Yeah but wasn't the discussion was using a fast mid instead of a low crushing move to deal with 2p? Lion and Sarah's Mids are hop kicks, which crushes lows. But are slow and can be beat out by faster standing attacks.

Thanks for the shout out Myke! It's been a while since I've delved into game theory, and there are some great comments there which gave me lots to think about.

2P aesthetics:
My take on the aesthetics of 2P haven't really changed from 6 years ago. There's some room for improvement. While the current 2P animation works well in off-the-ground combos, I'm not a big fan of punching the thighs or shin.

(from the old thread)
If you punch someone in the thigh, well the guy's crotch is only a few inches up and that would make a much better target. Also, the thigh being quite a curved surface, it's really hard to get a good punch in without sliding off and wasting most of your energy. You don't have this problem with Muay Thai style kicks to the thigh because you're hitting with your shin, which is a lot easier to aim than a fist.

I would also never ever try to punch someone in the shin. One of the largest and most sturdy bones in the body against the many little bones in my finger... Unless my fist is magical it's not going to be in my favour.

I'd prefer low punch animations to be angled up towards the stomach, like in Street Fighter 1, but this will look weird when they're used in bound combos.


2P function:
I personally think of 2P as a panic switch. It's for situations where you know you've lost the neutral game and you just gotta get this guy off you for a moment and compose yourself. As such, I think the advantage you get from a 2P hit is too much of an added bonus. I prefer VF3 in which you get less of a frame advantage on counter hit, and most characters only get back to neutral at best on normal hit. This way the move still serves its purpose as a panic switch, but there's less incentive for repeated use, and mid-level play will be a lot more fun.

However, on the other side of the arguement, I think we may have some of the best things about VF because of the current incarnation of 2P. As said in the old thread, 2P being strong encourages people to develop better spacing.

One more thing which makes 2P good for the game though, is that it's a simple and effective stop to people running up in your face. Before 2P was buffed in VF4, we used to see a lot more of that in VF2(especially because of option select throws) and VF3. Many players wouldn't bother to learn spacing, and would just dash in and throw when they had advantage. This put a lot of other fighting gamers off VF because new players were getting destroyed by dash-in high damage throw/mid nitakus. 2P being strong AND being able to turn the tables frame advantage wise stops the abuse of forward dashing, and encourages people to learn proper spacing instead.

Interestingly, one of my favourite comments about VF's 2P came from watching a Dead Or Alive stream in which one player was using Pai. Paraphrasing, the commenter basically said "You know it's a Virtua Fighter character, so you know 2P is strong and you know it's coming. You can't let that intimidate you."

On For Honor:
For Honor had a whole bunch of problems in both publishing and gameplay. I have never played the game myself though, so my viewpoints will be severely lacking in many areas. No offline multiplayer meant that you needed at least 2 consoles for every match in a tournament, and due to the camera, you could only follow 1 player's viewpoint at a time unless you had a 3rd console as a spectator. Gameplay wise, I quite like the system, but the stamina bar coupled with strong defensive options made many players feel the risks for hyper offensive playstyles far outweighed the rewards. Thus the pace of the game became slow and lumbering to many. Another glaring flaw of 3D games with 1st person or over the shoulder cameras is the difficulty of depth perception, making judging distances hard. The last big flaw for me is due to the nature of the game, it's hard for casual audiences to tell how much of a fight is skill and how much is wild swinging. For these and other reasons I think For Honor failed to live up to its potential, even though I and many others love it as a concept.

On the advancing guard:
We've seen some innovations on being able to move forward while guarding. In some versions of KOF, Ryo has a move where he steps forward and it has a few block frames in it. It is an amazing tool for closing distance and breaking out of difficult situations, and the distance covered can be quite significant in some versions of the game.

Something more extreme I can remember is one of the gems in Street Fighter X Tekken. There was a gem which automatically blocked for you as long as you were not pressing buttons. It meant players with that gem equipped could just walk up to their opponents and be hyper aggressive, never worrying about that quick footsie that they didn't see. Most people hated it because it flew in the face of everything Street Fighter, but it showed the potential of how scary a character could be if they could freely block while moving forward.

