I'm not super in to street fighter but just curious what you don't like about SF4 series of street fighter games, MadeMan?
Opening a can of worms, but okay.
Let's start with aesthetics and un-important things like that.
The graphics are so-so, and the art style is pretty horrendous. The characters all look very odd, and have strange anatomy. It's a very ugly game. It has none of the flair and style of games like King of Fighters or Guilty Gear, and none of the detail and simplicity of Virtua Fighter or Tekken. It's just... weird.
It's also trying very hard to cram in as many fan favourite characters as possible and still manages to include retarded Deviant-art tier characters like Oni, Evil Ryu and Decapre (the fact that they hyped Decapre for about a year makes it worse. NEW CHARACTER! Get hype! So Excit- oh, it's cammy with a fucking mask).
On the topic, they were also very lazy and copied and pasted the characters and backgrounds from SFxTekken, which is the worst fighting game to be released in years.
I'd also like to point out how much I hate 'Cinematic' Ultras. Holy shit, they get old fast. I would rather have a well animated attack that just takes place in the actual match and doesn't interrupt the flow of the game instead of a short film. NOT TO MENTION, they look like they should be in Fucking Marvel vs Capcom rather that Street Fighter. How did we go from Three Uppercuts being a super into Slow Motion panning shot, dudley punches a guy, he hits the wall a tornado appears and spins him around a lot, twenty seconds later they hit the ground.
Look at this and how much it interrupts the game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du3bkXYpOEcCompared to a NeoMAx from King of Fighters XIII (note the actual NeoMax is just the last hit):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTnx527riwkThe NeoMax doesn't interrup the flow of the game and still has the effect of 'Wow that looks cool!' without taking up a lot of time. Ultras are fun the first time you see them, then they just get dull. They also don't fit nicely into combos as much as simpler attacks. Someone did a comparison a while ago with the PC version where they removed all the 'cinematic' camera angles, it looked much better in my mind.
Onto the more important stuff, gameplay:
Firstly, take a look at this video of Evo grand finals for SFIV:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHtW2JJsEnIThis is high level play. This is how you're 'supposed' to play. It's the most boring shit I've ever seen in my life. Walk back and forth just outside of poke range and see who presses a button first. I can appreciate footsies, but this is ridiculous.
The game doesn't know how to be 'beginner friendly', and this has ruined the game in a lot of ways IMO. It wants to be easy to newcomers, so they included the terrible 'Ultra' system, basically revenge meter. It rewards you for losing, which is almost never good. Seemingly to counter-act this, they've included a stupid amount of one-frame links for basic combos. Coming from the VF school of thought, you should be playing the player, not the game. This puts down an unreasonable execution barrier in my mind. I don't mind hard to execute combos, but when you need to learn 1FL for bread and butters, it's just stupid and serves little purpose. If I wanted to practice button timing, I'd play guitar hero, thanks.
In addition to Ultra, you also have;
Super Meter
EX moves
Super moves
Focus Attacks
Red Focus Attacks
Focus Attack-cancelling
All of these affect meter. Again, simplicity is beauty in fighting games in my mind, and this is just saturation. So many options to throw out invincible moves and Focus Attack cancelling allowed you to do invincible moves with complete safety as you could cancel them safely if you had meter. Like a lot of things in this game, this favours the defender.
I want to point this out in particular since it's a big thing. Defense is so strong. They nerfed throws to do pitiful damage, no idea why. In fact everything does relatively poor damage in this game, leading to slow as molasses matches like the ones above. Coupled with long round times, there's less incentive to be aggressive and more to just wait and wait and wait.
Now the bugs. Oh the bugs and exploits...
Safe jumps, unblockables, crossups and fucking OPTION SELECTS. It's disgusting how rife this game is with exploits that have become the way to play.
Here is almost verbatim what a friend told me about playing his characters.
"Basically I just need to get a knock-down, then I whiff two jabs, and jump and do a heavy kick jump-in. If I do it right, I get a safe jump, if i do it wrong, I get a cross up anyway".
You could also do ridiculous shit like 'Press Down, LP and LK on wakeup. You'll either get a throw break, crouching kick or a guard, dpending on the situation'. Good fighting games shouldn't operate like this, you should have to commit to your decisions.
Not to mention all these issues were so ingrained the engine that they couldn't fix them properly, so they had to take a round-about method of including yet another system where you can delay your wakeup by a few frames to stop the safejump/crossup/unblockable nonsense that was plaguing the game.
Next is the balance. Or lack of it, rather. Capcom seems to just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks when it comes to balancing recently. It's almost universally agreed SFIV was most balanced at 'Super'. Then they added the twins and openly admitted 'Yeah they are pretty broken, lols whateva'. Nice work. Then 2012 patch, which still didn't fix everything. Now we have ultra where they MUGEN'd in five more characters to throw out balance some more. The game is ridiculously match-up heavy now.
There's probably more, but I'd have to think on it later.
