Teach me how to play this

[Aposine]

Combat in this game has been really frustrating so far compared to Shinovi, and I take it that trying to play it like you would Shinovi simply won't work. Shinovi had tons of mobility, whereas in Estival you're almost always unable to move. You seem to spend more than 50% of each battle stuck in second-long recovery animations, and canceling feels like a coin toss most of the time. The game regularly pits you against about fifty mooks and three rival shinobi at the same time, and the only thing that seems to work, even on easy, is to spam specials. I feel like there's something fundamental I'm missing.

[Vodka]

Yeah, they kind of throw a bit too much at you too soon. You still need to level up like in Shinovi to unlock your combos, yet you're being pitted against roughly mid to late-game hordes and 3-against-1s, and this is all on easy/normal difficulty.

You pretty much have to stick to your weak-weak-strong as your only reliable combo, air-dash after the airborne enemies and spam your weak attack. It's probably because of the focus on this that most of your mobility has been restricted to air-dashing in this way. The one move that still translates over as being brain-dead is jumping and smashing downwards - or charge attacks for certain characters (Ryona's spin).

Clothes break has no smashes and it's a toss-up depending on the character if they're capable of combos or are special-fodder. Kafuru is a pain and seems to be lacking in both early-on.

It takes a bit of getting used to. Just have to feel your way around each new character and find what works best, even if the best they have to work with is poor.

And yeah, I HATE these new sitting-duck cooldowns after combos. Between that and hard-stuns, there's way too much downtime during combat for a beat'em'up game. I think that was a poor design choice.

[DerGefallene]

Feeling the same, I loved how you could connect combos just by dashing in SV, but now it takes so long for your character to recover

[Pozhinateli]

Gamepley got slowed down, and I think that is perfectly fine. It give time to rather think about next move than just spam buttons. Animation are well made and this slowed - more natural gameplay allow to enjoy them, rather than just watch flashes or ither crap on the screen used to hide lack of animations. So overall that is big improvment from SV.

Fact they throwing more enemies is also improvment since it make game harder a bit. But sadly it seems they still keep limit max 3 enemy shinobi vs player.

[Rakhmana]

The recovery animation is either arbitrary or an intentional tactical element as you now have to deliberate your every move. I'm still undecided which.

[Nikke]

Yeah, game feels a tad bit too slow compared to Shinovi. You have to use tech combos to keep moving.

[Aposine]

Okay so I think I just discovered one of the most important (undocumented, perhaps even unintended) techniques in the whole game. There's a ton of recovery animations that you can jump out of almost immediately, but jumping may sometimes put you in an awkward position. Well, if you press jump and guard at the same time, you'll instantly guard instead, and this can be done much sooner than a regular guard cancel. From that, you can instantly drop your guard and go on with your combo.

[Fierce1]

Can someone just say controls or rather their equivalents with keyboard? I've no clue how to do a Fusion Ariel Rave and NO idea what buttons to press for it. It doesn't say X Y A B LS RS or any of that. Strong attack weak attack guard taunt etc WTF IS WHAT?!

[DerGefallene]

For a fusion aerial rave you have to Press X, X, Y and immediately after that press RB+B.
Can't help you with the keyboard controls though

[DerGefallene]

So just do a combo to get the opponent in the air and when they're being launched in the air, immediately press RB+B

[Fierce1]

What KEYS are those though? You see the problem? When I look at the bind key list it doesn't say: A, B, X, Y, RB, LB, etc. It says: Weak Attack, Strong Attack, Jump, Guard, Transform, Camera. I can't even figure out how to fully initiate Frantic Mode. Unlike the SV where you hold guard and right click then right click again. This time it doesn't do that for some reason.

[DerGefallene]

Weak Attack is X, Strong Attack is Y, Jump is A, Dash is B, Guard is RB, Transform is LB, Camera is most likely RS.
The controls itself are the same as in SV, so if you played that you'd know the button layout for the controller. Like I said: I don't play these sort of games with the keyboard, I can only guess it has to be pretty hard compared to the controller

[Fierce1]

Originally posted by DerGefallene:

Weak Attack is X, Strong Attack is Y, Jump is A, Dash is B, Guard is RB, Transform is LB, Camera is most likely RS.
The controls itself are the same as in SV, so if you played that you'd know the button layout for the controller. Like I said: I don't play these sort of games with the keyboard, I can only guess it has to be pretty hard compared to the controller

Thanks, and yeah it is. I've tried hooking up a controller, but mine don't work so well. Though it's more the fact I'm using old 3rd party controllers so I guess it's expected. Anyways, I have SV, and I had this same problem starting out, but overtime I learned. However, I still never got the keys actually connected to where if I looked at a combo list I'd be able to say "Ok so like this" I more often guessed and just started making them up on my own. I think part of the problem in this new game though, is that people are pointing out that the keybinds are resetting themselves. Which I think is happening to me, because I can pause with more than one key, and do other things with multiple keys. Or some don't work at all when I press. Hopefully they'll patch it soon.