Dispelling game speed myths: BlazBlue vs. Guilty Gear

With the release of BlazBlue: Chronophantasma for home consoles in Japan, there's been a glut of people importing the game and there has been something of a minor revival of the scene. The series has never had a particularly strong following in the United States; anime games are already fairly niche, and Guilty Gear was seen as superior by those who played them.

In particular, the major complaint levied against BB is that it feels massively slower than its predecessor. While there is some truth to that, common ideas for why it's true are actually incorrect, and I want to detail them here, as well as offering potential other ideas.

First let's look at hitstop. This is the big one, the most egregiously false complaint about the two games. For some reason, people think hitstop in BB is a lot longer than in GG. At least since Continuum Shift II (released in May 2011 for home consoles), this has not been true. Hitstop values were actually identical between the two games. And with the release of Chronophantasma, Blazblue actually has less hitstop than Guilty Gear does.

Attack attributes tables, courtesy of the Dustloop wiki

A quick primer for those unfamiliar with the inner workings of the attack system: in both games, all attacks have a specified "attack level", and moves with the same attack level have the same frame data in terms of how long the target is put into stun state. Individual moves have different knockbacks and can induce other states that are not covered by these tables. And of course there are individual exceptions.

A level 0 attack in BB is equivalent to a level 1 attack in GG and so on, in that jabs are level 0 in BlazBlue and level 1 in Guilty Gear, etc. What we see from these tables is that in terms of how fast moves in combos or pressure must follow each other, BlazBlue is actually faster--by a large margin in some cases. Its hitstop is a full three frames shorter.

We also see that attacks themselves cannot actually be slower in BlazBlue--since overall hitstun is actually lower, moves cannot, in the aggregate, be slower, or else they would not combo. However unlike GG, BB often makes use of the ground in combos, as there is no OTG penalty, and wallbouncing induces hitstun, allowing more liberal use of slower moves in combos.

Another oft-cited reason that BB feels slow is that combos are longer and do overall less damage; this is mostly true. The game's hitstun and damage proration systems work such that combos often last longer in real-time than in GG. Additionally, supers tend to last much longer and be more cinematic.

One caveat, though, is that the Guts system in GG makes combos earlier in the round appear to do significantly more damage than they do in effective damage. A fairly optimal Millia combo can take many characters from 100% health to 40 or 50--but due to the Guts system, this may only be one fourth or one third of the character's actual effective health. BlazBlue has no such system, but characters do have different health values; the highest health character has the lowest character's health plus over a third.

It's also worth noting that throws are much slower in BlazBlue, at approximately 13 frames. Guilty Gear has one-frame throws, but lacks the throw reject miss system that prevents mashing throw break in its younger sibling.

But really, the biggest, actual reason that the newer series is slower is the characters actually move more slowly. Guilty Gear has a gravity system: different characters fall at different speeds. This is still true, but to a much lesser extent, in BlazBlue. But overall, the average falling speed in GG is much higher. In addition, stages in GG are not nearly as wide, and characters run and airdash significantly faster, making the game feel more mobile and interactive overall.

To give some actual quantitative numbers, the average jump duration in frames in GG is 39.16, and in BB it's 40.34. While in a direct comparison of two characters that single frame doesn't make much of a difference, it can contribute to a more sluggish feeling. To give an idea of this, even when playing on GGPO, with a 2-frame buffer you can still feel that the gameplay isn't as crisp as local, it's very noticeable but generally inconsequential. Halve that and you have something that can at least contribute to a feeling.

Even more intensely, the average backdash duration in BB is 22.08 frames, and only 16.07 frames in GG. Air forward dashing is two frames slower in BB, air backdashing a full four frames slower. And since the stages are wider, this covers even less effective space. It is unfortunately not a simple thing to compare numerical run speeds, since the actual values used in each game are calculated differently.

So we've established that a huge reason for the game speed difference is in character mobility, but I want to add another idea, which is less quantitative: game situations change much more frequently in Guilty Gear than in BlazBlue. By "game situation", I mean classifying an instant of the game as being in neutral, one character pressuring another, and one character comboing another.

We've already established, informally, that combos are longer in BlazBlue. In addition, the higher character mobility and overall space coverage in Guilty Gear (look at Anji's Fuujin, for example; that thing covers like half of the entire visible screen) means that less time is spent in neutral. Which leaves pressure. The existence of faultless defense and its fantastic behavior as a kind of pushblock, combined with overall faster jumping and backdash speed, means that it longer pressure strings are generally not viable in Guilty Gear. Contrast this with BlazBlue, where barrier (though improved in BBCP!) is not nearly as effective as getting people out, and movement is somewhat more sluggish. Watch a Litchi working her pressure string to an unfortunate cornered opponent, or Carl or Relius.

