Alright, final round, let's rock!
Sanji
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By the same creator as Piccolo... I dunno what happened here, but somehow Sanji feels a lot less polished than Piccolo. He's very very fast,
but it feels like a lot of his attacks lack impact. Additionally, there are a lot of weird graphical errors in Sanji.
I honestly don't understand how you can misalign a dust cloud to be that high up.
I forgot to mention this in Piccolo, but all the jumps have this weird dust cloud following them up. Dunno why that is. I mean at least in Sanji's case you could *kinda* argue that since he's shooting fireballs from his feet that they might be smoking, but that's a stretch.
So... yeah, Sanji could potentially be a good character, but he has a lot of problems holding him back. Presentation again, but also just how weird his moves behave.
6/10
Susanoo
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An arranged character? And not PotS-style?! I MUST INVESTIGATE!
Susanoo is from Blazblue I guess (I dunno which iteration because I stopped playing the series after the first game lol), yet his playstyle is based on Melty Blood of all things. At first it looks like a weird combination, but after playing it, Susanoo feels like he would very much be at home in the Melty Blood universe. So that's definitely a plus.
There are a few major downsides though. The first is that there's no readme included, so I had to open up the .cmd and look at his movelist that way (and what I remember of Melty Blood's fighting system). The second is that the template used to make this character is by ⑨, and while it's a good approximation of the system in general terms, it tends to do really badly at approximating damage values and scaling, making characters a bit overpowered.
Again with the misplaced dashline. And yes I checked, my MUGEN isn't broken.
I am almost 99.99% positive this effect is supposed to be semi-transparent too.
Seriously though, aside from teh visual hiccups and the damage scaling, Susanoo is probably my favorite character of this COTM. He plays solidly, and it's nice to see a reinterpretation of a character into another system that actually feels like it should be that way.
8.75/10
Teen Gohan Z2i
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Now here's something interesting. Using EB sprites, ACID did his best to emulate the Z2 style. As a card-carrying Team Z2 member, it's kinda interesting to see how other people perceive the thought-process behind the system. It's actually a pretty admirable attempt, especially in making a cohesive playstyle with a limited number of sprites.
If there's a big problem with Gohan, I think it has to do with how a lot of his attacks turn into auto-combos. If you tap HP, it's Gohan rapidly jabbing the opponent in the stomach. If I was going to incorporate this into Gohan, for example, it would behave more like a Hundred Hand Slap special or something instead of being activated by a single button. Still, I can see there's a lot of foundations for a potentially great character, he just needs moves to compliment it!
Silent Rage is Teen Gohan's EMO Mode. The command is pretty restrictive (I could only pull it off on a keyboard), and I feel that being able to gain meter for it so quickly by simply pushing an attack button is a little too easy.
The mandatory Father-Son Kamehameha. The effects look a little funky (well I mean that's pretty much throughout the character) and I feel it might be a little too drawn out, but it's pretty close to how it might be storyboarded.
Also I just want to take this moment to treasure Mr. Satan's attempt at blocking it.
Oh also, there are a bunch of mislabeled commands in teh readme, so I would definitely fix those pronto.
6.75/10
Aquaman
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So the first two modes are basically based on the source game, and the source game really sucks even by my standards (reminder: I play bootleg NES fighters). So I'm going to review Aquaman when he's in Custom Mode.
To be completely fair, I feel like there was a lot of missed opportunities for custom mode. It's not like it's bad or anything, but there were lots of chances to go totally wild with it. My favorite example of this was when MUGEN legend XCB adapted Aska from TMNT: Tournament Fighter into an arranged system. She felt like a totally new character that could stand toe-to-toe with more modern (at the time) creations. So I guess what I'm saying is that there's a lot that could've been done to make Aquaman feel fresh.
s.HK's damage output if you only change the mode. The config file's choices for damage output are "low," "fair," and "normal." While I guess this has applications somewhere, I wish the damage output was tied to the gameplay mode instead.
Ummm, the super? I dunno, there's not a lot to screencap.
So in general, I feel there were some missed opportunities, but I mean it's super accurate to the game if you don't change the mode, so I guess that's kinda cool? I dunno.
6.5/10
Dark Lord Sauron
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It's pretty obvious from the start that this character is super-overpowered, so I'm going to review this the way the creator probably wants it to be reviewed: as a boss character.
To that end, Sauron is... kinda underwhelming. I mean yeah he has cheapness with stuff blasting all over the place, but there's a lot of times where he just stands around or somethings just fidgets back and forth. Additionally, I feel that there's not really a cohesive graphical style, and I'm seeing stuff from a variety of different games thrown together. It just looks sloppy.
Example of the stylistic clashing. It's pretty noticeable when you have newer-ish transparent explosions next to old-school ones.
So ignoring the fact that Sauron did NOT ever say this in Lord of the Rings (yes I know what this quote is referencing), I don't even understand what's going on with that big portrait. Is it a portrait for the author's personal screenpack? Like, I know Piccolo and Sanji have huge portraits, but at least they look kind of okay on a select screen and victory screen.
So yeah, this was a pretty underwhelming boss and definitely needs a lot more done to it.
5/10
So that's all your COTM nominees! I'm gonna go over them again later and give specialty shout-outs and stuff (ie: "best arranged character," "most potential," "best rookie char," etc).