Its description on its site:
http://www.fantasystrike.com/, bothers me and you can guess which part:
Fighting games have added a huge amount of complexity over the years in ways that have created more and more of a physical execution barrier. Fantasy Strike is about getting to the strategy part of the game immediately, in the first minute you play it. No complex motions for special moves and no need to practice combos in training mode. Emphasizing player-decisions over difficult dexterity is a much deeper commitment than simply letting you do special moves easily—it's a commitment to avoid fiddly, unintuitive, difficult-to-execute techniques throughout the game. If you don't know what plinking, kara cancels, option selects, charge partitioning, FADCs, or crouch techs are, you don't have to. Instead you can focus on the fundamentals of fighting games: distancing, timing, zoning, setups, reads, and strategy.
Okay, getting rid of or toning down the inputs is fine. That being said, I don't find quarter circle inputs difficult and I doubt half circle ones would be hard either. DP inputs are hard in my opinion, but that's just me and I didn't grow up playing any traditional 2D fighter. Anyway, that one part of "no need to practice combos in training mode" is what bugs me. You have to practice at everything. It's not just fighting games; it's real life. You don't get good at stuff without practice. Even simple stuff you still have to practice.
Take Demon's/Dark Souls and Bloodborne. The combat is barebones when it comes to comboing since that's not the point. The point is to understand how to fight with the game's combat system which in this case would be understanding when to take risks, when to pull back, and when to use which attack while adding on being able to parrying, learn to recognize backstab opportunities, etc. Basically, learning how to play the game which involves practice like anything else.
Specifically on fighting games, not a lot of fighting games actually need you to learn a bunch of "advanced techniques". With Melee, people say wave-dashing and L-canceling, but you can still be a good Melee player by just being good at the game. That's basically Smash in general since each of them have some techniques that you can use, but don't need too. It's just at the really, really high level that those techniques become more prominent. For traditional 2D fighters, sure, some of the inputs might seem complicated, but there are some characters who don't have the more complicated inputs e.g. DP inputs or straight-up don't have to use those inputs. Those examples are characters like Balrog, Rashid, or Nelson. A charge character, a character with only QCF inputs, and a character whose primary way of fighting is through directional inputs that lead to different combos while his other inputs are for a command dash, grab, and super move. Even then, they're not easier to use. The same amount of effort you put in with them will be about the same amount of effort you put into any other character. In other words, you still have to learn how to play; you have to practice, you have to practice combos, image train situations, etc.
I looked at the guide on the site and it said there are 3 normals, forward, back, and neutral; 3 aerials, forward, back, and neutral; 2 specials which each have their own button input, I think 2 throws, please have back and forward throws; a counter move, and 1 super for all characters. Combo-wise, I don't know, but it might be 3 to maybe 4 attacks at most. First off, what the hell? There are so little options. I expected at least crouch attacks to exist, but nope. I get that they're trying to make it simple, but this to me is insulting. You could take a Smash character and they would have more options that would probably make gameplay just more and perhaps richer. Or they could make characters like Ed from SFV where you use simultaneous inputs to do your specials, so you could keep 3 different levels of attack where some characters could have their own command normals and specials are done in a combination of simultaneous inputs. And another or is that they could have gone with light attack as one button, heavy as another, and special as the third button. I don't know, it just seems so limited that at a certain point, you can't do anything else.
