Regardless of how you slice it, Capcom erred on the side of offense in their design of Street Fighter 5. The game got better with time, to be sure, but so much of the flow favored the aggressor in ways both obvious and not.
One particular mechanic evolved into what the wider community might call an abomination in Street Fighter 5, but was refined and close to perfected in Street Fighter 6. Broski covers this mechanic in his latest video, showing just how important and powerful fairly minute tweaks can be.
The apparent offensive initiative that characterized so much of SF5 was not bad, in and of itself, but the execution and implementation of these novel ideas into a very sensitive balance system was lacking. Keep in mind, after all, that developers are not only tasked with making fighting games feel fair, they also have to feel fun.
It’s been routine in many fighting games for many years now to see counter hit bonuses that come into play when a character is stuffed during the start up frames of any attack. Said bonus usually make your opponent reel from a hit for just a bit longer, making combos that are otherwise impossible possible.
Capcom took this even further in Street Fighter 5 by introducing a buffed up version of counter hit: Crush Counter. Crush Counters were hard hits that caused characters to reel back, and would only occur when certain heavy attacks landed as counter hits.
Crush Counters weren’t the first heavy hits that caused character to reel back, but they were so powerful and prominent in Street Fighter 5 they widely defined the gameplay.
In their efforts to tune up offense and tune down defense, Capcom added Crush Counter potential to the recovery of certain moves (essentially those that could be used as invincible wake up reversals).
In the game’s second season developers took invincibility away from wake up reversals save for on the EX versions, making defense more costly on top of already being more risky than ever before.
As a result, the Crush Counter mechanic became even more prominent and powerful in SF5. Pepper in the fact that players could wield a lot of this power despite a sloppy, non-honed approach, and you had a player base who was widely not happy.
Broski recounts this brief history of Crush Counters in SF5 so that he can talk to the change Capcom has made with this mechanic in Street Fighter 6. Broski (along with many others) are extremely happy with Street Fighter 6’s Punish Counters despite the fact that they look awfully similar to Crush Counters on paper.
Get the full story via the full video below, and let us know in the comments if you think Punish Counters have righted the wrongs of Crush Counters, or if Street Fighter still has some growing to do when it comes to this mechanic.