It’s lovely.
I thought I had gotten decent with Rikuo (Aulbath), but then I played it against some people at Mikado and got wrecked.
A bunch of games did permutations on side-scrolling beat em up modes as part of the arcade to console port. It's kind of cursed though, because the expected controls for a beat em up and those of a fighting game are different enough that it usually just feels weird and wack.
Bleach DS and Smash have an easier time with this kind of thing because their controls are designed from the ground up to allow the player to control which way they're facing and don't rely on hold back to block, so it's easier for a player to move freely compared to typical FG controls where facing is automatic based on opponent position. But they still lock the player on a single 2D plane. IIRC Granblue VS's RPG mode is basically a Big Numbers version of this too.
Also, 2D beat em ups feel pretty flat these days (heh). Think the genre was wholly succeeded by DMC, God Hand etc. anyway.
straying from the original topic a bit here, this is something I’ve thought a lot about. I agree with the first sentence, but not the latter. I agree that 2D beat em ups feel flat, because nobody’s exploring the space particularly, they’re just making games “as they were” rather than evolving the genre. I believe there’s a lot of stuff you can do in the beat em up/belt scroller space that is either unique to the space, better there, or otherwise more fitting than in a 3D brawler system like you find in DMC, Yakuza, etc. I think games like Final Fight 3, Undercover Cops, and Streets of Rage 3 were getting there right before the end of 2D’s dominance. Here’s some of that stuff:
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2D exploration. There are a couple unique factors about 2D exploration I feel. For one, you’re able to hide branches in plain sight if you want - unlike 3D games where there’s so much to explore that you kind of have to give visual hints and queues or else you’re in trouble, in 2D any door or wall or whatever is viable to be smashed and give access to a new area (planned of course) while you’re beating up other dudes - your hint will be “whoa, some chips came off of that wall when I hit this guy.” So you can hide more stuff and encourage more exploration of the environments, and if you have enough branches and place enemies cleverly you won’t have people just hitting random parts of the environment (hopefully heh). Final Fight 3 gets closest to this that I’ve seen, with this feeling of “oh, I can go over there!?”
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2D exploration pt 2. The other exploration thing is, in a 2D space, say you hit a door that’s on a parallel plane to your scrolling. You have no idea what’s in there before you enter. It’s a total unknown space which leads to an interesting moment of anticipation - except in games like Resident Evil where they deliberately hide what’s behind the door to you, most 3D games telegraph it because otherwise it’s kind of unfair. In a 2D belt scroller it’s part of the convention so you can have a lot of surprising rooms.
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gimmicks. One of the more interesting features in Double Dragon 2 were the moving walkways, spike pits, etc. Other games have played with that (mostly pits to knock enemies into, or crushers coming from the sky, or fire on the ground), but I feel like there’s more to do in that space, not just for negative effects but positive ones. Healing zones that break, places where you or your enemy could get a buff, and just more elaborate setups, like a rube goldberg style situation to knock enemies into, especially if the player had some control positioning that stuff.
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weapons/environment. I think destructible environments and wacky weapons have a lot more room for exploration in general. Break a door and get a 2x4. Smash a phone booth and get a phone receiver on a chain. Tying the destruction of the environment, which is fun, to weapons, which are also fun, means even more fun :P Undercover Cops does a decent job of this, and I’m sure nobody went further because it’s rather expensive in terms of combos of weapons and animations you have to make. But a 2D belt scroller doesn’t necessarily have to be sprite-based, in 2020+.
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mechanics. There’s more room for complexity in the 2D space than in a 3D brawler because you can line yourself up on the same plane. You can’t do a lot with up and down, but you can do a lot more with throws, rush attacks, stun effects (like get the enemy into a stun, focus in on you, then give you access to a bigger moveset), jump/aerial attacks, etc. Final Fight 3 and Streets of Rage 3 both got into this with the ability to grab an enemy, hit them, jump over them, and do something else at that point. There’s more to do there I think. There’s also the whole “two player team up” thing but I don’t have any real ideas about how to make that feel satisfying without being fiddly.
