by Doc – Owner, Founder, Steve was the Only Good Fighters Pass 2 Character
During the Nintendo Direct, Nintendo revealed the new fighter, Kazuya. We didn’t feel it necessary to make a post on the Kazuya reveal for two reasons – first, there were no Smash amiibo announcements, so there was no need to recap the Direct, and second, I don’t know who the hell Kazuya is or why he’s dressed to the nines.
However, I did see a few things during the short presentation that gave me cause for concern. I’ve always kept an eye out for things that could be broken in the amiibo meta, and we’ve been fortunate thus far that I’m only right on a few of my predictions.
I think we may have run out of luck.
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Too Many Moves
Take a look at the complete move list for Kazuya on SSBWiki, which was created by analyzing the trailer.
That’s a lotta moves. And we can be pretty sure that more will be coming during Sakurai’s June 28 presentation. In fact, I’d bet money that there’s more moves coming for Kazuya – not because I know the source material (I don’t), but because I can compare the input types of Tekken to the other 2D fighting game characters.
Ryu and Ken come from Street Fighter, which has multiple types of inputs for the same button, depending on how long they’re pressed. Terry has a similar setup in some ways, though not as many. Tekken borrows a formula like that, but its source material has four buttons, not six, which means Nintendo will have to reconfigure how that’ll work in Smash. And knowing how the developers like to program amiibo, it’s entirely likely that they’ll borrow from the half-functional AI of Ryu and Ken to make it work…
The 10-hit Combo
The other side of that equation is what may actually be incredibly broken. Normally I wouldn’t worry about something like this in the slightest – Nintendo isn’t a fan of programming incredibly specific and long combos into amiibo. The only known exception is the very rare Lucas jab lock 0-death, which has only been caught on film twice in the entirety of competitive amiibo.
At least, it was the only known exception until Pythra released.
This is a built-in combo that the Level 9 Mythra CPU can perform. Because CPUs and amiibo function off of the same AI, many of the combos that CPUs can use end up being in the amiibo data as well. Joker’s Up air chains, dragdowns, and followups are notable examples of this.
Well, what about that 10-hit combo? The developers will probably want the CPU to be able to do everything a normal player could – that’s one of their design philosophies, after all. In order to accomplish that, they’d have to program the 10-hit combo into the CPU, and if they program it into the CPU, they may just put it into the amiibo as well.
I fear no man, but that thing? It scares me.
Amiibo Doctor 