roa2 continues to be extremely good. it's like, "what if we made smash melee accessible"

no needing notches on your gcc for wavedashing, way lenient windows for mechanics like teching / cc-ing, no need to mash sdi, no shffl-ing / jc grabs

oh! and walljumps for everybody!

also there's not like six hundred characters on the roster, so it's actually possible to learn the matchups unlike smultimate & there's no steve in it

@eclairwolf I like that much of all the game play is broken, but also answerable. Oh, all that damage gets shielded? You can just grab them. Spammy combat? You can open with a parry to then go into counterattack.

Oh yeah, floor hugging, the act of tanking a hit from your opponent and being less likely to fly off to cc and have a chance to hit back quicker. Just by pressing down when you get hit. Folks can just grab you. And out of the gate, I believe floor hugging deals more damage to you vs you taking a regular hit.

Every character has their cheese and counter cheese. Be they poor with edge fighting or poor with escaping the juggle, or even you can counter them with a stage pick.

This game has so much play to it.

@ilobmirt yeah, it really feels like a more refined melee. things are fast and super deadly, but the game's lenient enough that doing well is more about choosing options and making reads than hitting inputs

& i feel like there's not really any situations where i'm like "there's not a way to play around this" or "there's always/never a correct option to choose"

@ilobmirt tbh it's a lot of what i like about platform fighters. (and what i theoretically like about 'your only move is hustle,' though i oughta actually play that one)