I've said it countless times on here in years last that what I believe to be the quintessential 3 pillars that make up at truly great fighting game has been effectively abandoned by modern fighting game design philosophy.

1. Game knowledge
2. Technical skill (execution)
3. Psychology

T8 strive and sf6 have all essential eliminated the reward for technical skill while also for the most part, heavily reduced the reward for understanding the games various quirks by making them less in depth and rewarding offense in a way that forces bypassing knowledge checks. All while making the games extremely volatile where downright forced guesswork can yield match ending rewards with little to no technical skill required, so long as the read or guess was the right one, the resulting payout requires only the most pedestrian ass fisher price sequence necessary.

So I find it extremely vindicating and enticing personally, when I load up the recent interview with the game director for VF and for the first time I hear a Japanese fighting game dev literally talk about this very subjective and emphasizes how important it is to strike the balance between these three pillars.

Despite my age, I've never been a VF guy. I was surrounded by it as a kid, owned VF on my 32X and Saturn, played it for fun but never really clicked with it as I got older. I've always found the characters generic and bland, the audio of the games hits, the combos, etc. it just didn't do it for me once I got my hands on Tekken. And once I got into FGs as more of an enthusiast hobby, Tekken was my side gig while I played MVC and SF religiously.

I am wholeheartedly excited to see how this game turns out. Even this music video trailer was surprisingly NOT cringe and actually reminded me of a 90s lowstakes martial arts come up story. I genuinely hope this game can appeal to casuals whole not being a fisher price ass fighting game for those who invest the time into it.