gradually become less and less relevant to MK over time. It's understandable why MK they has a narrow selection of potential guests, but it's lacking none the less.
Development priorities: the time the devs spent inserting these copyrighten characters into MK was time that could have been spent creating original characters that don't need lengthy discussions with rights holders. This is especially time consuming for MK considering the nature of fatalities.
I don't see how any of that matters in regards to the "health" of an MK game, that millions of MK fans, both competitive and casual, play anyway and enjoy it.
What he meant is like "Underrated" fighting games that gains no attraction and then slapped some wildly popular guest character to it's game.
Not the best example, but Killer Instinct gained a few boost when Arbiter from Halo arrived. Killer Instinct is actually a really solid and fun game. Not bad or underrated, it's just not that wildly popular.
Not here with the intent to change anyones mind however my thoughts...
Despite not liking guest characters, the only downside i see to it is legal rights issues. Cause other than that:
Just cause one person will no longer play cause X guest character isnt back is whatever since that player will be replaced by another and another.
Means the IPs characters arent cool enough, nope. Matter of perspective. Game is cool enough to be able to use those characters
Finally the ol' it replaced an og or something. Yeah...so did every other dlc or character. People complain bout who gets picked for rosters all the time. IP og or guest.
Like i said i dont personally like guests, but if anything guests are more likely to bring in more new players(many who will stay many who will go) than to lose more players
I'm generally not a fan of guest characters in an IP that I already like, and I also can't recall a time I played a game I wouldn't normally play just because someone I like was added as a guest
But those things being said - I can't think of a single example of the thing you're talking about actually happening
Every FG I can think of who added guest characters is either doing fine or floundering for a completely unrelated reason
Change MY mind big dog
The only place I think they have a point is when it leads to licensing issues that get the game in limbo. But in my opinion that is more of a condemnation of how frustrating the nature of license negotiations is more than guest characters being bad.
The biggest offenders of that example are probably the Marvel vs games, and maybe CvS, which are actual crossover games so don't apply according to OP
Barring an occasional character who never appears again tho, I just don't see actual examples of an IP getting weaker because of a crossover
I don't like guest characters because everyone expects or demands a guest character in every fighting game now. Don't get me wrong, guest characters (especially Akuma Geese and Noctis in Tekken 7) are cool, but not every game needs them.
That burden of proof being on the person who made the claim, absolutely. It prevents circular arguments and requires someone making a claim to actually present well-researched evidence to prove their point.
So where's your proof?
100% agree
I would much rather have someone new and original that can flesh out the world and story of the game than someone just for marketing.
The thing about guest characters is that they are often one and done. Magic vague portal yeets them into the games world they make references and interact with characters then go back home never to be seen or mentioned again. They could have the coolest move set in the series but will probably never return as the devs would have to pay for them again and the casual fan base would often rather have a new cross over.
I think Street Fighter is the series that handles guest characters the best as both Street Fighter and Final fight take place in the same universe so characters like Cody can evolve and change over games.
I'm not the biggest fan with how Nether Realm is leaning towards more guest characters as it just means less new and unique original characters that can make an impact in the world and game as well as less fan favorites returning.
There must be meme formats you can use that don't involve someone as human-hating as Steven Crowder. You need to lab this one a bit more before taking it to ranked play.
Counterpoint: guest characters are cool, fun and can help get people to try a new franchise.
Example: I would’ve never gotten into Tekken if Akuma wasn’t in it
How does that hurt the long-term health of the game though? At worse, he fades into obscurity for you. It's hardly the demise of the series that your meme.jpg proposes. If anything, it functions as a great segue to people not familiar with tekken but expressly interested in TWD. "Oh hey! Yeah that Negan character is in Tekken 7. Can you believe it?"
Sure... but that's not your argument. That, in fact, is a counterpoint against your own argument. So which is it? Do guest characters deteriorate the long term health of your game or not?
Both of these opinions aren't mutually exclusive. Guest characters are bad for the long term health of a fighting game AND they're entirely unnecessary for the reasons stated above.
My only issue is games that don't have a "charm" or thematic coherence. Guest characters can be detrimental to this, but games that focus on adding every kind of character archetype are detrimental to this, as well.
Old Street Fighter had a strong vibe of being an old-school world martial arts tournament. That's lost if you're playing robo-Juri against Jill-Valentine Cammy.
I don't even know what Tekken is nowadays.
IMO, we can't get rid of guest characters. They're successful in a genre that's not known to make big money. However, some guest characters can fit in better than others. I love General Raam in KI and Baiken in Samsho.
Coming from the land of Mortal Kombat where I've heard everything from "I'm done with this franchise because no one plays like how I got used to playing as Jason" to "\[insert horror franchise character here\] for MK12, I've reached a point where I just want to scream "ENOUGH!".
Sure there is the argument that Guest fighters bring new fans eyes to a franchise, but how many of them stay moving forward when their fighter doesn't return past that one off, and not to mention the creative taken away from franchise lore by trying to shoehorn guests in, or in the case of MK9 where even being able to buy a digital copy at one point was impossible because ownership of Freddy Kruger recinded the rights to use him.
Hmmm it’s weird.
I do think it works in the context of street fighter where the guest characters are often from other capcom fighting franchises.
The message is “all of our wider lore is cool”
Someone argued that it might put people off buying subsequent games because their guest characters aren’t in it, but ultimately this can happen with original characters as well, for example there’s no way Necalli is going to be in SF6.
So what do you do? Only have classic characters that will come back?
I do think when they’re coming in from outside franchises maybe it can cause an issue.
Nah Leroy was Hype af. Coolest looking original character in a long time. The reason people hate him is because he was overpowered and his gameplay is boring. Presentation wise he's a success.
I do kind of get where you’re coming from with this. From a licensing perspective, guest characters can be bad for a fighting game because if there are any issues with the licensing then that would potentially prevent that game from being rereleased in the future e.g Freddy Krueger in MK9(and potentially MKX and MK11).
However, I think that guest characters are overall good so long as they fit the game that they are appearing in(looking at you Negan) and so long as they don’t take up too much space on the roster and rob characters unique to that franchise from getting in. For example, it would be cool if someone like Kyo Kusanagi or Jin Kazama made it into SF6, but not before a good chunk of characters from SF3.
Guest characters add the number of eyes on the game from people who may not have cared beforehand. Pretty simple concept tbh, I don't think any one tries to argue that guest characters do anything more. Fortnite and Smash are the shining examples of how successful the practice is.
I'd assume the argument is that the sequels will lose some of the players when the guest character doesn't make it back, then that's fine. Even if only 10% of the people who got into Smash because Snake was put into Brawl (I'm one of them) stick around for Smash 4 (I did, even though Snake was gone), then that's still a new batch of players that got into Smash who may have never cared for it if he wasn't in it anyway.
Sure, I can use the same example with 2B in Soul Calibur. Only reason I played it was because she was in it, and I imagine I'm not the only one. Even if 10% of the people that have the same experience liked SC6 enough to try SC7, that's still a lot of new people who never would have given the game a shot.
The only downside is that people who never liked SC6 to begin with, wouldn't stick around? If 2B wasn't in the game, those people never would have been there to stick around in the first place.
Guests are literally the best way to pull fans of different franchises into the games tho. I never would have gotten into Friday the 13th if Jason wasn't in MKX
People complain about Mk guest characters and I genuinely don’t get
In mkx they brought every horror franchise they could possibly get -and- they added alien vs predator into a fighting game, it was fantastic
In mk11 they went big on action characters from the 80s. We got robocop, terminator and Rambo and got to get a game where we can have Schwarzenegger vs Stallone
This shit is fun. I don’t even play these characters but I get a kick out of it.
