@bigsocrates: You are probably right. DOA is the butt of some jokes, but it lasted longer than most other 3D fighters in the end. Something about side-stepping turns a lot of folks off I guess. Tekken is basically the last one standing, perhaps because 7 nerfed the effectiveness of side-stepping.
I like DOA and think it deserves more credit for actually being fun. But there is no getting around the fact it was marketed as a boob physics simulator first and foremost, especially once the Extreme spinoffs came about. At that point, saying you liked it for the fighting was like saying you had a Playboy subscription for the articles. It might have been true (Playboys used to have an unexpectedly large number of words in them) but no one was ever going to take you seriously.
That said, there is no denying Virtua Fighter is more technical and was taken more seriously by the FG community, and that series had an even earlier death than DoA. So while I don't have any answers, I suspect it was more than just boobs holding the series back. Perhaps being exclusive to Xbox during a formative time for fighting game e-sports was another problem? Japanese players are big chunk of this group.
Honestly, I have encountered very few modern controllers that I didn't like. Like if you go way back, the Atari joysticks aren't great, and playing NES games on something with round edges sure beats the OG rectangle, but it's been a long time since I felt a 1st party gamepad was getting in my way. N64 had an impractically large pad, but having essentially two different setups made it work well for a lot of different types of games. GC button layout was only an issue for 2D fighters, but the system had very few of those anyway. Dualshock 1-3 were a bit small, but very practical with their layouts. DS4 improved this a lot. DC probably should have had a second stick but had great ergonomics. XBox controllers click too loudly, but are great otherwise.
Have to agree with @ben_h:. A Switch Pro controller with analogue triggers would be perfect, and fortunately it basically exists in the 8Bitdo Ultimate Bluetooth.
Look, I don't like throwing the fanboy/girl label around, but I do think it had an influence here. The first few years of the PS3 were kinda shaky for PS fans. They came off PS2 being the clear dominant "team", and were suddenly presented with an expensive console, that was losing out on exclusives, received oftentimes inferior ports of multiplatform games, and a year head start for the main competition. They NEEDED Killzone 2 to be the Halo Killer that the first game wasn't.
To be clear, I don't think it was a bad game, it had a lot going for it (especially production values), just got a bump from the 1st party effect.
Yeah, I agree. It's not a big deal, but they should have had the policy in place to begin with, and never sold the game in countries where PSN is not available. If a company pulls the rug out from under their customers, review bombing is a fair reaction.
I like the show a lot. Probably not a wider sign of things to come though. More like, some folks really wanted to bring back the show they grew up with, and the bigwigs saw it as Disney Plus filler that could be done reasonably cheap, so they didn't have any strict set of parameters about what the show needed to have or do.
Just want to say I enjoy your write-ups despite never playing through a mainline Final Fantasy. The only ones I spent much time with were the Dissidia spinoffs. Speaking of...
"What's the next Final Fantasy game I look at extensively? Only time will tell."
Switch 2 is coming early next year. Mostly a power upgrade, maybe a small new gimmick like 4K buttons, fully backward compatible.
June direct will mostly announce remasters like Zelda WW/TP, Metroid Prime 2/3, but there will be 2 or 3 new games coming to Switch. One will be a holiday release of a new Mario Party or Mario sports game (probably baseball), and the other will be Metroid Prime 4. MP4 will be a cross generation release, both versions launch same day as Switch 2. They might have one more small unexpected thing that comes out in October, but it will be small and Snipper Clips-like.
We will learn very little about the Switch 2 until January.
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