Here's the thing. I love that VF is super balanced and I have absolutely ZERO problems with the roster being 12-16 people. The reason is that each character has like 100+ moves and so learning just a single character can take MONTHS. There is always some new strategy or combo to think up and get better. There is just soooo much depth. I've played 500+ hours of VF4/5 easily and I'd say I know how to play as maybe 50% of the medium sized roster.
Yes, there's no question about VF's complexity. It has the most depth of any fighting game, 2D or 3D, easily. And yet I really don't play it because the character, stage, and music design are either boring, bland, or just bad. The customization stuff does help with the characters, however.
OTOH with 2d fighters, each character has like...3-6 moves. Learning a character takes a day or two or a week max.
No, each character has 3-6
special moves, and usually some supers too. VF is all normals. A simple punch counts as a "move" in VF.
If your roster is small, you're going to exhaust all the depth in like a month tops. If your roster is 25-50 characters, there's just a lot more gameplay time there in learning how to play.
Completely disagree. People are STILL playing old games like SSF2T (from 1994!) and finding new ways to play. Ditto for the Arc games, ditto for Street Fighter IV (arcade), ditto for well, EVERYTHING. No well-made game is that shallow.
Another problem is that in VF because each character has so many moves you can have 50 Akira players who all play VERY DIFFERENTLY and you have to form completely different strategies against each. OTOH you are so much more limited in a 2d fighter, and there is just not that much variety. Out of 50 Kens, 40 of them will play very similarly. Having more characters in this case just gives more variety.
Again, completely disagree. You can say the same thing about any fighting game. If you take the average player and give him Akira, you're also going to wind up with 40/50 players playing the same way. The number of moves a game has no bearing on its depth and how you can play a character. I've played Ken players who use him in a completely different manner than usual. Not a single fireball or even Dragonpunch is usually even used.
The moveset does not limit the way a character can be played.
Sure at a tournament level play MvC2 may come down to 8-10 characters used; but on a fun level of play with friends or general people every character gets picked and you always get interesting matches.
Oh, sure, it's fun to play MvC2 casually since you can fuck around with various characters. I find the game to be generally too chaotic and hate its presentation and god-awful music. Only fighter I've ever seen where people would make tutorials on how to burn your own copy with different music.
