So the rollback beta's about to end, and it gave me all sorts of feelings after having spent hundreds of hours across +R and strive. A lot of the design of the game is something I'd say I dislike in isolation. I wanted to go over a bunch of stuff, but lemme get to the heart of it. Why I was sure I wouldn't get into Xrd.
Knockdown into setplay, the game
I play Bridget in +R and most of her conversions lead to no knockdown, and almost all her setplay leads back to neutral too. In strive, I want to dominate footsies with Giovanna's absurd dash. My beloved neutral.
So imagine my surprise when I picked up Xrd May and every air hit leads to hard knockdown - usually in the corner! The set play is no joke either, even my week 1 May was running pretty tight 50/50s and it only gets better from there. Your reward on hit is to repeat the same situation again. Brutal.
I looked around for characters that were less focused on this type of gameplay loop, but while some characters don't get as huge of a set up off a knockdown, looping into suffocating oki over and over really seems to be the norm across most of the cast. Having to endure your opponent's looping setplay is one thing if you adore when it's your turn, but if that's unsatisfying? What's the point? Can't I just play more neutral or have more weird scrambles? Wah wah wah.
And yet, Xrd is extremely fun.
So what happened?? Xrd captures two things I find so fun about +R and strive and puts them both in the same game.
In +R, I love how unstoppable your own character's gameplan can be as your get stronger with them. There's so much room for creativity, control, and to play with absurdly strong tools that just wouldn't fly in most games.
In strive, the time where you want to start studying individual match ups rolls around real fast. Where in +R no one was ever to force me to learn defence past 'delay wake up, safe dp, backdash, jump, mash', strive quickly encourages you to understand more nuanced interactions.
Xrd presents slightly more stable situations than +R, while also making characters overwhelmingly strong. Every time I do beachball YRC it feels like cheating, and every day I have new ideas about tricks to try with dolphin hoops. All the creativity is there.
Meanwhile the universal mechanics of instant block and blitz really make me feel like I have a reason to vary my pressure, and have ways out against predictable sequences. I'm not just praying to execute the reversal DP out of blockstun with no buffer. Being rewarded on defence with instant block > throw is a rush, it's so deliberate.
I'm hoping this 'best of both worlds' feeling sticks around as I improve.
Honourable mention to Xrd's incredibly fun combo system, where I'm constantly eyeballing my opponent's height and spacing and deciding if I need to hedge with a weaker combo and get my knockdown, or go all out for the best damage.
I'm so excited for the full rollback release, and hope I can get good enough to hate YRC and blitz and [insert character] as much as the long time Xrd players I know.
See you there~
"I can't wait to get good enough to hate parts of the game" is the most self aware guilty gear thing ever
ty faye ☺️