@Azurath: EVO isn't until July. If you want to watch some competitive Persona I'd tune in to SoCal Regionals this weekend. Persona is one of the games and it's one of the major tournaments of the year.
@Rhaknar: Also, I think fighting the big Smough is much easier than big Ornstein. Big Smough is slow, you can easily get in close and avoid many of his attacks if you circle him or go between his legs. He just has one blast radius move you got to watch out for if I remember right.
Just beat O & S on my second playthrough last month. I spent numerous hours trying to figure these guys out each time, probably 3 hours each time. Only thing I can say to keep you going is that they are by far the hardest thing I encountered in the game (haven't played the DLC yet). This is how I enventually beat them solo and melee.
- enter the room and start going to one side. Try to lock on to Smough. Then what you'll do is consistently back up around the room (basically do backwards laps around the room). Stay OUTSIDE the pillars. You need to consistently be aware of how many pillars you've passed so you can know when you need to turn (I think there are three on each side). You don't want to get stuck in the corners. If you keep moving backward and are staying mostly locked on, you won't be in too much danger. The main thing this does is make them predictable. Occasionally you may lose track of Ornstein and he will hit you with his flying move, but just start backing up again.
- Use the pillars as safety zones. Only time I drink from the flask is when I'm behind a pillar. Too risky to get caught in their dual attacks because you'll probably die anyways. Also pillars blocks those lightning attacks.
- Experiment with the lock-on and experiment with switching between the two as needed. Sometimes you'll need to reset your lock-on. After practicing a few times you should be able to circle around the room like this for 10-15 minutes if needed. If you get in a corner and mess up your movement, just undo the lock-on and run to pillar for safety and start the movement again.
- The reason I lock on to Smough is because I think his hammer is the most dangerous attack when they are both alive because of it's stun abilities. Also, keep that shield down to regenerate stamina when you think you're in safety. Avoiding block stun is 70% of the battle in this one.
- You may be wondering then how I ever did damage since I spend 95% of the time running from them. While I was backing up, I waited for Ornstein to fly in front on me and miss. Switch the lock-on to him and do either one R2 attack or two quick R1 attacks and then start retreating again. Conserve your stamina in case you need to block Smough. Don't get greedy. This is a long/defensive fight and you're just going to widdle him down. Don't bother doing any damage to Smough as it doesn't matter.
This method would get me to the final form of Smough 8 times out of 10 once I got it down. The big Smough can be figured out and beat without too much difficulty, the main battle for me was just getting to the transformation with enough flasks to get him.
Thought it has a lot of potential and I was having fun. Has a real nice blend of combat, team objectives, platforming elements. Overall, this was a surprise to me. Went from not really interested to closely watching the progress of the game.
Waiting to see how varied the levels, items, and abilities are in the final game though. Even though I was getting new stuff as I played longer, none of them seemed to really change the way I played the game.Think the success of this will be tied to how much you can individualize your character from others.
Would be much more interesting if there were more base models to choose from that had different base characteristics. Right now everyone is pretty much exactly the same guy with just different equipment. Would bring in more variety and strategy to have for example a quicker guy, standard guy, bigger slower guy.
Camera is OK. Realize why they have to have it zoomed out to see level elements, but it hurts the combat sometimes. Hard to read the animation of opponents when they're so small. Also, when there are like 5 guys in one area it's a little impossible to see what's going on.
Seems to be some nice depth to the combat once you get past mashing. You can swing cancel (cool) and do other interesting strings like square> square>parry or square>dodge> parry. Playing other skilled players is pretty fun.
Thought the UI was confusing. Took too long to identify unlocked items and the abilities area was really confusing.
@DocHaus: I'm still playing this like crazy but it has seemed to die off pretty quickly around here. I'm not surprised at the quick dropoff because I think the game mostly appeals to the already established base... and it's probably not going to grow the playerbase due to the steep learning curve. The onilne still has a heavy population though and I think it will be the 3-D fighter with the most competition for quite a while. I might post a 6 week impressions on the game in the next week or so, might be interesting to get some thoughts together. I have some mixed feelings about the game, a lot of positives and some negatives.
Interesting read. I agree with many of your points. The single player content got super rushed and it's an unfinished product. Wouldn't be surprised if the lack of certain characters was from a similar issue. I would disagree on the combat engine though. The combat aspect is really good and has the best gameplay since the early Soul Calibur games. For evidence, I would offer up the support SCV has received in the tournament scene and the respect it's gotten. The meter added a lot of cool strategy to the game as well. Big improvement over 3 and 4 in this respect. On the Guard Impact, I sort of agree. The reason the Guard Impact costs meter is because of the introduction of the supers. It would be way overpowered to have free Guard Impacts because they lead into free supers (they are really valuable in this game). The game would turn into just fishing for Guard Impacts>Supers. The Just Guard never really took hold though as an alernative because the timing window might be too small. It was more of a high level technique and you didn't really see them that much, even in tournaments. The risk/reward just wasn't there unless your anticipation and timing were really good. In all, I think SCV is still a pretty defensive game as you still have a lot of defensive tools.
Now that all the big players have their 3D fighting games out (DOA, Tekken, VF) and putting many hours into all of them,I really think there is room for this game. It has a system that is easy to pick up while being hard to master. It's still the best looking 3D fighting game, the online is solid, and the action looks really cool. They really just dropped the ball on pretty much everything except for netcode, graphics, and combat engine. I hope Namco supports this franchise going forward and I think it could be really successful for them if they give it the time and resources to succeed. This one just needed another 6 months in the oven but it's still a solid 4.5 out of 5 to me. Mostly because I just play Ghost Battle and Online, but I could easily see how SCIV is the better game to many people as it has a lot more single player content.
Game is so awesome, can't believe how much content there is for this game. Almost too many characters because I want to play about half of them. Stages and music are really good.
I hope they bring some of the old customization items back. I'm not really big into customizing my characters, but from the little that I've done it doesn't seem as good as in past Tekkens. Not many unique items for each character. I'm still unlocking items and have had about 500 ghost battles, but it seems like I'm probably getting towards the end of the unlocks.
I really need to learn some good tag assault combos, but I think they are a double edged sword. Seem best used to end rounds with as they still leave a lot of red health and put the tag partner in rage. My biggest issue is still mashers (mostly Lee, Hwaorange, Lars). Besides defensive grinding in practice mode, the best approach has been learning my safe mids and pressuring them before they get started.
Really looking forward to getting this game next week. Haven't played much DOA since 2 on the Dreamcast, but that was such a good game at the time. I've played the alpha demo of DOA5 quite a bit and think it's pretty good. Graphics are really good, and gameplay seems like a more casual VF. Really enjoying TTT2 right now, but I'll be supporting this game and rotating it in.
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