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Boss interactions. I think bosses are kind of underutilized in these games to an extent. They wind up feeling like limper vs fighters than cool brawler moments. I think games like Yakuza actually get closer because they’ll have one big enemy and a bunch of small fry. For a 2D game, what I’d think could work is a similar setup, but the stream of small fry just doesn’t stop. You have to defeat the boss, doing their weird jumps or whatever, before you get overwhelmed by everyone. The small fry also act as fodder though, you can throw them at the boss, steal their weapons, etc. You could go another step further and add time limits sometimes - not a countdown to death, but a countdown to them summoning more dudes, to where it’s an almost unmanageable number of enemies. One of the limitations of belt scrollers in the past was the number of sprites you could display at once. we don’t have that anymore, and should do more with it.
To conclude, you’d wind up with an almost roguelite room-based thing where you’re exploring a space, but (almost) all paths lead to the boss - but maybe it leads to different bosses! Maybe it changes how you traverse through the space, and you wind up on an outrun-style path through the game with a different light narrative depending on how you do it, with randomized rooms along the way. With destructible environments and a bunch of weird weapons and some unusual traps and bosses I think you can make an experience that couldn’t be done the same way in a 3D brawler, and which would be a pretty compelling experience on its own. That said, I don’t believe this game has to actually be 2D, it could be nicely cel shaded guilty gear/DBZ style, or some other manner of faked 2D, as long as the animation is good.
Now, who’s gonna give me a million dollars to make it heh heh (nobody)
Last summer I finally got to play Twin Goddesses for the first time, which has received renewed interest as of late, or am I totally insane here?
this is basically the core of the problem IMO – the “up and down” are hands down the wackest parts of a 2D beat-em-up. Aces Wild has more satisfying combat design than any beat-em-up i’ve played and IMO a lot of that is unlocked by sticking to a flat 2D plane instead of the weird 2D-but-with-weird-depth.
i think most of the stuff you’ve described would be better served in like, a PvE Power Stone style game than a 2D beat em up. which isn’t to say that it wouldn’t work in 2D, or it wouldn’t make it better, but i think game devs have largely left behind the genre because the value of working within those constraints is only useful as a specific nostalgia play (see: River City Girls), not because it’s a particularly good template to build for a one-vs-many hand-to-hand combat fantasy.
Hmm, I still think it's a good format for exploration, precision combat mechanics, and discovery, I just gotta get the money to prove it ha ha.
I definitely agree that there‘s still a lot of untapped potential in the 2d belt scroller genre. It seems like when things really started to die out with that genre was when things were getting the most adventurous and interesting.
The massively increased opportunity for exploration over a locked plane never really got explored, and I love the idea of a branching area.
It seems like there’s boatloads of potential for interactable stage elements that still haven‘t been done (now I’m just thinking about the stage elements in Disgaea and how easily you could have an area where standing in the right spot grants wild benefits, or baiting enemies into the right spot let‘s you do all sorts of things. How about areas with some inspiration from the arena in Monster Hunter world - all sorts of hazards you can trip.
As for how to make the combat flow without being fiddly because of the slight height differences… I’m not sure about that one. Seems like there should be some ways around it, but I'm drawing a blank.
One thought I had is a “lock plane” button, where you hold a trigger, for example, and then you've got access to street fighter style moves, with up and down and etc.
What really got me interested in interactable stages, oddly enough, was Castlevania, Dawn of Sorrow, where I think you hit something and got a wooden shard, and I thought... why not more of this, all the time!?
@exodus there’s always the Guardian Heroes method - three planes you can shift between, each one a locked 2d area.
yeah, I always liked the idea in concept, but not as much in practice (same for the fatal fury two planes fighting system). To me it feels more complex than holding a lock plane button, but I could also see that being a barrier for other folks who don‘t want to have to hit a million buttons to do things. It’s a tough one - Guilty Gear isuka had a “change direction” button for the 4 player mode and it totally sucked. Frankly I‘d rather play Queen of Heart where they had autofacing but it didn’t work 20% of the time, than have to hit a button to face my opponent properly on top of all the other dang guilty gear buttons. So… I see good and bad to the “lock plane” button idea.
I wonder if a targeting system might be a good compromise? Choose an enemy to lock onto, and you are always considered on their plane. Tap a button to cycle lock ons. I‘m not sure if that would be better or worse than a lock plane button, but it would be more consistent with what folks are used to, and help make it really clear what enemy you’re engaged with.
hmmmm, still strikes me as maybe too complex - this would actually be a fun game jam topic though, belt scroller genre expansion. HMMMMMMMMMmmmm maybe some day for an internal necrosoft jam.