Throws work this way too. Most characters in GG cannot generally combo after their throws; almost every BB character can.

So overall, Guilty Gear changes state much more often and much more quickly. This and the greater mobility in both time and space are the reasons the game feels so much faster. Combos being shorter is true, but not significantly so. Hitstop is actually higher than in BlazBlue by a large margin.

So then, how did BBCP come to be felt as so much faster than its predecessors? By changing the second factor. I mentioned above that barrier received a boost in the new revision so that it's a better pushblock; this makes longer pressure strings less viable. The addition of Crush Trigger as a guard break mechanic means the threat is much more present than with the guard primer system that existed before, meaning a pressure -> combo change can happen more frequently. Hitstun proration has been attached to real-time combo duration, reducing overall combo length. And the reduction in hitstop shortens combo and pressure strings further.

All of this serves to decrease how long the game goes without a significant change in state, leading to a faster feeling. Without a huge paradigm shift in how characters move, especially relative to the size of the stage, though, the game will never be as fast as GG.

I give this rating system three and a half thumbs liked

Rating systems come into play in a lot of a person's daily life. Hotel ratings, vehicle crash-test ratings, Yelp reviews, all kinds of systems exist for the express purpose of concisely expressing the quality of something.

I've recently been thinking about different kinds of rating systems and their pros, cons, and trends, so here I'll detail a lot of what I've come up with. Specifically, I'll be investigating tier lists, five stars, out of 10, and like/dislike.

For the fighting game fans, tier lists are the primary method by which characters in fighting games are rated. In a tier list, elements are placed into roughly equivalent categories based on their perceived quality. Importantly, tier lists usually assign letter grades much like the American school system, which is the absolutely critical part of the system.

People have an inherent idea of what kind of quality deserves what kind of grade. Characters deserve an A if they are overall very strong with no major weaknesses--exactly like a student would deserve. S-tier characters are beyond even that, having some ridiculous strength that sets them apart. On the lower side, B characters have notable weaknesses and C characters are really just unfortunate.

The major benefit of this system is that it provides a context common across all fighting games that doesn't really need to be explained: everyone knows what kind of performance warrants what kind of grade, so the cast can be shifted up or down relative to another game and this still accurately expresses that the cast in one game is overall stronger than in another game. It also allows the expression of minor, but notable, variations by giving characters +/- grades consistent with their strength.

Notably this approach doesn't scale particularly well when rating arbitrarily large numbers of things. With only five real grades to consider, you end up with something very similar to a five-star system. Which of course, needs no introduction; it's the kind of scoring many online retailers and movie critics use.

Depending on what the system is being used to rate, common practices can differ on what deserves five stars. Product reviews often use five stars to mean "worked as expected". Movie critics reserve their five stars for the best of the best; genre- and period-defining films. Importantly, there is no real universal context in which a five-star system is based, so people don't have an inherent bias toward what the system should represent. Unfortunately, it ends up often being reduced to a binary like/dislike system by people who want to change the moving average score by as much as possible in the direction they feel it should move.

YouTube uses a like/dislike system, and actually moved to it from a five-star system a few years ago. It's very useful in expressing aggregate opinions across many people; it really doesn't matter if 1000 people rate a video between 1 and 5, you can get the same information by having them choose whether they felt overall positive or negative about it. In general this system isn't very good at comparing elements, but websites like reddit have molded it into a pretty good shape to do just that.

Let's look again at what the previously-discussed systems are used for. Tier lists are used for representing an easily-tractable dataset across a handful of categories given a common background context. Five-star systems intentionally remove the context, and are used typically to indicate the quality of a single element compared to a perceived average, rather than against any other set of elements. Like/dislike systems are a way of crowdsourcing that same indication.

So what do we use to represent a single person comparing many things? The out of 10 system works well here. Used on MyAnimeList.net for example, this system rates elements on a scale from the integers between 1 and 10, usually not allowing fractional scores. This system is extremely good at creating sorts of elements. The five-star system usually assumes a perceived average, but the out of 10 system is better at producing that average by taking an individual user's ratings. This allows you to have a good idea of the person's likes or dislikes, and also provides a lot of freedom in how you want your scale to work.

Many people, influenced again by the American school system, often set a 7.5 as "average", consistent with a C grade, and rate higher or lower based on this. So you get a sort of bell curve centered around 7.5, rendering the lower scores relatively useless. You could also take the more general approach and set the average to be 5, for whatever definition of average you'd like to use, and then distribute around it. But many people are averse to this, since 50% is a failing grade.

