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« on: May 04, 2014, 01:26:26 AM »
I realize this post will probably go nowhere (especially since it's a wall of text) but I'm posting it anyway because I have one major problem with this mode that basically encompasses every single issue I have with this:
I honestly don't understand the appeal at all. Everyone was simply gushing on how awesome this is...somehow. Yes, opinions exist, but I feel a lot of the issues are quite obvious and turn away from any fun whatsoever.
The first major issue is one that has been plaguing Saxton Hale since the beginning: matches take almost 7 minutes to end most of the time. And honestly, it's much worse here than any other version. Part one of the issue is you took Hyper Hale's gimmick of having melee bosses not being able to OHKO people. The attacks have really bad hit boxes most of the time. I was playing Remilia and just couldn't for the life of me hit anyone that was moving. I also personally feel not having OHKO melee takes away from the purpose of Saxton Hale. You are not exactly overpowered, just annoying to fight.
The second part of the match length issue are the classes. Putting aside the fact they are SilverSin classes rip offs with horribly long ammo regeneration, healer and support are very ..erm... double sided. Especially with a larger server, they completely make the Hale's job harder than it needs to be to do. Healer, while having an insane ammo regen rate, can still easily heal people back to full, completely wasting your work. Support can cook up random weapons pretty quickly. This makes it really hard for players to run out of ammo, a tactic I (tried to) abuse back in other versions of Hale. And now back to that whole "double-sided" thing: once they are the last ones left, they're useless. If they don't simply give up, it takes forever to kill the Hales. "But they get runes!!!" you scream at the monitor. Honestly, does it really help that they do 10 damage instead of 5? And on to the runes...
Yes, runes. They are a key feature of Hale and Rage Roboenza, the mode which all Hale versions derive from. At first all that was available was rage and strength or spread. Here, however, almost all of the runes are available, including the defensive ones. This also heavily contributes to the "matches run too long" issue. Who honestly wants to fight a guy who easily gains health from you due to the fact you get an insane amount of HP? Or a guy who can simply wait in a corner and regen all of his health back? This issue is enhanced dramatically if you go back to the "bosses cant ohko you anymore" thing.
Let's drift from the gameplay for a bit and go to the aesthetics. Yes, some of the hales have fancy intros now, but I'll get to that later. I'm more concerned with the HUDs and music / sound assets. Firstly, as many people have noticed, a lot of the HUDs simply rotate around. The ones that don't are bog standard Mega Man ones. And as a side question: does the Tank class really need a 10 foot health bar? Yes, it is to demonstrate he has more HP, but it's distracting and blocks off more of my screen than it needs to. And then you just have terribly done images like the Hot Head on Tomahawk Hale's HUD. I also remember ColdFusion yelling at you for using Touhou classes HUDs but never mind that for now.
Sounds. I'll be blunt and say a lot of the new ones sound like they were recorded from a built in microphone being placed next to a PSP or wherever the sound is from. I'll also be blunt and say the new music is terrible too. A lot of themes don't loop anymore, (except the round win theme because it's cool to hear a 5 second jingle on loop for 25 seconds). Some of the themes were altered to include seemingly random looped parts to extend the song. Then there are things like Seaman and Seelder's new theme...
And now on to the bosses. I'll be blunt again: it seems most of the new bosses seem to only have been made to show off mad ACS skillz. One major issue is that you removed the instructions. You can appearently read them by pressing altfire when the sun and moon are in perfect alignment, but is anyone really going to remember that? It's like the old NES games that tell you nothing. You need instructions to read the instructions. Also, I thought everyone was keen on removing all the non-Mega Man bosses. They honestly have no real place in this mode anymore other than being there because they were here before. Let's get into a few specific bosses:
Macho Man: Oh look, a fancy dynamic camera that clips into things 99% of the time. The first thing I noticed was the skin. Yes, he obviously doesn't have one yet, but did you have to make him giant and have an ugly color scheme? The real issue has been mentioned plenty of times: he has 5 lives. "BUT YOU HAVE TO WORK TO GET THEM!!1!11". Not really since binds exist and also it's easy to button mash. The real kicker is that he gets up to near full HP every single time he revives. I thought Ninja Spy was hated for this gimmick, but it's suddenly ok because you can add a fancy little intro and ending to the boss? Also, he is far too weak for his own good. He does piss poor damage, has to charge and aim his attacks, and causes invincibility frames on the players.
As a side note about bad skins: Morshu also suffers from this too. Wasn't a Morshu skin being made already or something? Also, Hyper Storm H is too big for his own good. Yes, he's supposed to be big, but he just clips through everything and it's hard to take him seriously. Not even Frost Man is this big.
Guts Man G: As I said in the server: this is the perfect representation of duel mode as a Hale. You have to wait forever to actually play the mode you want to play, and then when you do wait, everyone dies immediately. I thought this gimmick would be hated because it's the exact same as Slender Man's gimmick except reversed. This also gives the survivors far too much of an advantage for their own good. It's just not fun at all to play as this hale.
And finally: Tomahawk Talibain man thing: The darkness. Oh my god the darkness. "I don't need to see that the boss is right next to me at all no sir". But it's ok, it's part of the gimmick and it also goes light every 50 years. Again, I thought this kind of thing made Slender Man to be the most despised boss in any Hale version. But now it's ok because it's not slender? Also his rage is another huge issue. It spawns a totem pole that helps him out by giving new abilities...forever. Yes the totem can be destroyed but are you really going to be focusing on the thing (if you can see it) when there's a wolf dashing at you? This also distracts damage away from the hale, making the matches even longer than they need to be.
And then you have the Ra Thor Duo. This was apparently done for no other purpose other than to show off that two mods merged. Lovely.
And as another side note: what's with Scrooge's Mecha Ducks? They just seem to sit floating in a corner with no rotations and sometimes go after survivors.
The real icing on this cake are the "secret bosses". "BUT THEY CAN BE DISABLED BY THE SERVER!11!11" Well the server I was on (and everyone else was on) had it enabled so I'm complaining about them anyway.
First you have NeoDS. Everyone hated NeoDS. Everyone raged at NeoDS. Now he's back because...we needed to fill a slot?
The exact same thing for Pissed Off Roll. It didn't even matter how altered she was previously, everyone still hated her and wanted her gone.
Then you have things like fighting Gamma's legs. At this point I just quit the server. I could not force myself to play this mod any longer.
In conclusion, a lot of the development time looks like it was spent on making fancy ACS tricks rather than having playable bosses. I suppose I'll be forcing myself to play this anyway as this will be guaranteed to be the "mode of the month" and no one will play anything else anyway...
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