SC4 is out for 360 and PS3! I’m going the 360 route (Yoda!) as I have no PS3. Hilde looks like a great new character so I’m dying to try her out.
UPDATE INITIAL IMPRESSIONS
I beat normal story with Hilde, Yoda, and Seong Mi-na. I beat hard story mode with Xianghua then arcade with Cervantes.
Hilde was interesting but she doesn’t have as “artistic” moves as like Seong/Kilik with her spear. Her attacks felt very quick and didn’t have as many natural feeling or wide arcing hits as with a long polearm character. In this regard she felt more like a Street Fighter character where your combos are a combination of swift non-link-animated attacks if that made sense. I don’t know any of her moves and didn’t pour over her list of moves so this is a very immature glance at the character. I bet she is waaaaaaaaay cooler in the hands of a skilled player. UPDATE I take back all the mean things I said, she has some pretty nice combos actually.
Yoda was somewhat akward in the sense that his moves required him to jump up to hit at the normal level which made his initial attacks feel a little slower. He’s a funny character for sure though but he telegraphs his upward attacks moreso than any other character because of the jumping.
Mi-na is one of my better characters though I use the term loosely because I’m not at all the caliber of player that can waltz into an EVO match and do well. I thought one of her moves for a cartwheel was Forward and B+K but maybe they took it out or it’s rebound to another key config. EDIT: Discovered it on Kilik. Either way, one of my favorite staple moves was gone when I was playing but overall she had a lot of her other familiar moves from previous games.
Xianghua felt great but again, one of my favorite moves (up and kick) is now something slightly new. Overall she feels as elegant as before and doesn’t feel like too much changed from the time I played her before.
Cervantes also feels very familiar and the usual moves I do or can do were all there.
Critical executions or whatever they’re calling them weren’t as easy to pull off. I thought from reading the screen that all you had to do was bring their block gauge all the way down to red and press all 4 buttons but that did nothing, so I’m unsure how to pull the move off. I hear you have to break all their armor too. UPDATE: I find that I can do it if their gauge is flashing red and you’ve JUST broken their armor and they haven’t fallen to the ground yet. Meaning you need to break a piece of armor and not have finished a combo that will floor them, which is actually quite tricky, then hit all the buttons at once.
Ring outs are far harder to pull off. It’s like there’s an invisible wall there now so it should be much more rewarding to pull off a ring out since it’s not at all as easy as it used to be.
Character customization is SO cool now. You can even customize the main roster however you want and save them as seperate profiles. I haven’t touched it very much, I mainly used my money from the story mode playthrough to unlock a majority of the characters (dumb). But from my impressions it should be interesting to go online and see what people create. I think my custom made character will be Kenshin. EDIT: I made Kenji (Kenshin’s son) instead =)
There’s a lot going on with this version and yet at the same time I feel like I’m missing something from other versions. Single player had Story/Arcade and 2 other modes. For some reason I feel like there was more single player stuff in SC3, but maybe I’m imagining it. I actually only put maybe 10 hours into it and stopped playing. I’m more compelled to play SC4 with online play and achievements.
Drift linked this to me: How to get characters/achievements/treasures