A friend of mine and I, curiously, take very similar approaches on opposite sides of that center. I make the assumption that the shows I watch and rate on MyAnimeList are, in general, better than the aggregate of all shows. If I watched and rated every single show, my average would be a 5. But since I, in general, watch things I consider better than average, my average score sits at 6.4. Conveniently this also lets me express the categories I like, which are the following:

10 - Otherwise a 9, but significantly influenced my perceptions or opinions in some way
9 - Extremely enjoyable, no significant weaknesses
8 - Great
7 - Pretty good, but not very notably so
6 - Decent to fairly good, OR high-quality but not appealing to me, OR mediocre-quality but highly entertaining
5 - Mediocre, OR good-quality but not appealing to me, OR bad but highly entertaining
4 - Weak, but with a potential redeeming quality
3 - Lacks any redeeming quality whatsoever
2 - Absolutely godawful
1 - Offensive to my sensibilities

Note that I dedicate more ratings toward things that I enjoy less than my average. I feel that the things I enjoy fit nicely into those four ratings, but I need extra divisions to accurately represent how awful some of the things I could watch are.

My friend takes the exact opposite approach, setting a 4 to "decent", and anything worse than mediocre gets a 1 or 2. He reserves his 10 slots for extremely small numbers of shows he considers to be the greatest things ever created, and likes to emphasize subtle differences in the things he does like.

That's the beauty of this system: given a single person's set of rated elements, it is easy to determine the strategy and distribution they use, and adapt your interpretation of the list based on that. A clear weakness is that separate rating sets cannot be directly compared, however.

Mild Injury of the Author

Death of the Author is a 1968 essay by Roland Barthes that has had profound effects on the discipline of literary criticism. Its actual, formal precept is that tying a literary work to an author imposes limits on the work and in how it can be interpreted, when the work should have no such limits.

In common usage today, "death of the author" refers more to the idea of declaring an appeal to authorial information to be invalid. If a reading or interpretation of a work relies on information about the author, then it is an invalid interpretation.

I have long since taken issue with this common usage. To deny that a literary work has an author is, first and foremost, to deny the human achievement of the work. All stories we read are written by humans, and can only be consumed through that viewpoint--we certainly cannot accurately imagine ourselves as a dog, or a highly advanced alien spaces, so humans are absolutely essential to the work.

Denying the author also leads to several cases of apparent contradictions which I will describe below.

But that isn't to say the whole concept doesn't have merit. It is extremely important to understand that, being a human, no author has full control over his or her own unconscious self. What the author may say about a work he has written could very well be false. And, most importantly, abstract meaning of a text relies on the interaction between reader and text rather than author and text, and so no reader need believe that the author's interpretations are any more valid than his own.

This image is occasionally circulated as a way for students to vent their frustration about literary analysts searching too deeply in text. These students make the error that the author is in full control of every aspect of himself, when the state of depression of the character may have unintentionally motivated the choice of a saddening color because it matched the theme. Strict usages of death of the author would deny analysis of why blue may be a saddening color--because that exists due to the cultural memes the author has internalized, which cannot be used in a death of the author analysis.

To use an example anyone reading this blog post would likely be familiar with, take Neon Genesis Evangelion, directed by Hideaki Anno. Anno has repeatedly stated that the Christian imagery seen throughout the show, of his own design, had no particular meaning. It is important that we do not take this at face value; Anno is known to have been extremely depressed during the production of Evangelion, and it is very valid to find meaning in the Christian imagery as Anno lashing out at God in frustration.

A less morally-acceptable example would be in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, controversial due to some interpretations of the book as Hitler apologia, building up Ender as a faultless genocider. Understandably, Card has denied this. But again, authors do not have full control over their unconscious selves, and they of course may also lie. Analysis of literature is incomplete without incorporating the author in some way, but despite the existence of "author" in the word, the author is not an interpretive authority on it.

But Death of the Author would deny this information entirely, and contrary to Barthes' goal, imposes a limit on the interpretation that can be had of a work.

Arthur writes a novel. In his novel, the narrator, also the protagonist, grows up in an orphanage after his parents die when he is young; he is occasionally visited by an uncle, his only living relative. The uncle is mentioned only in passing. When the protagonist grows up, he has difficulty forming intimate romantic connections; critics suggest that the protagonist was molested by his uncle and that memories of the events have been repressed.

Arthur, seeing the reviews, is shocked. That was not at all what he had intended; the uncle served as an unintentional role model for the protagonist, who learned emotional detachment due to this uncle not having any love for him. So he writes a second edition of the novel, this time removing the uncle entirely, and emphasizing that the protagonist's emotional issues stem from a lack of family.

