You’d think getting more options would only serve to make a fighting game character like Ryu from Street Fighter better, and more than 99% of the time you’d be right. That said, there have been a handful of instances wherein the blessing of a new attack has actually made a character worse off.
We could maybe come up with one or two of these rare happenings off the top of our heads, but JM Crofts has rounded up seven such occurrences, some of them intentional.
The instance that immediately came to mind for us is found in Street Fighter 5 as late DLC addition Dan Hibiki wound up with an unexpected infinite combo thanks to the properties of his extremely stubby fireball.
It wasn’t easy to do, but if you could get your opponent cornered and you had the execution, Dan could loop a few hits into his fireball on repeat forever. Well, “forever” is a little strong as the round would eventually end, but usually as the result of a timeout rather than a KO.
The infinite would quickly scale damage down to nearly negligible amounts, so Dan would only be scraping off minimal amounts of life from foes. Needless to say, ad nauseam fireball loops were not a good look for the game and Capcom creatively solved this issue by giving Dan a second fireball.
This second fireball was actually enhanced and much better than Dan’s regular projectile as it had better frame data, traveled further, knocked down, and allowed for follow ups when in the corner. It had a random chance of coming out whenever Dan did fireball, and with its knock down property it would effectively end the infinite sequences players were pulling off.
This is actually quite a brilliant fix for the issue as it simultaneously remedied the infinite and made Dan a little more interesting. That said, he was technically a worse character after getting this new move because it ultimately robbed him of an infinite.
This is just one of the seven examples of new moves nerfing characters from JM Croft’s video. Check it out below for the other six and let us know in the comments if we or JM missed any other instances of this odd fighting game happening.