Free Step Dodge

Raging Blast 1 if a certain custom set-up would work without abusing ki blasts in order to insanely extend combos. Hell, even Bleach Blade Battlers 2nd has a lot of depth to it which is ruined by some strong transformations and Aizen being able to do easy tod's. We'll never see the light of the day when an arena fighter has enough depth and balance that it'd work as an offline competitive game, unfortunately.

Naw, they don't have to be balanced be competitively viable, just look at the Ninja Storm series, they had full on tournaments for all 4 of those games and they're unbalanced af, (basically any character with extreme offence/defense was tournament viable, everyone else was ignored)

I mean hey, JoJo and Hokuto No Ken are still being played competitively and those games are unbalanced as kek. It's because of those unbalances that made those games look fun in display.

But with Arena fighters, due to how free form they are and how situational everything is, there's no clear way to perfectly balance those games (realistically), but because of how everything else is busted, everyone has access to those busted options so something that's not balanced becomes equally balanced in that sense.

In my opinion? yeah. Probably just a matter of the sub-genres and preferences with arena brawlers (aerial arena, grounded arena, item based, group gauges etc.)

@Immortal Ninja That's a good video actually. Though generally they have a easier time to form a concept behind it. Even those DBZ Budokai games can form something if developers took their time with it.

Now Arena brawlers on the other hand is a different ball game. It's situational balance and core balance.

Two things that makes a fighting game, all characters are limited to the same ruleset and Player agency, player agency, player agency.