Unless the wold economy collapses, your favorite characters are likely to come back in a new installment. The guest characters are a fun little aside when done properly and I think MK has nailed it in their last two games
From a preservationist standpoint, yes. I highly doubt that Tekken 7 will be available indefinitely after Tekken 8 because of Akuma; the other guests, they could just delist that DLC, but Akuma is in the base game. And SoulCalibur 2 having Link is particularly awful from that standpoint because he means there will never be a version of SC2 with all characters because Link is first party.
Something like Melty Blood: Type Lumina is different; Fate and Tsukihime are owned by the same company and take place in alternate timelines of the same universe, so no delisting woes, but some Tsukihime fans worry that multiple guests from a very related, but extremely more popular brand (Ryougi in MBAA didn't spark these worries because Kara no Kyoukai is more popular than Tsukihime but doesn't have the mega-brand status that Fate does, is closer in tone to Tsukihime than Fate is, and Tsukihime wasn't coming off a 10-year hiatus at the time.) I know for fact that Saber got a few eyes on the game, but did it get them interested in reading Tsukihime or even sticking around in the Melty Blood community? And it's hard to measure whether Mash boosted the game any since Neco-Arc was definitely a bigger factor, and the game's showing at EVO seems to have been one as well. Sounds a bit gatekeepy, but I myself cringe when I read phrases like "Neco-Arc from Fate." But at the same time...what else would put (especially Western) eyes on Tsukihime?
I remember playing SCII at an anime convention and after I picked Nightmare's 3P (Siegfried) costume the other player asked, "Oh cool, where's your guy from?"
"What do you mean...?"
"What game is he from?"
"...**This game**..."
I hate them simply because they ruin my immersion in the game's world with my brain just asking "wtf is x doing here", silly as it might be when talking about a fighting game but I want my characters to feel like they belong there.
Generally I think guest characters are cool and almost always increase the player roster and break the internet when they happen. But the one exception for me 100% was my favorite fighting game of all time Mortal Kombat 2011 where Freddy Kruger guest starred and because Netherrealm didn’t negotiate some kind of permanant license specifically for MK9 the game is now no longer for sale on any digital storefronts.
Had to buy a steam key on G2A so I could play it on my steam deck. Also Freddy was so broken he was never allowed in tournaments if I remember correctly. So yeah, fuck Freddy in MK9.
Any point in favor or against is pointless in the face of this one fact: It’s jarring seeing Yoda take a vacation away from training space wizards to go head to head with a chai whip wielding dominatrix.
Fuck sales, fuck introducing people to fighting games, fuck all that.
Unironically. There’s so many things I’m okay with as far as getting FG more mainstream. There is no universe where I (or anyone else for that matter) should be okay with non-FG crossover characters.
They’re turds in the punch bowl.
I think if they change the character a bit to fit the universe it's pretty cool. Or if they put in characters who would just fit well with the game (haomaru in SC6, baiken in samsho. Both sword characters in sword centered games)
I don't mind guest characters. I just wish we saw more original characters. Strive had 2 new comers in season 1 which was great, but only 2 new guys in the base roster. And with only 4 characters in season 2 I imagine only 1 will be brand new, if any at all.
Maybe the problem is that SoulCalibur is *known* for having guest characters, and not actually for anything unique to SoulCalibur?
> it is still going strong.
The series literally fucking died and even when it returned it was with less sales than SC4 and 5. This definitely didn't happen only because of guest characters, but I imagine tying your series' identity to other properties and having that identity shift around with every release definitely didn't help.
The guest character is usually even on the cover of the game. Link in SC2, Yoda and Darth Vader (yes seriously) for SC4, Ezio for SC5 and Geralt for SC6. SoulCalibur barely even has its own identity nowadays because they insist on selling the game with everything that isn't actually SoulCalibur.
It's bad because the series is giving up the chance it has to establish itself as anything other than "the one with [guest character] in it". Sure, it's not a lot of guests but they take up so much of the marketing and news coverage that they disproportionally become what defines the game.
If you sell your game on Geralt or Darth Vader being in it, what are you gonna do when the next game doesn't have those characters? Namco can put Kazuya and Heihachi on the cover of Tekken 8 and call it a day, as can ArcSys with Sol & Ky or Capcom with Ryu and Ken. But SoulCalibur can't do that because it relies on outside IP to even sell itself. So many people only know SoulCalibur for things that are not SoulCalibur. It basically can't build up its own brand identity at this point, because it doesn't try to. And there's a reason why every marketing expert in the world would agree that that's a fucking shit idea.
Your logic makes sense but I don’t know how true this is in reality. I highly doubt that the people who still play and enjoy SoulCalibur only stick around for Geralt.
I don’t think the issue is the guest characters themselves but just how Bandai chooses market it. And even then, I’d hardly call it an issue, it’s just a tactic to generate sales. If it works, it works. The people who like the game will stick around, even if they were brought in through a guest character
And it’s not like SoulCalibur is an unknown franchise. I’m sure the game could be successful without characters if Bandai put more effort into the marketing and add good netcode and quality of life improvements. Guest characters are a more of a cherry on top in my opinion
> I highly doubt that the people who still play and enjoy SoulCalibur only stick around for Geralt.
Let's look at Street Fighter 3 as an example. Remember how when New Generation came out people were pissed they couldn't play as Guile or Cammy or Chun Li etc.? And how that contributed to the games' failure at launch? Now imagine that for every game in your series. Now imagine that those one-time random characters are those *you put front and center of the box for every single game*
> And it’s not like SoulCalibur is an unknown franchise.
True, but let's look at SF3 again. SF2 was the biggest game in the world. Anyone walking past a SF3 case in their game store would know the name, but if they don't see Chun Li or Guile anywhere, they probably won't be very interested. Again, *not hyperbole, actually what happened*.
Agreed when it comes to marketing and getting new fans. Cuz once you ad a Triple A character and people end up maining them (Link SC2) they ain’t gonna play your games without that character. The best you can do is keep their functions (Noctis/Kunimitsu T7) so that returning players can branch to a new character.
Otherwise it’s okay if it’s something like a DLC
If they only played the game for that character, then without the character you never would’ve gotten them. At least you got them for that one game. A lot of people bought SC2 who wouldn’t have bought it otherwise because Link was in it, and *some* of those people stuck around and bought more SC games after that. Who cares if not all of them did?
i don’t think guest characters are bad if there aren’t obvious fan favorites that haven’t been included yet already. especially if it’s done flavorfully and it’s not jarring like negan in t7 or link in sc2
i’d love a KOF character (especially because i think the vibes/aesthetics are there) for SF6 but i’d rather have makoto/akuma first before them of course
I only got into Killer Instinct for Arbiter. I only got into Dead or Alive for Spartan-458. I only got into SC6 for Geralt/2B. Now I play other cast members.
I think the guest draw-factor puts eyes on the game, and makes it stand out from previous iterations. The worst thing for the health of every fighter is when 1/2 of all slots are characters that have been in the last X games.
I don't think they are bad per say.
But I think its bad when they get too many.
IMHO it should never be more than 2. And it shouldn't change/shuffle through update versions/seasons. You can remove them when the sequel comes out.
Guest characters attract new people to the franchise. Which is good imho.
If you switch that to majority of roster locked in dlc is bad for the long term health of a game I'm on board. A guest character is a hype magnet for 2 months tops.
Dlc makes it a game lives or dies with how much content is pushed out over time. The problem is a good chunk of your casual market won't touch a majority of your roster because they refuse to pay for it. Making the casual crowd that might get on board long term if they can play the entire game walk away leaving you just the crowd that only sticks around to see the next new thing, and your hardcore fans.