This situation poses problems for Death of the Author. It is simple enough to deny authorial intent and still get meaning out of a work, but that intent has now been turned into an official re-write of the text. Therefore, to deny the author's influence, one must dictate that the two editions are completely separate stories and have no relation to each other--something that is clearly false. A story is just an author speaking in an official capacity as the author; denying the author entirely leads to problems like this one where the same story must be considered as two unrelated ones.

Another problem can arise, as well. Alice is a prolific author, praised by social equality types as writing stories that feature strong instances of oppressed people; she is particularly known for her protagonists being a symbol of the feminine and overcoming masculine oppression. To expand her horizons, she writes a new story, from the perspective of the masculine.

But she fails. For whatever reason, she cannot effectively write from a masculine perspective, and her protagonist once again ends up as a symbol of the feminine, agreed upon by critics all over. Death of the Author limits the analysis of the work that can be done under the assumption that the protagonist is a symbol of the masculine. Without a hint of what the author intended, the very idea cannot be found, as the symbol of the feminine is so strong. Particularly, it would declare the masculine reading invalid as it is unsupported in the text.

But clearly, there is useful analysis and interpretation to be done from the perspective of a failed masculine. Interesting parallels can be drawn between an attempt at the masculine and what it ended up as. But by completely disregarding the author, this analysis is impossible. To add to that, if a critic hears of the author's intent and then performs a text-only analysis based on it, he or she has still failed Death of the Author, as the analysis was motivated by the author's existence.

To conclude, understanding that the author is not an interpretive authority on their work is critical to a complete analysis of literature. Even factual statements rather than interpretations about events in a story are not necessarily completely at the whim of the author; they may misremember a detail and say something happened that is directly contradicted by the text. When this happens within the text itself, we usually call it a "plot hole," and other details of the text are used to fill in information to correct the contradiction. If this is infeasible, then it is a damning indictment of the work.

But to completely destroy the author entirely limits both the human achievement of the text and the human reality that shaped it. What aspects of the author a reader may find useful are up to him or her--and indeed, the reader may decide to use no aspects at all. But axiomatically declaring that the author cannot be used is highly stifling.

The Guilty Gear macro glitch

A recent discovery in Guilty Gear XX Accent Core and its subsequent iterations has generated a flurry of discussion, argument, and overall bad posting, rendering reasonable people cowering in horror at the cesspit a certain thread on Dustloop has become. The gist of the glitch is this: pressing any button bound to a macro command gives you a negative-edge input of that macro for every frame you're holding the button.

Some quick terminology background: A macro is, in general, one key or input that performs several inputs when pressed. Most fighting games include certain multiple-button macros to make inputs feasible on a default game pad that are otherwise designed for an arcade stick, and Guilty Gear is no exception. You can set any button to perform P+K, P+K+S, etc. Pad players typically bind these to the unused shoulder buttons. Negative-edge is a ridiculous term that refers to a game registering an input when you release a button, as opposed to or in addition to when you press a button. So the way the glitch works is that, in effect, pressing and holding a macro button gives you the macro input every frame for as long as you're holding it. For whatever reason, this doesn't work in training mode.

Since as I mentioned in a previous blog post, Guilty Gear does not have a repeating input buffer (or if it does, it's only one frame or so), this new glitch opens up a world of new input opportunities that were not present before. You effectively now have a limited, infinitely-long repeating input buffer, capable of performing any command that you can coax the macro system into executing for you. You can abuse button priority to make P+K give you commands off of P, for example.

Naturally, this poses some problems. Although both arcade stick and pad players get eight buttons to work with, the Guilty Gear input layout makes using at least one of them kind of awkward, and arcade stick layouts aren't particularly conducive to pressing the far right two buttons. Of course in practice this wouldn't really much of an issue; complaining about input difficulty on stick is laughable. Just man up and learn to press the other buttons.

Notably this would make the game more attractive to play on pad, potentially more attractive than stick, and for a certain set of fighting game players who seek to emulate the arcade experience as much as possible, this seems like a slap in the face. There is a defensible argument that, originally being arcade games, playing a fighting game in a way more faithful to the arcade experience should never be a disadvantage. But ask any Tekken player and they'll tell you that pad is the preferred input method of the community, so again there's precedent to just suck it up and play on pad or take the extra difficulty. Though I fear for the TOs who will have to deal with all the sudden pausing issues as people start bringing all their wireless controllers--I would not blame a TO fearful for his own sanity who banned macros to avoid this exact scenario.

