I play a lot of a mobile shmup called Sky Force Reloaded. I suppose it is a dreaded Euroshmup because you don’t necessarily die in one hit. The bonus stuff you collect isn’t just for score, it’s a currency you use to buy upgrades. It has planes shooting other planes and no anime girls at all. There’s no real atmosphere per se, it’s not a thing of exquisite beauty like Einhander, but as a dude who has self-ejected out of the modern STG niche I find it to be a good game.
I don’t know what this means other than, maybe, the way to sustain niche genres without succumbing to licensing/anime horseshit is mobile pricing?
the current genre-dominant games are fine (really, as bad as sfv is, it’s perfectly serviceable)
there are plenty more being made outside of those frameworks (i mean, ARMS, c’mon)
esports is never going to focus on games that do not have enormous traction already because they are marketing and spectator focused, not player focused
“this is why fighting games suck” reasons are usually things that exist for a real tangible reason in the first place
and yeah, random ranked battle systems just kind of suck, always have, always will. I feel their main purpose is “I want to push buttons, I don’t care with who” more than anything else; you will need to make friends if you want to get actually good at anything, much to the disappointment of many players.
something important about the Animefication of niche genres, especially as far as Japan goes, is they want to make up losses on the game with merchandise and extras. they don’t necessarily get more players for it, and this usually only happens when the games themselves have already done poorly.
services like nesica, which reduce game cost in exchange for taking a cut of every quarter, really hurt niche arcade games that don’t get a lot of burn
see I totally buy the “I just need a faceless player at the other end” thing, and I don’t really care that it’s the standard at this point for fighting games, but seeing what ARMS (and Splatoon) did with their lobby/matchmaking systems makes me think that fighting games can definitely lead the way as far as this goes
like, I have friends and I got good by playing with them, but they’re not around all the time (even less so for me now), and even though I can just hit the ranked matches over and over again to get my fighting fix, I feel like there’s a big opportunity to do stuff with the ways lobbies work in fighting games, creating local hierarchies and mini-metas with the 7 or so other people you’re playing with
so it would turn a nightly session from just a grind against random people to something where you can see where you fit in the localized space that tonight’s lobby gave you. and sometimes you’ll be at the top and sometimes you’ll be at the bottom, but I think simply being able to see where you are in relation to a few other people in real time helps establish a framework for improvement that isn’t just a number that goes up or down
that locality is important! it’s not you vs. everyone in the world playing online, it’s you vs. the 7 people in the lobby, and that’s much easier to conceptualize