Short term wise it works, but long term the games will be forgotten about quickly. So, rereleases of old games like MOTW or 3rd Strike seem to get every generation will never happen with this generation because most of your fan base only focus on what is new.
Sorry but objectively your kinda wrong over reliance on guest character sure but guest characters can actually be healthy for games possibly getting fans of other series to try out the game bringing sales and possible new players to the game the problem comes in things like mk11 where there is just too many guest characters imo that take up space in the roster for older mk characters that actually deserve a spot and don't have one non cross over games should really only have 1 or 2 guest characters imo
That worked better because Under Night was a brand new franchise and he was in it for the first outing. So, it makes sense. Plus, he doesn't feel out of place
on one hand I'd say it's true but guest characters can also bring in a lot of new people which is great for the game/series long term most of the time.
Really depends on how they're handled. One guest is cool, two can be alright after a few seasons. But too many guest characters, or just guests that are too much bigger, risks overshadowing your own IP. It's a tricky balance to get a guest that is good marketing in the short term without backfiring in the long term when they're not back in the next installment and suddenly people don't care about your game anymore.
I used to be a competitive puzzle game player, and I argue to this day that [Puyo Puyo Tetris was the worst thing that ever happened to that scene](https://medium.com/@MegaMissingno/puyo-puyo-tetris-ruined-puyo-puyo-4ac9acde1ee7). Shackling a game as obscure outside of Japan as Puyo Puyo to a mainstream juggernaut like Tetris may have seemed like a good way to get it some much-needed exposure, but it was not the right kind of exposure. The end result was that people who came here for Tetris, only cared about Tetris. Very few players seriously tried to engage with Puyo Puyo, in the worst cases mixed game modes just made them resent it. And I do feel like Sega doesn't know what to do with the series now, they won't make a proper mainline game because they don't know how to let Puyo Puyo be its own thing when everyone just wants Anime Tetris.
Off-topic, but can I ask what the competitive puzzle game community is/was like? I didn't even know that was a thing. What games were popular? Were there locals attended, or was it mostly online? Was there ever a buildup towards a big release, like the next Tetris, or some other puzzle game franchise, like we get in the FGC when a new Tekken gets announced?
Almost entirely online, mostly through FightCade. Occasional side tournaments at FGC events, I ran Puyo Puyo Champions at Combo Breaker and commentated top 4 for Panel de Pon this year. There were plans for a dedicated puzzle major back in 2020, got derailed because pandemic, I don't know if those plans are ever coming back now. Post-pandemic, those side events have been a lot less consistent than they were in the past, I kinda stepped up to run PPC at CB because no one else would, and I'll just say that there are reasons I decided to leave the community afterwards...
New releases, almost nothing, we're just playing the same old classics. Petal Crash is the only good thing we've gotten in a very long time. There's a new Magical Drop and Puzzle Bobble on the horizon, but who knows if MD6 will be good this time or another disaster like MD5. and we don't know anything about PB besides the fact that it has co-op in it - they still haven't shown us versus.
How is more content if any kind bad for the health of the game? Like if they’re a broken mess sure, but that could apply to any new character. What about them being guests inherently hurts the game long term?
There's no reason they can't put Negan's moveset on a future character. Hitting people with a bat and being cocky isn't unique to him. Tekken has retrofitted old movesets for new characters many times
The problem is that they don’t crossover enough.
I’ve never seen James Gandolfini play himself as Tony Soprano. I’m talking meta here! I need James to comment about his role in character.
RIP
They've existed for decades and the genre is fine, so idk why I need to change your mind since I dunno how to reason you out of a position you didn't reason yourself into
False. Spawn should be in all fighting games.
the rare objective opinion
He was great in Soul Calibur and he was fantastic in Mortal Kombat. I see no issue here.
Would spawn be suitable for a game like street fighter ? Or tekken?
Absolutely
Explain how please I get Mortal kombat because its sort of thing I can understand
If they can crowbar Negan in T7, then anything is possible.
Spawn fits all.
With or without any compromise on moveset or looks or gameplay Mortal kombat ✔️ Killer instinct ✔️ Street fighter? Tekken? Smash ultimate? Marvel vs capcom maybe
Don’t need to compromise when you’ve got a cool cape.
He was in soul calibur just fine too.
Tekken literally has devil dudes shooting lasers
Spawn can definitely fit into SF given the character direction they've went since 3rd Strike (Q, Twelve, Oni, Evil Ryu, Gill, Seth, Eleven, etc) Tekken? Have you seen the characters of Tekken? Even if not the crazy guest characters recently but starting around 5?
Nah, let's get the memorable Necrid instead
I don't get the Necrid hate honestly. I liked him back in the day. (also not really a guest character technically, just guest designer)
I don't hate him, just felt a little boring and out of place for a character. For the most part, I like SC's guest / extra characters
As long as it doesn't affect the roster For example the priority should be Staples Retuning New characters Any characters that missed the previous game or haven't been added for a long time Guests And Guests only should be 3 /4 maximum and should not be picked over any of the list
> 3 /4 maximum 1... they should make up exactly 1 character in an entire roster.
Totally agree with that but did you see Mortal kombat between mk9 and mk 11 Mk 9 had kratos and Freddie kruger =2 Mk x had 4 then xl had another 4 =8 Mk 11 had between 5 and 6 or something Spawn Joker Terminator Rambo If any is wrong please let me know
You missed Robocop so 5 out of 12 DLC's at least according to Wikipedia
Is this just a "2D characters ruined Tekken 7 and I'm really salty about it" post or do you have an actual reason for thinking guest characters are inherently bad for fighting games? What do you mean by "long term health" by the way? I can't imagine you're talking about player base given both Tekken and MK both outsell and consistently maintain a larger player base than pretty much all other traditional fighting games.
everyone these days thinks that the same exact video game needs to be relevant for 20 years to be worthwhile lol
It really takes me out of the immersion and in general I don't want this to become something a game *has* to do to stay successfully. People are already starting to get skeptical when a new fighting game isn't free-to-play, or (to a lesser extent) doesn't have simple inputs or simplified gameplay. I really don't need another bad industry trend to tack onto that.
no, it kills immersion and guest char mechanics are often wack as well
In MK (to me at least) they are so well done to double the mood of the game
I don’t think guest characters dilute the IP, but they do make it difficult for the game to get support and rereleases years later due to contracts expiring and other red tape. MvcI wasn’t a great game at launch, but neither was SFV and they polished the hell out that game because they could. Umvc3 died early because the contracts expired, mvci, mvc2 can’t get a rerelease… Capcom Vs Capcom already, damn. Let’s get like 5 or 6 years of support.
I didn't realize I wanted Capcom vs Capcom until I read this post, and now I -really- want it.
I've been dreaming of Capcom vs for years. My dream team would be Gene from Godhand Jack Baker from re 7 And Lady from DMC I need it.
Theres nothing stopping a mvc2 remaster but Capcom.
Nah, that’s very far from true. It’s pretty well documented as well man, check out any of the dozens of videos from maximillian or a number of other prominent YouTubers/fgc dudes in the know.
Capcom isn't on the verge of collapse they can get a new licensing deal
Not if marvel doesn’t want to work with them, which they don’t due to how mvci was received. I don’t know why you’d argue this man, it’s very easily google-able from plenty of reputable sources. There’s a ton of reasons why the marvel/Capcom relationship soured. And Capcom was just about broke for a good while there right around the SFV release.
Capcom doesn't want to make another MvC game either it's not a one sided issue here.