So with the control issues out of the way, perhaps the most compelling argument against the glitch is in gameplay. Having access to a (limited) repeating input buffer can radically alter how the game is played. Imagine trivial reversal windows to beat out blockstrings, or this Justice stupidity:

There are a fair number of other things that can turn into problems, too. So what do we do about it? Here, the "suck it up" answer isn't as obvious. An assumption of input difficulty is built into the game, and certain things are balanced around it. Certainly slashbacks would be stupidly powerful if it weren't for their unreliable execution--you don't need to worry about the miss penalty if it's trivial to never miss. So you can have two major lines of thought that support banning the use of macros (the only feasible way to ban the use of the glitch): making impossible something that isn't possible in the actual arcade game out of purity concerns, and preventing radically negative gameplay effects.

The first argument isn't really justifiable from a pragmatic perspective. Only a handful of Americans will ever play the game on an actual arcade board, so it's not a problem to be able to do something the arcade can't. Console tournaments in Japan, on the other hand, have a stronger position from this argument.

The second argument is the actual crux of the issue, and the pivotal question on whether macros should be banned. Is it worth it to prevent what negative gameplay effects may exist, when doing so makes playing on pad impossible? A fairly large number of players do use pad exclusively (even top players, if not in this game--see SKD). Now I don't have the gameplay knowledge or the community knowledge to know the answer to this question. But, if macros are banned, then new players, who almost exclusively use pad, will be completely alienated. Which leaves only one source of growth for the community: siphoning players from other fighting games, who already own sticks. Is it worth it to restrict growth like that? Of course, the game is old, maybe the only new blood entering the scene is already from the rest of the community, so most new players do actually use sticks.

And is "preventing negative gameplay effects" a goal worth pursuing? One of the golden rules used in fighting games is that the game's default settings go, and the game lives or dies on its own merits. Now I come from a Super Smash Bros. Melee background, I have absolutely no philosophical objection to rewriting the rules to make a more compelling game. It's stupid to let stupidity stand when it can be dealt with--though a significant difficulty of that is in making a standard, which in this case is trivial. So yes, it absolutely is a goal worth pursuing.

Which leads me to my final conclusion: in the absence of total absurdity, let the glitch rock. Unless something absolutely horrifyingly broken is found that cannot be otherwise dealt with, alienating an entire group of players and potential players is dumb. The game's community is small enough as it is, we should be working to make it as inclusive as possible so we can keep playing with more people. We don't need to worry about "arcade purity"--most of us will never see a Guilty Gear cabinet in our lives. Stick players can either learn to use the other three buttons (or two if you really need to keep Respect bound for some reason) or intentionally not take the option. People learned how to plink, we can learn how to actually use a couple more buttons.

The only reason I can see banning macros being worth it is if the glitch turns you into Meta Knight, or something equally broken. Apparently Baiken can do something that might be just that oppressive, so we'll see.

Tales of Xillia in retrospect

Nearly a month ago I made an earlier post about my early impressions of Tales of Xillia. In truth, I beat the game about two weeks ago, but I haven't gotten around to posting a full review until now. Go read my earlier post for proper context for this review.

Features

Nothing has really changed from my initial opinion on all the game's features. Fast travel is great, all of the series staples return in an easy-to-digest format, linking is spectacular, and overall the game feels very robust to actually play.

I actually now have one additional complaint, though. The Lilium Orb, Xillia's leveling system reminiscent of Final Fantasy X's Sphere Grid, seems largely useless. The way the game makes you expand the orb prevents you from specializing your characters in any significant way, and I think the game would have been better served by a traditional system.

Plot

Unfortunately, Xillia's plot falls apart right about the point where the earth-shattering revelation I mentioned occurs. Character motivations become extremely questionable, there's no particular reason why the proposed solutions to the problems should even be necessary and overall it feels like a mess.

As usual, the game has its socioeconomic allegory, which I won't spoil here. I will grant that the sheer attempt at managing the allegory puts Xillia above Graces in the plot department.

I do very much like that the plot makes the word "Xillia" meaningful. Especially in that it makes the pronunciation, officialy "eks-IL-i-a", actually important. This I will spoil: the word "Xillia" comes from "exile".

Cast

The only change to my initial opinion here is that my opinion of Milla's English voice got worse the more I played. I like all of the characters, and they have a very strong dynamic and personal motivations (particularly Alvin and Rowen), but the voice acting was weaker than I've come to expect from Tales.

Battle

Now that I've beaten the game and gotten access to the full range of artes and skills, I can make a more informed opinion on the battle system.

The return of TP in conjunction with AC makes the game flow nicely. One of the problems with Vesperia was that the arte-canceling rules were fairly restrictive, until you got the skills that basically removed every single rule and gave you free reign to do pretty much anything you ever wanted. Having AC solves that problem, in that you can simply cancel whatever you want into whatever you want until you run out of it.

