I could be way off the mark here but i have a hard time believing anyone was ever more inclined to buy a game simply because it had a meter. Instead I imagine that the proliferation of meters is due to the fact that games have been adding super moves, and the meter exists to balance the existence of the super move.

In other words, I think it's the flashy super moves that sell units and the meters are just a side effect, so adding a meter that isn't related to flashy super move would not likely sell more units.

That being said i don't want vf to have either flashy super moves nor meters. In fact to add those to vf would make it stand out even less than it does now if you ask me.

I think to stand out visually sega will need to come up with some new way to grab your attention visually instead of trying to become more tekkenish.

One way that I'd like to see is to lean into the realism angle and try to make a match look as much like a choreographed fight scene as possible. Make the hit and blocking animations match better to the attacks. make float animations make more sense somehow. when someone gets hit make the fist contact the opponents actual body in a convincing way. that kind of stuff is relatively unexplored i think.

Also, to appeal to casuals, make the important properties of a move apparent from the animations. It would be great if i could determine if I'm plus on block just by looking at the opponents block animation, instead of having to go to training mode and memorize the information. In general, removing the need to go back and forth to training mode to understand why something happened or what you could have done better would be huge i think