"character action" isn't a game genre it's the equivalent of the phrase "elevated horror" for beat-em-ups
People always say a "focus on combos" defines/separates "character action", but lots of good-ass beat-em-ups have combos (SOR4 more recently) so I don't get it at all.
Character Action games are clearly a kind of beat em up but there's definitely a different vibe to games that get called Character Action than a traditional beat em up. It's hard to put my finger on why but i think it's less about focus on combos and more about how you deal with enemies in general
Let's take this encounter from metal gear rising for example: https://youtu.be/ZihkAbgKZn0?t=7137
What we see in this clip is there are few instances where you're engaging more than one enemy at a time, and generally that's because they happen to be in the same spot the one you're after is occupying. What's much more common is that you're engaging a single opponent at a time and giving them your whole focus. The game encourages this style in its mechanics:
- outside of the highest difficulties enemies don't all try to attack you at once
- your defensive mechanics (parrying here, but dodges and counters apply too) are built to deal with one attack at a time
- it's actively difficult to hit more than one enemy at a time, let alone keep them in a combo; they like to stay separate even when they're surrounding you
This is pretty much how every game of this style I've seen plays out so I would say that in Character Action games you deal with encounters by efficently dealing with one enemy at a time.
Now let's take a similarly enemy-dense encounter in SoR4: https://youtu.be/lNkpDRbPS9c?t=2496
Immediately we see a difference: Blaze knocks down one enemy then turns around to take out another, then gets dinged by a biker from offscreen. In fact the player switches targets five times before getting back to the first enemy they swung for! It's far less important here to eliminate targets than it is just to keep them away from you. Again, the game is built to support this:
- Enemies will happily swarm you and attack outside of any sequence
- Your main defensive options are: an invincible attack that hits all around you but costs health; grabbing an enemy and throwing them at others
- Enemies tend to group up so it's pretty common to hit multiple at the same time
What i would say makes streets of rage 4 a traditional beat em up is that you deal with encounters by dealing with groups of enemies at once
That was a whole lot of words just to say there's a reasonable and consistent enough distinction in how it plays out to warrant its own label imo but hey it was fun to think about
I dunno, I think that's just a specific design decision of Metal Gear Rising that helps put the focus on the parry mechanic. I think it would be ridiculous to say that, say, God of War (the original series, haven't touched the new ones) is a different genre than Devil May Cry, a game it clearly is influenced so much by, but God of War has a much larger focus on dealing with groups of enemies, which is clearly shown through Kratos's default weapon having a ton of wide, sweeping attacks. Hell, he, too, has invincible grabs and an invincible space-clearing attack, much like Streets of Rage 4. In fact, one of the game's most intense encounters at the end of the game is a massive group fight.
The Ninja Gaiden games as well, especially 2, are quite willing to swamp you and make you deal with groups, with an expectation that you'll use powerful, space-clearing invulnerable moves like ninpo and Ultimate Techniques.
Really, though, it's not wrong that these 3D beat-em-ups made for consoles have their own conventions unique to them, much like how 3D platformers tend to have many of their own conventions that 2D ones usually don't. My issue with "character action" is that it's used as an exclusive term, a "you must be this tall" sign except instead of height it's a nebulous definition of "depth" that tends to be biased towards certain developers, and leave many games in the dust. I mention God of War up there, and that series has been argued to not be "character action" despite it clearly taking heavy influence from the first Devil May Cry (much like many other of its ilk around that time), most likely due to simple bias against non-Japanese developers.
It's this sort of elitism that I really dislike with "character action," as it limits the talk about the genre, its history, and hidden/unknown examples simply because the main character can't juggle enemies as much as Dante can. To many people, "beat-em-ups" are just shallow, button-mashy games, and a game with as much depth as Bayonetta clearly can't belong to the same genre. Thus my comparison to "elevated horror," a term which largely exists to say "this horror movie being good means it's inherently different from horror as a genre." Which I think is silly.