Have you ever played a game like, say, Marvel vs Capcom 2, where there are a lot of ridiculous combos and whatnot, against someone who's really good at it and they land a hit on you, and then that hit leads into an infinite and inescapable combo that will reduce your lifebar to zero. At that point, the best option for the player at the receiving end of the endless anus-kicking is really just hoping that his opponent will mess up.

Now, don't get me wrong, I like the feeling of doing a 16 hit combo on a really buff guy with a bowl on his head (Juggernaut). But sometimes it can get to the point where it's just plain cheesy. And I know that you know,as a dedicated gamer,that just about EVERY fighting game developer and their collective dog has tried in some way to copy the tried and true Capcom vs. combo system, ever since the idea of combos was introduced in good ol' Street Fighter II. The only current fighting games I can think of at the moment that don't have some kind of combo gauge or something to keep track of how many consecutive hits you've racked up are SSBB and Soulcalibur (I'm sure there are more). So I guess what I'm saying is that I... AM TIRED OF COMBO INTENSIVE GAMES. Or at least the ones where once you're in a combo, you're helpless until the other guy decides to finish it.



In my opinion, a good fighting game should focus on strategy and reading your opponent, not seeing how high you can get the combo meter to go. It should also encourage a player to get familiar with a character's entire move set before he can say he's mastered that character. It's always more satisfying to me to reflect a shell back at somebody in SSB or to knock my opponent out of the sky with a well placed Dragon Punch when they try to jump in Street Fighter than to do the same 30 hit combo every 5 seconds in Marvel vs. Capcom.

So in essence, I really just think that in games where there are preset combo strings, there should be a way out of the combo if you know what it's going to be. That would make things way more interesting in that it would discourage spamming the same combos, and encourage predicting the opponent's attacks. Fighting would be way more dynamic if you had just as many defensive and counter-offensive options as you do attacks. Yet, sadly, most games these days expect you to get by with only the ability to block the first attack in a combo.

Please comment and tell me what you guys think about the idea that in most fighting games, offense >defense by a huge margin.