I miss playing fighting games 
I bought that UNICLR game which is supposed to be awesome but have yet to touch it. It's so hard to make time when you have other games you wanna play and can only do one at a time.
I live in the same town as one of SoCal's premier local fighting game weeklies, but it's the same night I play pinball in another venue right around the block lol.
or at least used to... before the quarantine. I miss social gaming :(
@p3ters I’ve been meaning to get into the Sailor Moon S SNES fighting game, and the community for that is dedicated, but quite spread out, so online play is a already big thing for them. I’m really curious about the ramifications this quarantine will have on fighting game group ( and multiplayer heavy gaming communities in general). Fighting is a genre so dependent on really precise timing and lack of lag, I’m curious if there will be a shift in popularity of games based on quality of netcode, or what will happen.
Any chance the weekly is moving to the internet? Pinball’s a bit tougher (though I could play Devil’s Crush/Dragon’s Fury for hours) to shift online sadly.
@exodus I guess you could always go the simplest route and have some gimmick that physically narrows down the stage for specific miniboss/boss battles. It would take the control of plane locking away from the player, but also not require them to keep track of another thing they have to control.
Both NorCal + SoCal WNF has started running netplay weeklies for a bunch of games.
Sailor Moon S is wild.
@pattheflip I’m a massive Sailor Moon fan, so I figure if anything is going to convince me to stick with it and learn to play, it’ll be that or X-Men Children of the Atom.
@James- IIRC it was made by ArcSys (though credited as Angel, apparently?).
Highlights include:
- All normals are cancelable into backdash/forward dash (if your character has them)
- Blockstun can be canceled into any special move (bonus: Jupiter and Uranus have command grabs that I thiiiink are 1F)
- Everyone’s throw is some awesome pro wrestling shit
- Discord is here if you wanna find people to play with
@pattheflip I’ve been in the discord lurking for a bit (thank you for the link, though!), but I haven’t put aside the time to start learning to play… I even picked up a cart of it, just so I can play on actual console even.
I did not realize about the cancels - that sounds wild!
I love what ArcSys did with it, it would be incredible to see what they’d make with the license now if they had a chance to do another one.
BTW, if anyone is interested, I did a Twitter thread just now TL;DRing some of my recent FG writing work. x.com
Also, I had this in drafts for over a year and never figured out what I wanted to do with it, so it’s perfect Exclusive Insert Credit Forum Content:
TL,DR; Play Sailor Moon S
My wife loves Sailor Moon. She loves Sailor Moon so much that her family will reminisce about her young years by saying “Remember how obsessed you were with Sailor Moon as a kid?” and I have to remind myself that they do not realize she is still obsessed with Sailor Moon.
After seeing Sailor Moon S tournaments crop up here and there at a bunch of tournaments, I asked her about it, and found out she had her old Super Famicom copy lying around. I played it and realized why people are bringing it back; I invited my old Bearcade buddies over to play it and we cracked out for a few hours like it was some hot new shit.
I think that part of the joy of picking up Sailor Moon S is the joy of discovery, and I don’t want to deprive you of that, so I wrote this Spoiler-Free Review of Sailor Moon S for the Super Famicom instead.
Sailor Moon S is like playing kickball when you’re thirty years old and realize those bouncy balls are way more fun when you’re kicking with Grown Adult Power.
Watching someone play Sailor Moon S for the first time in their lives is a fighting game purity test.
Playing Sailor Moon S validates your off-hand habit of judging people based on their favorite Sailor Senshi.
In the first 20 minutes, you’ll think about how shotos really are kinda cheap.
In 30 minutes you’ll wonder whether it has super moves.
In 1 hour you’ll feel dirty.
In an hour and a half you’ll realize that you don’t care if there are super moves because they’re probably kind of underwhelming compared to the shit you just figured out.
In two hours you’ll realize that you’re playing Galaxy Brain: The Fighting Game and you’re going to enter the next Sailor Moon S tournament you see?
In a week or two you’ll be at a Sailor Moon S tournament and realize you only played the game for two hours.
In the first game you play at that tournament, you’ll meet a person who will beat your ass and then invite you to the Sailor Moon S Discord.
Playing Sailor Moon S reminds you that every game you ever learned how to play was Worth It;
Playing Sailor Moon S also reminds you that every game you ever learned how to play is not That Serious.
Play Sailor Moon S.
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