Free Step Dodge

Well tbh it's been that way for decades, characters with multiple stances and such are always gonna be characters who don't follow logic or whatever because they're depth is deeper than what's seen at a glance. I don't think it's as deep as he's saying, characters with a deeper move set are always gonna have a harder to master difficulty

DOA as a whole kinda just flies in the face of standard fighting game logic, which is both a blessing and a curse, on one hand it's a unique experience that you wont find anywhere else, on the other it's so unique that it doesn't really translate well to anything else, which can make breaking out of or breaking into the DOA bubble unnecessarily difficult

this is why i regret DOA being my introduction into fighting games (technically for me it was VF1/2 but DOA was the first home console fighter I got into), It gave me a very warped version of what i thought fighting games conventions were and made me turn my nose up to other fighters on the basis of "it's not like DOA", eventually i got over this but it took me a long time to do so (roughly 10 years)

This sentiment actually brings up a good point that Team NINJA needs to put more emphasis on character tutorials. Something like SCVI's "Combat Lessons" could serve as a starting point. DOA6's tutorials are fantastic in general, but don't exactly let you know "how" you're supposed to play a character.

Can see where he's going with that. You can pretty much pick a character for completely different gameplay reasons, add the triangle system on top of that and you have a unique experience that is very fun if you get invested into it but at the same time it is different from your conventional fighting game aspects, which can be a double-edged sword.

People either really like or really hate DOA, there's no middle ground. Still, every fighting game has characters who have a completely different gameplan compared to the characters that benefit most from what the game can offer: Xiaoyu and Yoshimitsu in Tekken for example, very gimmicky, mix-up heavy characters who are usually low to mid tier in every Tekken game.