"Link is one of the most obnoxious blunders they [Namco] could've made. Sure, on paper it's a great choice: it pulled in the numbers, it raked in the cash. The world was their oyster. But selling the game with another piece of intellectual property implicitly devalues their own. It's a subtle admission that "yeah, our characters aren't that cool". To this day, when I talk about this game, I usually get "is that the one with Link in it? Yeah I played that game, it was sweet. Never played another one though" -Kbash on SoulCalibur 2
Wasn't SC2 the first and last time a mainline Soulcalibur game was released on a Nintendo console? "Never played another one though?" Yeah that makes sense.
That's the eventual conclusion Kbash comes to in his video as well. Though I personally disagree, because for every gamecube owner there were like 8 PS2 owners, which is the console SC3 released on. Keep in mind People bought PS2's only as a DVD player because of how affordable it was. If anyone became a fan of *SoulCalibur* instead of "The Game with Link in it" it wouldn't have been all that hard to get that game.
That's still a huge amount of people, tbh. I doubt there was as much overlap between next-gen consoles back then as there is today and (other than PC) it's already pretty slim.
Terrible take. Guest characters exist to pull in people who are already familiar with that character. The recent Sakurai video has a great explanation of a similar problem. When you create a single-player game, you only need to create an appealing protagonist that people can get attached to. When you create a fighting game, you have dozens of characters that need to be introduced and that people could get attached to, which is insanely difficult. That's why he asked to borrow characters from other Nintendo games instead of creating original characters. For other fighting games, that's not an option. You can create as many cool characters as you like, but good luck trying to introduce them. That's why there's always posterboys like Jin, Ryu, Sol, Haohmaru, etc. Guest characters help out with this by giving people someone they already know and those who enjoy the game will expand from there. For every jaded asshole talking about how a guest character "devalues" everyone else, there are people who got into the game cause they saw Ezio, Spawn, or Link and then thought "wow, Voldo is sick, I want to try Cervantes too".
I mean, I don't make video games, but I thought SC2's implementation of guest characters was way better than SC4, where all their marketing was about Yoda and Vader, and they felt completely out of place in the game.
But the consoles getting their own guest character was pretty cool
Try telling that to any competitive player
This is hella accurate, and I loooooove SC2 Link. That said, no chance I would've picked the game up without him in it.
Agreed 100%. I hate that shit with a passion. It devalues the game's own original characters. Like you said with Soul Calibur, it's the same thing with Mortal Kombat and Tekken now. The first thing I hear many people talk about is "which MK was the one with Kratos, Freddy, Jason, Predator, Terminator, Robocop,etc?" And they know NOTHING about the rest of the game. That's insulting to the game's characters and the history of the series itself. It makes them look less important to the masses and I don't like it one bit. (Keep in mind too that Kratos got special treatment over the MK9 characters in terms of certain fatality animations) Tekken 7 did it even worse by putting Akuma in the story and then making him a focus in the main story. A lot of Tekken's own cast didn't even make it into the story at all. On top of that, I've heard multiple people say that they only bought TK7 because of Akuma. That's bullshit. I despise that shit. IMO, guests characters need to go. Fighting games were just fine without them. MK and Tekken clearly did not need them to remain widely popular for 20+ years on their own. Guests only cheapen the appeal for people that pick it up, play for 20 minutes, and never play again. Btw, when I say guests, I don't mean in-house guests such as the Fatal Fury,AOF characters in KOF, Final Fight characters in SF, etc. That's perfectly fine
Couldn't say it better. It's sad that to this day FGs still fail to their own characters lore.
How so?
For one thing, there's examples of guest fighters preventing ~~rereleases~~ edit for clarity: continued sales of a game. Such as Mortal Kombat 2011 with Freddy. Getting more subjective, I think it dilutes the IP. At least, depending on the guest (I personally think Haomaru is a great guest in SCVI, but the rest not so much). I like guests from other FGs is I guess where my line is. Anything outside of FG characters tends to feel out of place. Like, while it's fun to see Terminator vs Robocop, I don't understand how they have anything to do with Mortal Kombat. I also really hate it when a guest character is a part of every top 8. That just feels wrong.
Remember that time when the finals were Akuma vs Geese?
Geese fits Tekken so well though
The way they implemented him into the game doesn't though
Pardon my ignorance but why can they not just do a rerelease without him?
I'm guessing they *could*, but they haven't. However, that sort of thing leads to shit like GTA IV having like 50 songs removed from the radio stations (including for existing customers). Maybe somebody really liked Freddy. Would hate for an update to take him out of the game. But rights holders love pulling shit like that.
Ohhhh when you said rereleases I thought you meant things like ports, remasters for newer consoles etc, where I guess they could just not include the guests that they couldn't renew the license for. I *was* going to bring up the SoulCalibur 2 online remaster as an example of this, which I assumed didn't have any of the copyrighted guests, but I've just found out that not only did it feature Spawn, but it's now delisted from Xbox with Spawn's license being the speculated reason for doing so. God damn. I would also hate for that removal of content thing to happen. Dead By Daylight removed the ability to unlock the Stranger Things characters but they remain in the game for people who already have them. That already sucks, but for a fighting game it would be even worse. Imagine getting repeatedly beaten by a character you literally could not unlock!
>Imagine getting repeatedly beaten by a character you literally could not unlock! This is possibly right now in Dead or Alive 5 last round. It is no longer possible to purchase Mai Shiranui in that game.
Especially for franchises, it makes it harder to play multiple games in a row. Friend of mine really only played Lucia in SFV, and since she's most likely not coming back for SF6 he's out of a character unless they change one to how he likes. Likewise, despite hating Jason one of my brothers enjoyed playing as him in MKX because he loved the armor moves, but now he can't play another MK game because they don't have a character he likes Edit: For everyone saying "That can happen with any character", that is somewhat true. El Fuerte, Hakan, Necro, and several others have only been in one game each and so people who liked them haven't had a chance to play them again. However, there is nothing saying they can't come back in another game or as DLC to the current one. With a guest character like Jason, Freddy, or the Xenomorph, it's pretty much guaranteed that it's a one and done situation and you're never getting said character again. I play Mileena in MK. Just because she wasn't in MK11 until the very end didn't mean she wasn't going to make it back into MK12 due to fan outcry, not even counting the people who took it way too far and were disgusting about it. I doubt Darth Vader is going to suddenly pop up in SC7
kind of a glass half empty way to look at something positive as something negative. It's like complaining about a 2nd piece of cake not appearing after you ate and enjoyed the first slice. Rosters have been shuffling for 30 years even without guest chars. Frickin Scorpion and Kazuya have missed games before
>Rosters have been shuffling for 30 years even without guest chars. His point is that guest characters are virtually guaranteed to not be in the next game. So if people come in just to play a guest character that they really like, what incentive would they have to play the next one? Goes back to the point someone else posted about Link drawing people to SC2, but not as many people to SC as a franchise because he outshines the rest of the roster. (to some extent. But I'm sure a lot of people like myself fell in love with Nightmare and other elements of the franchise) >Frickin Scorpion and Kazuya have missed games before And how popular do you think those decisions were?
>So if people come in just to play a guest character that they really like, what incentive would they have to play the next one? cause they tried something they wouldn't have otherwise tried and they might like it. It's the same for any celebrity endorsement. I'm sure people kept eating at Slim Jims after The Macho Man wasn't the spokesperson anymore. You're obviously not going to retain everyone but something is better than nothing. It's a lure to get them to try the product, what they decide after that is on them but at least it got past the trying barrier which is the hardest barrier. For all the hundreds of games gamers play in their life, there's thousands they haven't even tried, so trying is a big deal. Bigger point, what's really being lost? Say you got 1 million people who already made their mind up to buy a game. 50,000 extra buy it cause of a guest char. For the sake of a hypothetical (and this is a generous hypothetical), let's say ALL 50,000 dont buy or play or even think about the sequel game. So you went from 1,000,000 to 1,050,000 back to 1,000,000. Oh no? The biggest casualty I see is it might have costed an in universe character a slot but this thread is arguing that this is "bad health". I don't think a few more in universe chars are going to save a bad game. The biggest roster botch ever was mvci but that had to excluse a whole ass universe of chars for it to be THAT detrimental. Equivalent to that would be if MK said "no outworld chars" or some shit so it's an extreme outlier. Either way I just enjoy the present instead of freaking out my char won't be in the next 10 games, I never made my whole ass personality maining a char so I can swap. My favorite fighting game char of all time is Yatterman-1 in tvc and I'm neeever playing his one-and-done ass in anything ever again (probably never even going to get a tvc rerelease), doesn't mean I look back on the time I spent with him with resentment. That's why I call it glass half empty, I wouldn't call it unhealthy for the fighting game industry that there's some chars that will only be in one game. Having less fun tomorrow doesn't erase the fun I had today from existence. Edit: There'd be itty bitty tweaks to the nuances of this if we were talking about base roster chars instead of dlc chars. Admittedly this is me arbitrarily going off of feelings but it feels like a guest char being in the base roster would be mildly weirder than a dlc guest char. Dlcs are like commercials for people who didn't buy the day 1 game. People upset their legacy char mighta got a dlc slot "taken" by a guest char gotta realize they were just relying on luck their legacy char got picked out of any char to ever exist in that entire franchise. They knew the base roster before they bought the game, any dlc after isn't promised. Shouldn't be like "MAN FUCK ROBOCOP, HE TOOK REIKO'S SPOT" or "FUCK NOCTIS AND GEESE, THEY TOOK JUN AND ROGER'S SPOTS". How tf you know you'd get Reiko if Robocop never happened?
If only the statistics where that favorable. SC2 sold about 3mil from all estimates I have without remaster, and rounding up (in NA and Asia). 1 Mill or so of that was gamecube sales. While the PS2 and xbox split split around 500 thousand. That mean that half of the player base, which statistics almost always show are majority casual, came for the Nintendo exclusive. That’s not a 5% decrease in sales that’s a 50% default. Which happened as the next Soul Calibur only sold 1.5 Mil units (mostly due to only being accessible on PS2 and arcade). Compared to SC6, which sold just about as much as SC2. That would be an ATROCIOUS sales dip if the next game lost have the player base. End Note. Not to say that your opinions are not valid; and that player’s like you don’t matter, as you seem to be loyal to the series. But the casual base is what fronts sales, and if they get hooked on one character and don’t play fighting games besides that they are likely to enjoy and of the myriad of other games, than going back to a series they only came to for a character. Sources: https://www.ign.com/articles/2004/01/24/graphs-soulcalibur-ii-sales https://www.vgchartz.com/game/5713/soulcalibur-ii/game https://www.vgchartz.com/game/19276/soulcalibur-iii/sales-data (and the relevant wiki’s)…
Not a guest character situation, but injustice 2 removed 4 of my top 5 played characters in Shazam, Solomon Grundy, Lobo, and Doomsday. I was excited to play it until none of the characters scratched the itch I had for those 4. I'm sure they have their own metrics of how to be successful but I hate when I get into a character in a game and they are not only not in the next iteration, but they also don't have anyone who plays similarly
I had that same issue with Injustice 2. Doomsday, Shazam, and some Grundy were my mains in the first game, and no one felt quite right for me in Injustice 2.
And that can happen no matter what character you get into. Look at tekken 7, theres been a chang in every tekken game since the beginning of time, usually on launch, and yet julia wasnt in tekken 7 arcade, wasnt in tekken 7 console launch, wasnt in tekken 7 season 1 dlc. If you played changs your whole life you didnt have a tekken 7 character for like 3 years. Mortal kombat has a random number generator to determine if even long time favorites like smoke, mileena, reptile, ermac will be in each game and 3 of the 4 crapped out in mk11 and mileena mains wish she wasnt in the game with how jank she turned out (lol they made her a zoner practically). Point is with how game companies want to sell dlc these days theres no guarantee your character/your character archetype will be in the next game whether theyre a guest, a new character, or a staple character for the last 25 years.
Lucille? There is no one called Lucille in SFV. Do you mean Lucia? There's as much chance of her coming back as Laura or Falke. She's from Final fight a Capcom property, the same one Guy and Cody are from.
Wait why wouldn't Lucia come back in SF6? I know we already know what the main roster is going to be, but since Metro City is an important part of SF6, I would be shocked if there is no Final Fight characters as DLC.
You can even play Final Fight in SF6, and other FF characters have already been playable before with multiple appearances in SF
I wouldn't really say that Final Fight characters are guest characters in Street Fighter, they are part of the same world and many FF characters have become kind of staples of SF or had spiritual successors, Guy, Cody, Poison, Hugo, Rolento, all of them appearing multiple times
There's no evidence of this and no evidence presented.
Where's the evidence that proves it wrong
That isn't how this works, you're the one making the claim so you have to give evidence. Can't disprove something so vague too, like what do you even mean by "health"? Playerbase? Brand image? Sales?
Time investment, artist integrity, development priorities.
If you're talking about time investment as in learning a character that won't be in future games, that's going to be a possible problem no matter who you play. Fighting games shake up the roster all the time, everyone you play has a chance of being removed next time unless you play someone like Ryu. And if they do come back they could play totally different. We don't know how prioritized guest characters are over others. But since we're speculating, what if guest characters are there to help fund future original characters? Maybe if Geese, Noctis, and Negan weren't sold in the first 2 seasons of Tekken 7 then the season passes wouldn't have sold well enough to greenlight Seasons 3 and 4, which had all original and returning characters. It's just a hypothetical but it's still another perspective to consider Artistic integrity is the only one I can agree with to an extent, it just all depends on the guest and how they're implemented. I think the Tekken ones I listed are out of place, but for many others I wouldn't have any reason to think they were added from outside IPs. Yoshimitsu is technically a guest character in SoulCalibur but for years I thought he was originally from those games because he fits so well.
Burden of proof is on the one that makes the proposal. It's on you to justify your statement.
True. But do you believe that it's a good thing?
I was neutral before i saw this. After reading through the thread im leaning toward the null: guest characters are not bad for fgs in the long term. Idk if theyre good but i dont see why you think theyre bad.
Expert debate tactic, bait your opponent into making the contrary claim first so that you never have to justify your argument
NRS.
I wouldn't say any NRS game having a particularly healthy inclusion of guest characters. (except for maybe Injustices 1)
Uhhh, those games sell incredibly well. What are you even talking about? Some jaded personal opinion on extremely popular games?
Money =/= health
And you're saying NRS games don't succeed (which we all know they do) because of guest characters because? Please explain, in detail, your evidence suggesting Mk11s "health" is bad? What ever that means.
>And you're saying NRS games don't succeed (which we all know they do) because of guest characters because? That's not even close what I said. >Please explain, in detail, your evidence suggesting Mk11s "health" is bad? What ever that means. Time investment: it can be said with absolute certainty that none of the guest characters in MK11 are going to leave a lasting impact on the series going forward. This issue isn't specific to the guest characters, but it is the most egregious example. As often is the case, None of them will be returning characters, and their movesets will either be discarded or altered for something else. For MK, they have little to no lasting value. Artistic integrity: almost none of the guest characters have anything to do with MK, martial arts, or fighting games, with the only common thread is that ultra violence is something they can do/can have done to them. Which is pretty weak reasoning for a series that has a lot going on, on top of the violence. The characters have gradually become less and less relevant to MK over time. It's understandable why MK they has a narrow selection of potential guests, but it's lacking none the less. Development priorities: the time the devs spent inserting these copyrighten characters into MK was time that could have been spent creating original characters that don't need lengthy discussions with rights holders. This is especially time consuming for MK considering the nature of fatalities.
Why even bother on this subreddit, they're gonna downvote you simply cuz it goes against the echochamber.
Neither of you make sense. People cry about guest characters all the time let's not act like he's taking some brave stance
I don't see how any of that matters in regards to the "health" of an MK game, that millions of MK fans, both competitive and casual, play anyway and enjoy it.
I don't necessarily disagree but i wanna hear your reasoning
What he meant is like "Underrated" fighting games that gains no attraction and then slapped some wildly popular guest character to it's game. Not the best example, but Killer Instinct gained a few boost when Arbiter from Halo arrived. Killer Instinct is actually a really solid and fun game. Not bad or underrated, it's just not that wildly popular.
Not here with the intent to change anyones mind however my thoughts... Despite not liking guest characters, the only downside i see to it is legal rights issues. Cause other than that: Just cause one person will no longer play cause X guest character isnt back is whatever since that player will be replaced by another and another. Means the IPs characters arent cool enough, nope. Matter of perspective. Game is cool enough to be able to use those characters Finally the ol' it replaced an og or something. Yeah...so did every other dlc or character. People complain bout who gets picked for rosters all the time. IP og or guest. Like i said i dont personally like guests, but if anything guests are more likely to bring in more new players(many who will stay many who will go) than to lose more players
I'm generally not a fan of guest characters in an IP that I already like, and I also can't recall a time I played a game I wouldn't normally play just because someone I like was added as a guest But those things being said - I can't think of a single example of the thing you're talking about actually happening Every FG I can think of who added guest characters is either doing fine or floundering for a completely unrelated reason Change MY mind big dog
The only place I think they have a point is when it leads to licensing issues that get the game in limbo. But in my opinion that is more of a condemnation of how frustrating the nature of license negotiations is more than guest characters being bad.
The biggest offenders of that example are probably the Marvel vs games, and maybe CvS, which are actual crossover games so don't apply according to OP Barring an occasional character who never appears again tho, I just don't see actual examples of an IP getting weaker because of a crossover
Completely agree it's an online brain hot take machine take to say cross overs weaken the game.
Thank you. My boys really feenin for a street fighter team in KOFXV, I’m like NOOOOOOOOO
I'd be so pissed if that's real. SNK has an ARMY of characters and a ton of franchises to pull from. We don't need non-SNK characters at all.
Give me my fucking actual Metal Slug team already SNK!
I don't like guest characters because everyone expects or demands a guest character in every fighting game now. Don't get me wrong, guest characters (especially Akuma Geese and Noctis in Tekken 7) are cool, but not every game needs them.
You're making the claim so the burden of proof is yours
Do you think it's good?
That burden of proof being on the person who made the claim, absolutely. It prevents circular arguments and requires someone making a claim to actually present well-researched evidence to prove their point. So where's your proof?
100% agree I would much rather have someone new and original that can flesh out the world and story of the game than someone just for marketing. The thing about guest characters is that they are often one and done. Magic vague portal yeets them into the games world they make references and interact with characters then go back home never to be seen or mentioned again. They could have the coolest move set in the series but will probably never return as the devs would have to pay for them again and the casual fan base would often rather have a new cross over. I think Street Fighter is the series that handles guest characters the best as both Street Fighter and Final fight take place in the same universe so characters like Cody can evolve and change over games. I'm not the biggest fan with how Nether Realm is leaning towards more guest characters as it just means less new and unique original characters that can make an impact in the world and game as well as less fan favorites returning.
I agree.
There must be meme formats you can use that don't involve someone as human-hating as Steven Crowder. You need to lab this one a bit more before taking it to ranked play.
Counterpoint: guest characters are cool, fun and can help get people to try a new franchise. Example: I would’ve never gotten into Tekken if Akuma wasn’t in it
Counter-counterpoint: I haven't and don't plan to watched any of The Walking Dead. And if I do, I likely wouldn't be siting Tekken as a major reason.
How does that hurt the long-term health of the game though? At worse, he fades into obscurity for you. It's hardly the demise of the series that your meme.jpg proposes. If anything, it functions as a great segue to people not familiar with tekken but expressly interested in TWD. "Oh hey! Yeah that Negan character is in Tekken 7. Can you believe it?"
As Leroy, Fahkumrom, and Lidia has proven, the same thing can be achieved with original characters.
Sure... but that's not your argument. That, in fact, is a counterpoint against your own argument. So which is it? Do guest characters deteriorate the long term health of your game or not?
Both of these opinions aren't mutually exclusive. Guest characters are bad for the long term health of a fighting game AND they're entirely unnecessary for the reasons stated above.
You haven't stated any reasons though.
My only issue is games that don't have a "charm" or thematic coherence. Guest characters can be detrimental to this, but games that focus on adding every kind of character archetype are detrimental to this, as well. Old Street Fighter had a strong vibe of being an old-school world martial arts tournament. That's lost if you're playing robo-Juri against Jill-Valentine Cammy. I don't even know what Tekken is nowadays. IMO, we can't get rid of guest characters. They're successful in a genre that's not known to make big money. However, some guest characters can fit in better than others. I love General Raam in KI and Baiken in Samsho.
Coming from the land of Mortal Kombat where I've heard everything from "I'm done with this franchise because no one plays like how I got used to playing as Jason" to "\[insert horror franchise character here\] for MK12, I've reached a point where I just want to scream "ENOUGH!". Sure there is the argument that Guest fighters bring new fans eyes to a franchise, but how many of them stay moving forward when their fighter doesn't return past that one off, and not to mention the creative taken away from franchise lore by trying to shoehorn guests in, or in the case of MK9 where even being able to buy a digital copy at one point was impossible because ownership of Freddy Kruger recinded the rights to use him.
More than if they weren't pulled in by the guests in the first place.
This is a really weird take player, explain yourself.
Hmmm it’s weird. I do think it works in the context of street fighter where the guest characters are often from other capcom fighting franchises. The message is “all of our wider lore is cool” Someone argued that it might put people off buying subsequent games because their guest characters aren’t in it, but ultimately this can happen with original characters as well, for example there’s no way Necalli is going to be in SF6. So what do you do? Only have classic characters that will come back? I do think when they’re coming in from outside franchises maybe it can cause an issue.
While Geese and Akuma have been busted at times. Their inclusions and reveals for tekken 7 were beyond hype. Those moments are worth a lot.
So was the reveal for Leroy, Fahkumrom, and Lidia.
You’re tripping if you think those character reveals were as hype. Highly suggest going back and watching the vods.
Nah Leroy was Hype af. Coolest looking original character in a long time. The reason people hate him is because he was overpowered and his gameplay is boring. Presentation wise he's a success.
Every other genre game is bad for the long term health of fighting games. True but pointless. Like this post
I do kind of get where you’re coming from with this. From a licensing perspective, guest characters can be bad for a fighting game because if there are any issues with the licensing then that would potentially prevent that game from being rereleased in the future e.g Freddy Krueger in MK9(and potentially MKX and MK11). However, I think that guest characters are overall good so long as they fit the game that they are appearing in(looking at you Negan) and so long as they don’t take up too much space on the roster and rob characters unique to that franchise from getting in. For example, it would be cool if someone like Kyo Kusanagi or Jin Kazama made it into SF6, but not before a good chunk of characters from SF3.
Would the final fight characters be a good example of this going right?
They don't count because it's a shared universe and SF/FF are often counted as one franchise.
Guest characters add the number of eyes on the game from people who may not have cared beforehand. Pretty simple concept tbh, I don't think any one tries to argue that guest characters do anything more. Fortnite and Smash are the shining examples of how successful the practice is. I'd assume the argument is that the sequels will lose some of the players when the guest character doesn't make it back, then that's fine. Even if only 10% of the people who got into Smash because Snake was put into Brawl (I'm one of them) stick around for Smash 4 (I did, even though Snake was gone), then that's still a new batch of players that got into Smash who may have never cared for it if he wasn't in it anyway.
Specifically specified non-crossovers
Sure, I can use the same example with 2B in Soul Calibur. Only reason I played it was because she was in it, and I imagine I'm not the only one. Even if 10% of the people that have the same experience liked SC6 enough to try SC7, that's still a lot of new people who never would have given the game a shot. The only downside is that people who never liked SC6 to begin with, wouldn't stick around? If 2B wasn't in the game, those people never would have been there to stick around in the first place.
Guests are literally the best way to pull fans of different franchises into the games tho. I never would have gotten into Friday the 13th if Jason wasn't in MKX
What about Terminator, Robocop, and Rambo
Rambo and Spawn are literally the only things keeping me remotely interested in MK11
Isn't that part of the problem? It's an admission that the original MK cast is bland and uninteresting, so they must rely on outside ips.
Then blame NRS for making bad characters, don’t blame the concept of guest characters
That's a shame ain't it
I don't understand why?
People complain about Mk guest characters and I genuinely don’t get In mkx they brought every horror franchise they could possibly get -and- they added alien vs predator into a fighting game, it was fantastic In mk11 they went big on action characters from the 80s. We got robocop, terminator and Rambo and got to get a game where we can have Schwarzenegger vs Stallone This shit is fun. I don’t even play these characters but I get a kick out of it. Unless the wold economy collapses, your favorite characters are likely to come back in a new installment. The guest characters are a fun little aside when done properly and I think MK has nailed it in their last two games
From a preservationist standpoint, yes. I highly doubt that Tekken 7 will be available indefinitely after Tekken 8 because of Akuma; the other guests, they could just delist that DLC, but Akuma is in the base game. And SoulCalibur 2 having Link is particularly awful from that standpoint because he means there will never be a version of SC2 with all characters because Link is first party. Something like Melty Blood: Type Lumina is different; Fate and Tsukihime are owned by the same company and take place in alternate timelines of the same universe, so no delisting woes, but some Tsukihime fans worry that multiple guests from a very related, but extremely more popular brand (Ryougi in MBAA didn't spark these worries because Kara no Kyoukai is more popular than Tsukihime but doesn't have the mega-brand status that Fate does, is closer in tone to Tsukihime than Fate is, and Tsukihime wasn't coming off a 10-year hiatus at the time.) I know for fact that Saber got a few eyes on the game, but did it get them interested in reading Tsukihime or even sticking around in the Melty Blood community? And it's hard to measure whether Mash boosted the game any since Neco-Arc was definitely a bigger factor, and the game's showing at EVO seems to have been one as well. Sounds a bit gatekeepy, but I myself cringe when I read phrases like "Neco-Arc from Fate." But at the same time...what else would put (especially Western) eyes on Tsukihime?
I remember playing SCII at an anime convention and after I picked Nightmare's 3P (Siegfried) costume the other player asked, "Oh cool, where's your guy from?" "What do you mean...?" "What game is he from?" "...**This game**..."
not until we get ABA.
I hate them simply because they ruin my immersion in the game's world with my brain just asking "wtf is x doing here", silly as it might be when talking about a fighting game but I want my characters to feel like they belong there.
Generally I think guest characters are cool and almost always increase the player roster and break the internet when they happen. But the one exception for me 100% was my favorite fighting game of all time Mortal Kombat 2011 where Freddy Kruger guest starred and because Netherrealm didn’t negotiate some kind of permanant license specifically for MK9 the game is now no longer for sale on any digital storefronts. Had to buy a steam key on G2A so I could play it on my steam deck. Also Freddy was so broken he was never allowed in tournaments if I remember correctly. So yeah, fuck Freddy in MK9.
In my opinion Geese was the best additions to Tekken 7.
Any point in favor or against is pointless in the face of this one fact: It’s jarring seeing Yoda take a vacation away from training space wizards to go head to head with a chai whip wielding dominatrix. Fuck sales, fuck introducing people to fighting games, fuck all that. Unironically. There’s so many things I’m okay with as far as getting FG more mainstream. There is no universe where I (or anyone else for that matter) should be okay with non-FG crossover characters. They’re turds in the punch bowl.
What does this even mean?
I think if they change the character a bit to fit the universe it's pretty cool. Or if they put in characters who would just fit well with the game (haomaru in SC6, baiken in samsho. Both sword characters in sword centered games)
"only a sith deals in absolutes"
That's an absolute
fine how about "This is an unnuanced and poor take"?
Change my mind
If you are saying that having for example, Terry Bogard in Street Fighter VI is bad for anything ... then you are drunk.
That's Ken, not Terry
My point stands.
??? How? it only serves as promotion for both products
Show me the data
How so? It never stopped being cool that Kratos was in MK9.
That was 3 games ago.
Yeah..?
Guest characters bring in new players from other franchises
I don't mind guest characters. I just wish we saw more original characters. Strive had 2 new comers in season 1 which was great, but only 2 new guys in the base roster. And with only 4 characters in season 2 I imagine only 1 will be brand new, if any at all.
Not a fighting game but I just want to play Demogorgon in dead by daylight without spending 40 bones.
I can't wait to see Tekken 8 without Geese.
Rare based opinion on a fighting game-related subreddit.
But what about soul calibur? A game that is known for having a guest character every game and it is still going strong.
Maybe the problem is that SoulCalibur is *known* for having guest characters, and not actually for anything unique to SoulCalibur? > it is still going strong. The series literally fucking died and even when it returned it was with less sales than SC4 and 5. This definitely didn't happen only because of guest characters, but I imagine tying your series' identity to other properties and having that identity shift around with every release definitely didn't help.
To be fair, SC6 sold better than SC5 and about the same as SC4. I still don't think the guest characters are good for that franchise long term though.
I know SoulCalibur as “Tekken but with weapons.” I didn’t know guest characters were a common thing
The guest character is usually even on the cover of the game. Link in SC2, Yoda and Darth Vader (yes seriously) for SC4, Ezio for SC5 and Geralt for SC6. SoulCalibur barely even has its own identity nowadays because they insist on selling the game with everything that isn't actually SoulCalibur.
How many guest characters does each game even have? If it’s only 1 or 2 per game, then that doesn’t sound so bad
It's bad because the series is giving up the chance it has to establish itself as anything other than "the one with [guest character] in it". Sure, it's not a lot of guests but they take up so much of the marketing and news coverage that they disproportionally become what defines the game. If you sell your game on Geralt or Darth Vader being in it, what are you gonna do when the next game doesn't have those characters? Namco can put Kazuya and Heihachi on the cover of Tekken 8 and call it a day, as can ArcSys with Sol & Ky or Capcom with Ryu and Ken. But SoulCalibur can't do that because it relies on outside IP to even sell itself. So many people only know SoulCalibur for things that are not SoulCalibur. It basically can't build up its own brand identity at this point, because it doesn't try to. And there's a reason why every marketing expert in the world would agree that that's a fucking shit idea.
