So what is it about SF that makes it unique?
Prior to all of the supers/cc nonsense, it was a much slower paced game, with less emphasis on pushing everyone to having to rush down. More chess play, and none of that "activate" super for 50% damage garbage that you see today. Completely different mentality of play with current SF players today vs SF players when fundamentals were absolutely prime.
As Jeff once stated about Daigo's mentality vs OG mentality. Umehara likes to fish for the big win, while OG fished for the slow methodical kill. Some of these concepts were returning in Vanilla SF4 which I really, really liked. Because of the big damage on just simple normals and normal supers in general (meaning good strong damage for the regular Hadouken, Shoryuken, etc, etc, not speaking of Shinkuu-Hadouken etc), players had to be more patient.
In AE with everything being heavily watered down with only big damage deriving from supers/ultras, the mentality has averted more towards an aggressive playstyle again which again removes away from the uniqueness of SF and its fundamentals.
Isn't the main reason for the top characters in AE, and just 4 in general, is that there is a general tendency for each of them to have good reversals, save for Chun-Li, Guile, and Viper?
I wouldn't state that based entirely upon good reversals. With Vanilla SF4 playing closer to the mentality of OG SF as opposed to AE, you had a better balance of overall flexibility for characters to compete and what they were designed to do. Some SF games will bring this out better then others. AE with direct nerf of normals, AA's, and multiple other individual nerfs pertaining to character individuals basically had the sole intention of pushing for a more aggressive playstyle.
It was obviously what Capcom wanted and they got it, but that to me is once again a removal of character archetypes. You shouldn't be forced to having to play with that mentality for the majority of the characters, that should be left upon the character that you play.
Aggressive zoning? Tell me more. And that's not quite what I was getting at in terms of defensive play. I have no problems with zoning or anything like that. Rather, it's more that it was risky to approach an opponent with jump-ins or pressure thanks to anti-airs being so good and with the case of Ryu and Sagat, they could FADC > Ultra from a successful DP.
Aggressive zoning is a concept more in the lines of pushing hard with strong positioning to gain the life lead, then controlling the match up from their, because with this advantage it will directly put your opponent into being forced to coming to you.
Jump-ins before all of the crazy high-damaging options was what made SF fun. When you jumped in, it was supposed to be scary. That's why jump-ins were more methodical and timed, where as now a days you have less-risk on all of that. The purpose of AA's are supposed to make you think twice about jumping, so that you'll make smarter decisions upon that. This is why I'm not a fan of continuous nerfs to AA's like Shoryuken and Tiger Uppercut, for they are meant to plant your opponent to the ground, put fear into, and allow you to control the air.
Ryu and Sagat did have good AA's into Ultra which I felt was highly unneeded (I'm speaking about being able to go into the Ultra, not the AA itself which was perfectly fine) however that still doesn't remove what I would like to see more intelligent jump ins with stronger AA's.
On the notion of CC's, they are leagues dumb. As much as I <3 CvS2, A-Groove was completely unnecessary. Throwing out a simple jab would become a fatal mistake when you were up against a CC character, which always made me shake my head in disbelief. The risk/reward for doing such a thing was so far in between because nobody can try to make a case that throwing a jabs worth of damage could potentially cost you half or more of your life. Again, can't remember a time where CC's within a SF game were not pevital with a significant advantage.
Hence why I said I don't believe that their will ever be a proper nerf to Genei-Jin unless you absolutely put it down to the pedestrian level which would then make it useless which isn't what you entirely want want either.
I myself am banking that with the hopeful patch of 2012 that you'll see more of what you saw with the first two previous installments of SF4.