Why I can not like this article more then once?

@Myke - take this as a feature request please

It must be a Slow year so far....

To Jump Kick or Not to Jump Kick?

They improved all the jump. F.S has the best animation for jump kicks

The Idea of a stagger instead of a K.O at the end of a round is interesting. But maybe unfair if at the end of the round (when both opponent's life bar remains the same) if you guess right but have to change all the rules just for a small life finishing move.
IMO just replace the K.O animation by a new cool anckle crumple animation (no floating) even in counter hit. But it's only an aesthetic choice.

What if you look at the 2p as a universal parry against highs and slow moves with a low reward (the risk is still pretty high if someone knows you're gonna do it). I mean, most fighting games have a universal parry/reverse system (sf3 has parrys, sf4 has focus, sf5 has the v-reverse, tekken has low parry, etc.) and I think that all vf characters lean on the same universal systems of sidestep, p, 6p,2p, throws makes the game already naturally more balanced than other fighters.
This doesn't solve the aesthetic of the move, but might help you get over the fact that it's there (if you do have issues with it..)

Secondly, the other thread is discussing if a 3-point guarding system would be more interesting than a 2-point one. I don't want to bump up that old thread, so I'll ask here: what about a 1-point guarding system? if 3-points makes the game too complex, what would the effects of a 1-point system be? Smash already uses it to great effect and there was a fighting game on the n64 called fighters destiny that also used a button that evaded most moves in the game, it had a similar "point" scoring system instead of a lifebar too.
With the amount of guard-breaks in vf, sometimes the mid/guardbreak mixup is already so strong that if you would let characters auto block lows (so they basically become "mids" (because all moves are technically mids with a 1-point system), but with a visual difference, still able to be crushed) and use alternatives such as more frame advantage on block and guardbreaks to keep the RPS system going. Maybe this is a terrible idea, but I'm just throwing it out there to see how you guys feel about it.

2P is ok on a great 3 bars connection or offline, maybe they should make it at 12 frames.

since realism is a thing for VF, i'm a bit partial to using the IRL 2P: which is a kick. The problem is, the real kick would not crush highs. The issue comes from (and this is why i liked DoA for so long) that, IRL, it's not unrealistic to do 2 things at once. You can parry a high jab while doing a low kick (IRL, that's what you'd be doing, anyway). Unfortunately, it's next to impossible to model this kind of behavior into a game in any simple manner, when 3d fighters are already pretty complex to begin with. When it comes to aesthetics, we need to understand that it looks wrong because it's replacing an IRL mechanic that just can't simply be modeled well in game. If they wanted to give it an extra frame or two of active (which wouldn't really hurt it), they could easily turn those straight punches to the knees into hook shots in the calves.

The issue being that there's only a few ways of handling it realistically: the kick in which im thinking that would make the most sense as a universal 2k jab is a shin kick with the rear leg hitting with the bottom of the foot which would make the fighter stand rather tall. The sabaki would be a high punch parry exclusively. What makes the kick fast (although weak) and highly recoverable is that you go straight from your opponent's shin to a full step backwards.

Something i never understood in fighting games is, while punches are faster than kicks, a low punch should be slower than a low kick. Closest weapon to closest target was a good rule that bruce lee had, which means that anyone in a wide stance (not true of a low stance that's not wide) is a sucker for kicks. I'm a tall, overweight male and my footwork sucks, so i can tell you all about getting kicked. If your legs are more than an inch beyond shoulder-width apart, you are not going to block or evade a low or mid kick, realistically. And it can be a really slow as heck round kick, too.

TBH, i think fighting games (and the arts represented, since VF seems to lack universals where the arts do) could benefit from a few more universals. A good push kick (brad has one) that you can get at any time just to create some space for new players. I've been pulling off brad's push kick in some real sparring lately and it's gotten me out of situations that i otherwise had no answer to against way more experienced partners.