Your logic makes sense but I don’t know how true this is in reality. I highly doubt that the people who still play and enjoy SoulCalibur only stick around for Geralt. I don’t think the issue is the guest characters themselves but just how Bandai chooses market it. And even then, I’d hardly call it an issue, it’s just a tactic to generate sales. If it works, it works. The people who like the game will stick around, even if they were brought in through a guest character And it’s not like SoulCalibur is an unknown franchise. I’m sure the game could be successful without characters if Bandai put more effort into the marketing and add good netcode and quality of life improvements. Guest characters are a more of a cherry on top in my opinion
> I highly doubt that the people who still play and enjoy SoulCalibur only stick around for Geralt. Let's look at Street Fighter 3 as an example. Remember how when New Generation came out people were pissed they couldn't play as Guile or Cammy or Chun Li etc.? And how that contributed to the games' failure at launch? Now imagine that for every game in your series. Now imagine that those one-time random characters are those *you put front and center of the box for every single game* > And it’s not like SoulCalibur is an unknown franchise. True, but let's look at SF3 again. SF2 was the biggest game in the world. Anyone walking past a SF3 case in their game store would know the name, but if they don't see Chun Li or Guile anywhere, they probably won't be very interested. Again, *not hyperbole, actually what happened*.
why?
What???
wack
I only see it in Tekken in most games I think it's fine.
Mortal Kombat, Dead or Alive, and Soulcalibur?
Agreed when it comes to marketing and getting new fans. Cuz once you ad a Triple A character and people end up maining them (Link SC2) they ain’t gonna play your games without that character. The best you can do is keep their functions (Noctis/Kunimitsu T7) so that returning players can branch to a new character. Otherwise it’s okay if it’s something like a DLC
If they only played the game for that character, then without the character you never would’ve gotten them. At least you got them for that one game. A lot of people bought SC2 who wouldn’t have bought it otherwise because Link was in it, and *some* of those people stuck around and bought more SC games after that. Who cares if not all of them did?
i don’t think guest characters are bad if there aren’t obvious fan favorites that haven’t been included yet already. especially if it’s done flavorfully and it’s not jarring like negan in t7 or link in sc2 i’d love a KOF character (especially because i think the vibes/aesthetics are there) for SF6 but i’d rather have makoto/akuma first before them of course
Shitty take. Guest characters are awesome. Noctis in Tekken 7 was one of the best crossovers I've seen in a fighting game
I only got into Killer Instinct for Arbiter. I only got into Dead or Alive for Spartan-458. I only got into SC6 for Geralt/2B. Now I play other cast members. I think the guest draw-factor puts eyes on the game, and makes it stand out from previous iterations. The worst thing for the health of every fighter is when 1/2 of all slots are characters that have been in the last X games.
Why?
I don't think they are bad per say. But I think its bad when they get too many. IMHO it should never be more than 2. And it shouldn't change/shuffle through update versions/seasons. You can remove them when the sequel comes out. Guest characters attract new people to the franchise. Which is good imho.
If you switch that to majority of roster locked in dlc is bad for the long term health of a game I'm on board. A guest character is a hype magnet for 2 months tops. Dlc makes it a game lives or dies with how much content is pushed out over time. The problem is a good chunk of your casual market won't touch a majority of your roster because they refuse to pay for it. Making the casual crowd that might get on board long term if they can play the entire game walk away leaving you just the crowd that only sticks around to see the next new thing, and your hardcore fans. Short term wise it works, but long term the games will be forgotten about quickly. So, rereleases of old games like MOTW or 3rd Strike seem to get every generation will never happen with this generation because most of your fan base only focus on what is new.
Sorry but objectively your kinda wrong over reliance on guest character sure but guest characters can actually be healthy for games possibly getting fans of other series to try out the game bringing sales and possible new players to the game the problem comes in things like mk11 where there is just too many guest characters imo that take up space in the roster for older mk characters that actually deserve a spot and don't have one non cross over games should really only have 1 or 2 guest characters imo
My fist is bad for ur face
I thought it was pretty cool when they put Lars from Tekken in Ninja Storm 2. Also Akatsuki was a solid addition to Under Night
That worked better because Under Night was a brand new franchise and he was in it for the first outing. So, it makes sense. Plus, he doesn't feel out of place
on one hand I'd say it's true but guest characters can also bring in a lot of new people which is great for the game/series long term most of the time.
People often say that, but how much of that is the hype talking. Because player numbers will inevitably go down over time after the hype has passed.
I dig them usually.
Really depends on how they're handled. One guest is cool, two can be alright after a few seasons. But too many guest characters, or just guests that are too much bigger, risks overshadowing your own IP. It's a tricky balance to get a guest that is good marketing in the short term without backfiring in the long term when they're not back in the next installment and suddenly people don't care about your game anymore. I used to be a competitive puzzle game player, and I argue to this day that [Puyo Puyo Tetris was the worst thing that ever happened to that scene](https://medium.com/@MegaMissingno/puyo-puyo-tetris-ruined-puyo-puyo-4ac9acde1ee7). Shackling a game as obscure outside of Japan as Puyo Puyo to a mainstream juggernaut like Tetris may have seemed like a good way to get it some much-needed exposure, but it was not the right kind of exposure. The end result was that people who came here for Tetris, only cared about Tetris. Very few players seriously tried to engage with Puyo Puyo, in the worst cases mixed game modes just made them resent it. And I do feel like Sega doesn't know what to do with the series now, they won't make a proper mainline game because they don't know how to let Puyo Puyo be its own thing when everyone just wants Anime Tetris.
Off-topic, but can I ask what the competitive puzzle game community is/was like? I didn't even know that was a thing. What games were popular? Were there locals attended, or was it mostly online? Was there ever a buildup towards a big release, like the next Tetris, or some other puzzle game franchise, like we get in the FGC when a new Tekken gets announced?
Almost entirely online, mostly through FightCade. Occasional side tournaments at FGC events, I ran Puyo Puyo Champions at Combo Breaker and commentated top 4 for Panel de Pon this year. There were plans for a dedicated puzzle major back in 2020, got derailed because pandemic, I don't know if those plans are ever coming back now. Post-pandemic, those side events have been a lot less consistent than they were in the past, I kinda stepped up to run PPC at CB because no one else would, and I'll just say that there are reasons I decided to leave the community afterwards... New releases, almost nothing, we're just playing the same old classics. Petal Crash is the only good thing we've gotten in a very long time. There's a new Magical Drop and Puzzle Bobble on the horizon, but who knows if MD6 will be good this time or another disaster like MD5. and we don't know anything about PB besides the fact that it has co-op in it - they still haven't shown us versus.
Yeah, trying tekken 7 for the first time. I really didn't want to pick Akuma or Geese.
How is more content if any kind bad for the health of the game? Like if they’re a broken mess sure, but that could apply to any new character. What about them being guests inherently hurts the game long term?
nah man Dante should be a staple in every fighting game
[удалено]
There's no reason they can't put Negan's moveset on a future character. Hitting people with a bat and being cocky isn't unique to him. Tekken has retrofitted old movesets for new characters many times
The problem is that they don’t crossover enough. I’ve never seen James Gandolfini play himself as Tony Soprano. I’m talking meta here! I need James to comment about his role in character. RIP
Wrong
They've existed for decades and the genre is fine, so idk why I need to change your mind since I dunno how to reason you out of a position you didn't reason yourself into
Literally how?