Combos are not nearly as fun to do as in Vesperia, but still are plenty entertaining. Jude basically becomes Ryu, and I had a lot of fun Shoryukening people into the air, kicking them a few times, knocking them down, divekicking their face, and OTGing with a self-buff. Milla is very air combo-oriented, and she has one particular arte that hits a few seconds after it applies, and creating a combo utilizing it feels extraordinarily powerful. I didn't play around with the other characters too much, but Rowen's Arte Tuning solves a lot of the problems I had with casters, so good job.

Speaking of which, each character's unique gimmicks were great fun to use. Snap Pivot allows Jude to teleport behind the opponent when he dodges an attack, and Spirit Shift lets Milla turn a spell into a physical arte; using both was great.

One complaint, however, is that linked normal chains can be frustrating to land. When linked with an ally, your attack chain will change and you and your ally will sort of knock the opponent between you appropriately, but these attacks can be slow and leave both of you vulnerable to other enemies.

Overall

Like I originally thought, Xillia remains a good entry-level Tales game, being representatively good in all aspects. Its plot is its weakest point, but even so it's still stronger than a few other games in the franchise. If someone wants to play a Tales game, point them to Xillia. If someone wants to play a decent JRPG with a fantastic battle system, Graces F is your best bet. If sheer overall game quality is your goal, you want Vesperia.

If you want to utterly crush your rose-tinted glasses, play through Symphonia again.

A look at the Repeating Input Buffer

Recently I picked up the grandfather of anime fighting games, Guilty Gear. In the past I had avoided it because it was somehow even less popular than my preferred game of BlazBlue, and had significant presentation issues that made it difficult for me to visually parse what was happening in a match. After playing it for a couple weeks now (though only one actual week of playing against people), I've gotten over the presentation and now I don't really have any issues telling what's happening--and as a result I found my new favorite fighting game.

GG is fast-paced, has interesting and unique character playstyles, and every character has a huge number of options at their disposal, spanning across movement, space control, mixup, and all other manner of things. I won't go into detail here about everything I love about the game (you should just go play it yourself), but one of the things I don't like about it is what I want to talk about in this post.

Aside from the aforementioned presentation issues, I also don't really like the varying character gravity, the guts system, the close/far dichotomy on Slash-button moves, or throw being overloaded onto forward Heavy Slash. The last two problems are largely philosophical, in that in general, I don't want how my character responds to my inputs to be affected by my opponent. I also don't really want to go too deep into the first two problems; they're for another time.

But my biggest problem with the game, and the one I want to discuss, is the lack of a repeating input buffer.

Input buffers exist in all fighting games that have moves requiring more than one directional input. In order for Street Fighter to determine whether you're trying to throw a hadouken or walk forward and punch, the game has to keep track of whether or not you pressed down and down-forward sufficiently recently before forward+punch. But there are other kinds of input buffers. Street Fighter IV has a notoriously large input buffer for moves performed on wakeup; it's the reason the game's reversal window is so large. Input a shoryuken even a few frames before you could act and it'll still come out frame 1.

NetherRealm Studios games use a different kind of input buffer, where moves are just stored in a sequence and performed in order regardless of how long ago the inputs were provided.

BlazBlue utilizes what I will refer to as a "repeating input buffer". Any time you input a command, if you hold the command, the game will repeat the command every frame for the next five frames, until either you stop holding the command, or the command is executed. For instance, if you wanted to link a special into a 5B (standing-B), you could press and hold B for up to five frames before your character could act, and the move would come out as soon as action is possible. There's some additional weirdness regarding how dashes are buffered; I believe any dash command is automatically repeated for five frames or until execution, with no holding required. This lets you do "microdashes" into other moves. If SFIV had BB's repeating input buffer, one-frame links would not exist; the tightest link would be five frames (barring any combos requiring delays or controlling the opponent's position etc).

To this day I have not been able to think of any reason why a repeating input buffer would be a bad thing to add to a game. The closest thing I've been able to come up with is that difficult links bring a sense of risk vs. reward into decision making, where you run the risk of failing the link and so you may opt not to try it. But fundamentally that does not express the primary appeal of fighting games: overcoming your opponent. On the contrary, it's a question of overcoming yourself (or, from a different perspective, the game engine, if you'd like to think of it that way).

So let's discard that idea. In the remainder of this post I will attempt to discover some benefit, something that can be done only in games without a RIB.  I do not yet know anything I'm going to write; the whole thing will be very stream-of-consciousness. As a comparison point, I'll try to use the other input buffer systems I know. First, let's try to find out if a RIB makes any kind of input impossible, or more generally, if it makes any command sequence that works under a game's current system, fail.

