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| Akiha Tohno by NFB-ZMC |
Current Code 1.07 came out on PC recently, and the game is pretty much as good as I had hoped from watching videos. I had already mentioned before in earlier posts about Melty that MBAA improved on MBAC in almost every single way, but there were still fundamental problems with the game, like how strong being in the air was. Most of those leftover issues were fixed in CC 1.05, and carried over to 1.07 so I'm pretty happy with the way the game turned out.
A CC 1.05 change that carried over to 1.07 was in airthrows, specifically raw airthrows. Airthrows are godlike now so you can really bring on the pain against people who just jump and frolick around all day. This is a really great change as it makes the air game less dominating, so there's a bigger emphasis on proper ground movement.
Somewhat related is the almost universal increase in character walkspeeds, which also makes the ground game stronger.
I also want to talk about the removal of anti-A armor, which was something a lot of people were divided over. It's pretty clear why it was added in the first place though, since A attacks in MBAC were so dumb. But the active frames on A attacks were already universally toned down in MBAA, so anti-A armor ended up being kind of overkill. It's been removed since vanilla MBAACC, and one of the results is that antiair 5a becomes viable again. This sounds bad, as 5a mash antiair was one of the most obnoxious things about MBAC, but I think it's been toned down appropriately in CC because of the counterhit change. So for the most part, if someone scores a trade from a mash 5a antiair, the extra counterhit stun will be just long enough so that they won't be able to combo afterwards.
The 1.07 port is almost perfect, as far as I've seen. Frenchbread is known for adding in last minute balance changes in the home ports, but PC CC 1.07 seems to be devoid of this. The training mode is an improvement over the PS2 version, especially in the amount of replays that can be saved and the maximum time allotted to dummy record. However, the training mode has actually lost some features like the status bar. I can never understand it when game developers actually remove features that were present in earlier versions of a game. Unless these certain features were problematic. But status bar was very useful for getting an indication of the cancel points of attacks.
In contrast, the 1.07 netcode is easily the worst I've ever seen in any fighting game. It doesn't handle packet loss well at all and the way it calculates delay is completely off. Now, delay based netplay in general is terrible. But Frenchbread isn't exactly a big company like Capcom who is rolling in money, so it's somewhat understandable that they'd go this route. What I don't understand is not allowing the players to manually choose what delay to set. The connections seem completely random too. Some people can't even get good connections with people that live less than an hour away from them, but can play people out of state just fine.
In terms of balance, it's a bit too early to say but every character seems viable at this point. All of the ridiculous characters in 1.05 were toned down, in particular PCiel and Ryougi. VSion and Mech, who were considered bottom of the barrel in 1.05, have also been improved by quite a bit. The game's only been out for a few months, so there are just 2 "credible" character rankings right now.
First off is top Miyako/Ries player Kanna's list, which he made within the first month of the game's release!
S Arc PCiel Kohaku Nero Satsuki Roa Seifuku Ryougi
A Warc Shiki Akiha Wara Hisui Nanaya Sion Ries Aoko WLen Ciel Kouma VAkiha Hime Len Miyako
B VSion Mech
Notice that HisuKoha, the Necos and the various team characters are missing. Supposedly he didn't include them because of the lack of exp vs them in 1.07.
Next up is top VAkiha player Hato's list, which was actually published in the most recent issue of Arcadia magazine.
S Nero Ryougi
A+ Arc Satsuki Wara Seifuku
A Sion Warc Akiha VAkiha Nanaya Kohaku HisuKoha Mech Len Kouma Ries Roa PCiel
B VSion Shiki Ciel Miyako Aoko WLen Hime
C NecoArc NecoArcChaos KohaMech Necomech
There's a great deal of disagreement here, so clearly it's a sign that it's much too early in the game's lifespan for a tier list. I should also mention that 1.07 came out in mid October, so the game is still pretty new. Some characters are still relatively unexplored, so there's a lot of potential for change! I still remember how different the final AA char rankings were compared to the ones made in the first year of that game's life.
As for characters I've been using, I have mostly been playing F Archetype Earth and my old AA character F Akiha. I streamed a quick F-Akiha tutorial the day the game came out, detailing her general gameplay, normals, combos, and her 1.07 changes. F-Akiha plays exactly the same as she did in AA; it's just that everything she does deals less damage now, so it's a bit harder to win. In particular, her fire webs(412) do way less damage and have a proration of 50%, so it's not even worth trying to work them into combos anymore. It also affects her web+arc drive unblockable setup, making it do about 1000 dmg less on average.
The recovery on the projectile version of her arc drive has also been increased, which at first doesn't seem like a big deal. But it actually weakens her corner unblockable, because in previous versions, whenever someone wanted to reduce damage on the F-Akiha unblockable, they would just jump guard. The projectile version of her arc drive would lock the opponent in blockstun, and since web is air unblockable, they would then get their guard broken and take a bit of damage. Her arc drive in the older versions of the game recovered very fast, so F Akiha could just combo off of this and score another knockdown. She can't do this anymore, so now the opponent gets to escape. The damage that the opponent takes is generally between 1.4K-2K, so it's a significant reduction over the 4K that the opponent would take if they had gotten grabbed.
In earlier versions, even if the opponent reduced damage on the unblockable by jumping, Akiha would still be in a favorable position because she could combo into knockdown. Now that she can't do this anymore, it's hard to say whether or not it's still worth it to go even go for the unblockable setup in this version. Guaranteed damage is nice, but the setup does require her to be in MAX or Heat, and the opponent can easily reset the match back to neutral by jumping. It seems like the Japanese F-Akiha players have decided that it's not worth it anymore, because I have never seen anyone go for it in 1.07 match videos.
The only thing she's gained is 623c having OTG relaunch properties. Since OTGs scale pretty severely in this game, it's not very good for adding extra damage to combos. However, it IS useful for extending midscreen combos to get that extra corner push, and it can also be used to confirm a really far 2c hit. Since 2c at its maximum range doesn't go into any combos normally, 623c is a good tool to make this more scary.
That's pretty much it for impressions. I'll probably talk about Archetype Earth in my next post.
