Now laugh as they call you anti fun.
Compare this with the simplicity of Mount & Blade Warband which achieves greater depth, in 3D, with a very simple and intuitive control scheme.
Once you get used to the input style the complexity makes the character and thus the game more fun and interesting.
I also said the other half of that: that the result is that people grind until they can do it 100% in their sleep, and thus all it forms is a "you must be this tall to play this character" barrier.
Unlike the example in Street Fighter it actively works against having a balanced game, since now you have to nerf the move because the people who ground it frame-perfect are too strong, which wouldn't have affected anyone who didn't stick their nose to the grindstone but now they get to eat the nerf too, so the character ends up about level with other characters when you're frame-perfect, which isn't demanded of other characters. We saw this exact antipattern happen with Ivy in Soul Calibur 6.
There's an argument to be made that the arcane input provides a tell to the opponent when it's used outside of a buffered section in some other move's lag, but that same argument would work with a less pointlessly arcane input, like a double half circle.
In lower ranks, people are more concerned with the other strategic aspects of the game; there is a lot of stuff going on all at the same time.
> It still baffles me that traditional 2D fighting games and Tekken in particular are so complex and that it is so hard to even pull off a specific move due to control schemes that are maximally unergonomic.
The mechanical difficulty of certain actions is a deliberate design choice. The game tests not only your strategic decision making, but also your ability to execute difficult inputs, both under pressure, all at once.
>Compare this with the simplicity of Mount & Blade Warband which achieves greater depth, in 3D, with a very simple and intuitive control scheme.
Most of M&BW depth is outside of the combat system (whereas fighting games are generally only comprised of a combat system) thus making them hard to compare directly. Simplicity is a not a good first principle for developing a successful fighting game combat systems historically. Simple = Less Skill Expression
But what I remember being very special about tekken was how easy and logical the moves where.
It was one button, one limb and more or less only buttons that controlled limbs involved in a move was used. It was quite easy to learn many moves without consulting the manual because they flowed well with the characters.
This was in stark contrast to street fighter and mortal combat where things were as cryptic as cheat codes.
Our local Aladdin's Castle regularly held tournaments and I had friends who ended up making all the way to the national level through those
Probably considered “cute” to the fighting game community, I think it’s a great option for those of us who don’t care over the minutia of frame counting.
Edit: https://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win This is the overview but read the whole thing start to end, seriously.
It's not meant for high levels of play. We have to start somewhere. I think it is perfectly a suitable to help beginners think about +/- frames or other situational info before getting into matchup specific strats.
I always go at it roughly like this: Figure out what buttons to use in what situations, get executions of special moves down first, learn a few bnbs/block strings (and other offensive strategies), oki situations, then once I really master the character do I worry about match up specifics, mind games, etc.
The visualizations make simple scenarios clear, for example if you block a sweep point blank (or whatever a highly punishable tekken equivalent would be, a snake edge or a hellsweep or whatever), then you are at advantage and can land a strong punish.
But many moves that are highly disadvantageous on block are not punishable when used at their furthest effective range, because the opponent does not have a far reaching & fast enough move to punish it.
At higher levels of play, this kind of knowledge of move properties is actually used against you. There are characters who have uninterruptable block strings that ends in a disadvantageous move, but the string has significant pushback on block.
Players will use these strings to push the opponent to a deliberate spacing where it looks like they can land a long range normal to punish the last move of the blockstring. But the string is designed to place the opponent just outside of the range of that normal, where it looks like it will connect, but it it will not. In this situation, the person who did the "unsafe" blockstring can watch their opponent's character model, visually confirm the startup animation of the attempted punish, and punish _that_ move's recovery on reaction. Tricky tricky!