This is a great idea for a thread. As someone with lots of (probably bad) ideas and little likelihood of ever using most of them, this is wonderful.
yeso One of my favorite film podcasts (it’s called The Pink Smoke) fantasized about a AAA open-world game based on Meet Me In St. Louis where you would go around having cute conversations in Technicolor scenarios and you’d load up on items like “a fancy button” or “an ornate bit of string.”
I’ve often thought it would be cool to have a fighting game that has ways for you to totally disable certain attacks/types of attacks/other inputs for your opponent.
-Maybe make it something that happens at the beginning of the match, like each player gets to ban one thing for BOTH players (so I choose to ban dashing and you choose to ban light attacks, so now that’s how we’re fighting)
-Maybe make it part of the fight: you have to land certain attacks to disable certain moves for your opponent*
-Maybe tie it into the aesthetic, like the characters are cyborgs and you can rip off their limbs/weapons/components to indicate an option-loss
-Obviously, balancing this game would be a nightmare, but I think there might be ways. I just think it would keep the metagame fresh…to get good at the game, you could never rely on any one optimal playstyle. You would have to be ready to play your character in a wide variety of unusual ways in any given match in order to win. I love weird, gimmicky, awkward playstyles in fighting games, so maybe this is just my dream of making that happen more regularly.
*To be fair, some games sort of already did this (Samurai Showdown series when you disarm your opponent they lose moves and Time Killers where you can tear off limbs), but there’s just so much more to explore here.