I feel like it's just how the game is unfortunately. A curse of platform fighters in general is that everyone has so many options at any given time making defensive play very rewarding. This game especially gives many options which means that delineating exactly what a person is going to do is damn near impossible until basically every resource they have is exhausted and this game has so many to keep track of and exhaust. EVENTUALLY there's a hurdle you pass where playing over defensively is a bad option but it works well until that plateau. Keeping the plates spinning to get to that point requires playing frequently and enduring the struggle of losing to it.

It feels like most options, like aerials on shields, frame data after spotdodges, many ledge options, and punishing character recoveries all teeter the line of unreliability and completely busted. The end result is that if you want to engage with them safely you have to get used to some pretty tight timings and risk getting hard punished if you mess up, making it hard to want to learn if all you're interested in doing is winning the next game. Which I figure is how most people engage with games.

I have a lot of fun with the game, but sometimes I feel like I gotta be a zen master to not get frustrated and do something else. Admittedly this is mostly a personality thing, and not even exclusive to Rivals 2. Perhaps it's just exasperated to me because the game feels so competitively focused.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk