1. I feel like tackling this first. Tekken gets its attention because of the sheer level of depth the game has. Go to
www.tekkenzaibatsu.com and look around. There's just so much for every character and for every system of Tekken to know to be truly good, and so much to master. It's also very hard to execute good combos and strong setups in that game as well. It is truly harder than most of the other games. Tekken 4 isn't as good as Tekken Tag Tournament, but even at its worst Tekken is better than many other fighters.
2. Dead or Alive 3 is not very good because people can mash. Why does that work? Because it's random and hard to predict. If somebody randomly mashes out moves, it's pretty hard to reverse them, or predict when you should simply counter-attack if they're about to throw. Basically, DOA's system is this:
:Attacks beat throws
:Throws beat reversals
:Reversals beat attacks
The problem is, button mashers are often too random and illogical to properly anticipate, so you're forced to watch and try to simply react as it happens. That's hard because most people only have about a 15 frame (0.25 second) reaction time, and that's just for recognizing that something's coming. You gotta take even more time to decide what to do. See, there's plenty of logic to what I say.
You SAY you'll reverse everything, but that's just it: you CAN'T reverse everything in DOA. They'll throw at random because they're mashing, so you're forced to choose between guarding (gets thrown), reversing (gets thrown for Hi-Counter damage), or attacking and getting a counter-hit. How will you know the throw is coming when a throw is 6 frames (0.1 seconds)? 6 frames to execute with a standard of 15 frames to simply react for humans. The throw comes out too fast to recognize what it is, and do something about it.
The problem with DOA is that mashers can hang with those who practice because of this. This is the opinion of the entire fighting game community, pretty much.
3. I said CvSNK2 is NOT more balanced. It is LESS balanced. Sagat (C-N), Blanka (C-N), Sakura (A), and Geese (K) all are at the top of the pyramid in that game. Sagat for his ridiculous priority on attacks, Blanka for his incredibly good roll-cancelling applications, Sakura for strong priority and very solid custom combos, and Geese for getting 1/3 of his super guage filled while in K groove for landing reversals (which are easy to do in CvSNK2), combined with a solid move list and very powerful Level 3 super options (which are used for K-Groove supers). Everybody else except Kyosuke is in the middle, where they can compete with the top tiers at least (but have a terribly hard time winning). Kyosuke just stinks because of how preposterously slow he is, and is at rock bottom.
4. Game manufacturers nowadays usually don't INTENTIONALLY make a character better than most of the others. It's usually oversight. Either they don't recognize how effective a character's tool (or move with a specific purpose) will be, or a game-modifying glitch comes along that alters the usefulness of a character's tools in general, or that a character is just not made well, and has lots of glitches.
When this happens, characters can become better or worse because of these circumstances. For example, because of oversight in his parry, block-stun advantage, and an accidental just-frame input on a move, Jin is the very top in Tekken 4. In addition, because of basically the same oversights, but in the opposite direction, Craig Marduk and Lei Wulong are at the very bottom in Tekken 4.
Tiers are when the programmers make mistakes in one way or another. Games aren't made perfect. EVER. Tiers are representative of this.
Edited By Dan Hibiki on May 20 2004 at 05:19