So MBAA came out in arcades sometime in the middle of 2008, after a very short period of location tests. And not surprisingly, the game was very broken. Many characters had infinites, and C-Ciel in particular had a handcuffs infinite involving looping her charged black keys. Meaning that doing this infinite would actually freeze the opponent in place and prevent him/her from doing anything, even sparking. It was ugly, and a revision called Version A was quickly released in the beginning of 2009.
How is it?
It's pretty much better than MBAC in almost every way. It's very obvious that the developers knew what the flaws of MBAC were and they probably listened to fan complaints as well, as they took multiple measures to fix everything they could. Let's run through the good and bad:
The Good
The screen is bigger
Bigger screen means there is finally a real midrange game, and that there are actually real zoning characters.
Nerf to A mashing
This was addressed in several ways. The most direct way was a new armor system, where if a b or c attack hit an a attack at the same time, the b or c attack would then win outright, instead of trading like it normally would in other games. The other way this was fixed was a universal nerf to j.a's across the board: they no longer have the ridiculous active frames that they had in MBAC. Meaning that in the neutral game there is now a reason to use air attacks other than j.a
Nerf to clash frames
Unfortunately, clash frames weren't completely removed, but most of them have been taken away, save for a few characters like F-Nero.
Guardbar
You still can't die by chip, but now there's a guardbar which means that people cannot simply block all day without consequence. Getting guard crushed is also really painful as the GCed character is stunned for a really long time, allowing all day for the opponent to get a full combo off.
Nerf to shielding
Shields no longer freeze the opponent in place so safe jumps are back in the game. In addition, a character whiffing a shield will be put in counterhit state and will also have his/her guardbar quality reduced, which discourages reckless shielding.
Airthrow whiff animation
They finally added these, so the old airthrow/shield option select is gone.
Varied combos/rewarding execution
Most characters now have new, varied combos that aren't just j.bc j.bc. In addition, they look pretty cool and require a good amount of execution. The old easy combos from MBAC can still be done, but they do very little damage. I think this was handled perfectly, as the game doesn't require the players to have ridiculous execution to even play the game on a basic level, since the easy mode combos can still be done. However, it rewards the players who do put the time into improving their execution with much more interesting and damaging combos.
Variety in characters
It becomes obvious very quickly when playing that the developers made sure to make the characters more unique from each other, compared to MBAC. The addition of the three moon styles also helps this.
The Bad
Neutral game
Unfortunately, what I feel was the biggest problem in MBAC wasn't really fixed in MBAA, although it's at least a little bit better. The neutral game is now more than just a j.a mash fest; however, jumping and chicken blocking are still way too strong. It's still overwhelmingly advantageous to be in the air than on the ground, and the across-the-board nerf to airthrows also means that getting "punished" for being in the air too much isn't that big of a deal.
Bigger screen
Yes, it's both a good and bad thing. Kind of related to the previous point, but the bigger screen size means that being in the air is even stronger than it was in MBAC.
Unbalance
It's the result of there being way more characters(23 chars x 3 styles = 69 characters, and that's not even counting the console chars), but the game is less balanced than MBAC. I feel that the unbalance in MBAA is not the result of the top tier being too powerful. Rather, it's that there are a good number of blatantly terrible characters. It's obvious that some characters had much less time put into them(like H-Wara) than the others.
In Closing
MBAA is a great update, and I'm very happy with the direction the series is taking. Sadly, the biggest problem with MBAC wasn't fixed in MBAA, but they fixed 6 out of the 7 problems I mentioned in the previous post, which is really impressive.
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