By its nature, the RIB can only hold one command. So, you cannot buffer two consecutive commands at the same time. Of course, this isn't possible in Street Fighter IV anyway, since the game lacks any kind of input buffer outside of its command interpreter and on wakeup. NRS games do provide the opportunity to buffer multiple commands, so some input leniency is lost in a hypothetical version of their games with a RIB.

On the other hand, you could simply increase the number of RIBs available. Create a queue of RIBs, and whenever a new command comes in, add it to the earliest open RIB such that there are no occupied RIBs below it in the queue. Each frame, evaluate the RIBs in order and execute the earliest one if possible. A demonstration:

t=0 <- hold 5B: 5B is put into RIB0
t=3 <- hold 5C: 5C is put into RIB1
t=4 <- action available. Check RIB0, execute 5B, clear RIB0.
t=5 <- hold 5A: 5A is put into RIB2 since RIB1 is still occupied.
t=7 <- action available. Check RIB0, clear. Check RIB1, execute 5C, clear RIB1.
t=9 <- action available. RIB0 and RIB1 clear, execute 5A, clear RIB2.

The usefulness of multiple RIBs seems suspect, since most moves will have more than five frames of committed time after execution begins and the RIB is cleared.

So assuming a time limit of five frames, NRS's input buffer is not expressible with a RIB. You could potentially remove the time limit, and with multiple RIBs you could come close, but even in such a system putting two of the same command into the buffer is impossible. You would need to stop holding the command in order to input it again, thus clearing its previous instance from the buffer.

Let's try to express Street Fighter IV's input buffer in a RIB, then. This is easy: reduce the time limit to one frame, except on wakeup. More generally, any input sequence that works in SFIV currently would work just as well under a 5-frame RIB, except likely plinking. Luckily the RIB means plinking becomes unnecessary.

What appears to be the key thing here is that with a RIB, any command is only executed if you are still holding the command when execution becomes possible. This prevents you from performing commands you didn't intend, which the NRS system or a non-repeating 5f input buffer does not.

What happens, though, if you want to execute a command requiring multiple button presses, and you don't want it to happen on the first frame available? Perhaps you need 5DD to happen 2 frames after action becomes available. Without a RIB, this is fine as long as you press the first D at any point before action is available. With a RIB, you need to not be holding the first D at that point, which is slightly more restrictive. The only game I can think of that requires something like this is Persona 4 Arena, but in that game the single-button version of the command has to come out before the two-button version can (see: Chie 5DD, Narukami j.BB), so the RIB is strictly more lenient anyway.

And that's really all I can think of for potential problems with the RIB. In general, it seems that having a RIB makes inputs strictly easier than having no buffer or a non-repeating buffer. And with that being the case, a 7f RIB makes inputs strictly more lenient than a 5f RIB, so why not go all the way and remove all effective limit on the buffer time? Why not just repeat the input for as long as the button is held, until it's executed? Perhaps there's a technical reason for it; not knowing how the games are programmed, I obviously can't say. Additionally I can certainly believe that having an effectively infinite-time buffer could mess up movement buffering.

So let's stay small and just go with a 5f RIB then. Is there any reason, other than the higher mechanical difficulty, not to have it?

Tales of Xillia Impressions - Part 1

Aviators make everything better

Over the past two days I've been playing (and streaming!) Tales of Xillia, the latest flagship Tales title to be released in the United States, to join the ranks of Symphonia, Abyss, Vesperia, and others.

Those unfamiliar with the series should know that, much like Final Fantasy, Tales is a long-running franchise of JRPGs, but with a more cult following than Square's far more well-known production. There are two things that define a modern Tales game: the aesthetic, and the Linear Motion Battle System. As you can see in the picture above, the games are pretty whimsical, with a colorful anime-like palette and funny cosmetic customization options. Plot and characters to match, though things can get a bit dark at times. Tales games also tend to base their conflicts around some allegory for a real-world socioeconomic issue; racism, cloning ethics, and climate change have all been featured.

The battle system has its own quirks and refinements in each iteration, but the general idea remains the same: battles are fought in real time, and characters have access to normal attacks and special Artes as they move around the battlefield, trying to defeat their opponents. The battle system is titled Linear Motion because in general your controlled character only moves in a straight line either to or away from its current target--but for many games now a Free Run system has been implemented to allow temporary totally free motion to reposition yourself.

So what of Xillia so far? I'm about 15 hours into it, give or take. So far, the game doesn't feel like it excels in anything compared to the other games in its franchise, but it notably doesn't feel like it has any remarkable flaws. In battle, plot, characters, and environment, Xillia feels like a solid, but not outstanding, entry in the franchise.

Features

The game has the player take the role of either Jude Mathis, an extremely intelligent medical student, or Milla Maxwell, avatar of the Lord of Spirits--the closest thing to a god the universe has. The majority of the game has the two of them traveling together, but for short bursts of time they may take separate actions in town or act on different aspects of a plan, and the game follows the one the player picked.

In keeping with the genre's steady adoption of quality-of-life features, Xillia's meta-mechanics are very strong. Fast travel to any town, dungeon, or overworld zone that you have previously visited is unlocked within the first few hours of the game; areas are locked off as the plot demands in order to maintain immersion. Sidequests are all hinted at via skits and progress on them is maintained in a menu accessible at any time. Skits, a series staple, are short conversations between party members that can be triggered by any number of things and which often provide extra insight into characters or plot, or even just silly humor.

Series-standard mechanics such as Grade and Over Limit make their return in yet another iteration that fans will find easy to adapt to. New to Xillia is the linked battle system; at any time, the player character may "link" with one of their CPU-controlled allies. The linked ally will begin to use a special ability unique to them. For example, when linked with Jude, if the player is knocked down, Jude will teleport to them and help them back up. Another character will steal items from enemies the player has knocked down. Various benefits regarding distribution of buffs and paying the costs of skills are also conferred to a linked pair.

Linking also enables the use of Linked Artes--special combination abilities that can be triggered between a pair after the player character uses one from a specific set of his own abilities. For example, if Jude and Milla are linked, and Jude uses his Demon Fist arte, it can be followed up with the Linked Arte Final Gale, in which Jude and Milla fire a Demon Fist and a Wind Blade respectively at the opponent.

Linking is clearly the fundamental gimmick of the game's battle system, but it feels so smoothly-implemented it almost seems like a natural consequence. I would very much like to see it return in a later game.

Plot

The adventure begins when Milla encounters Jude as she breaks into a military laboratory to destroy a weapon it's building; Jude is caught in the crossfire and ends up having to flee with her after he becomes wanted for the intrusion.

As they escape together, Jude learns more of Milla's personality and her mission, and decides to accompany her at great risk to himself. Other party members are encountered in standard JRPG fashion. To avoid the risk of spoilers, I won't elaborate any further; I'm fairly early into the game anyway.

The big twist of the game has not occurred yet, but Tales twists tend to be particularly earth-shattering, in that they often invalidate the party's progress up to that point. Learning about the existence of and destruction of Tethe'alla in Symphonia, learning about the weakening of the Sephiroth in Abyss, etc. all necessitated a complete rejection of the party's goals. I expect something similar to occur here.

Cast

Although not as strong as Vesperia's cast, Xillia's playable characters acquit themselves well and are far more enjoyable than their Symphonia or Graces counterparts. A shining feature is in just how reasonably the two protagonists act. They are perhaps too reasonable for the plot happening to them--perfectly in character for a god and someone who's supposed to be unreasonably intelligent.

Happily, I can now say for a second Tales game that there is no party member I actually dislike--the only other one being Vesperia. I have six party members at the moment, so we'll see if there's another one waiting. Vesperia had seven party members (two more in the PS3 remake), and Symphonia eight (technically nine if you count the choice of one of them).

The English voice acting for the cast is pretty good, and the dialogue and localization are amazing. There are a fair number of lines where the actors clearly emphasize the wrong things, but they generally do a good job of sounding natural and portraying emotion.

Looking back, and forward

I'm not very picky about the remaining aspects of the game that a typical review would cover--I don't feel engaged enough in the art or music or such to make any sort of evaluation of them. So instead I will just continue playing.

I really like what I've seen of Xillia so far. It has no notable weaknesses, except for perhaps that it has no remarkable strengths. Its battle system and character cast are definitely in the high tier of Tales games, and we'll see where the plot goes from here.

The problem with the game is that, having no great strengths, there is nothing to really entice a player into wanting to play it. It is, by all rights, a great entry in the franchise and one that all fans will want to play. It also makes a reasonable entry point; everything about it is representative of a good Tales game. But for those uninterested in the series as a whole, there's no one thing about it that's so excellent that someone would want to try it--unlike Vesperia's stellar cast or Graces' brilliant combat.

My hope for the rest of the game lies in its plot and battle. I don't really know where the plot is going, so it runs the risk of suddenly becoming awful. And as my characters grow stronger I'll have more options in battle to play with. I'll have finished the game within a few days, and I'll revisit these impressions then.