So I actually really liked Injustice. It had its share of flaws, obviously, but considering that it’s a whole new fighting game which tried out a lot of different ideas, it was actually pretty cool. More importantly still, it was FUN TO PLAY.
Since there will almost definitely be an Injustice 2 (it sold so well that it would be flat-out silly NOT to make a sequel), here are some ideas for what I think would make the series, IMO, even better:
The lifebar system
I was sceptical at first, but I actually quite like the ‘2 health bars spread across one match’ dynamic as a break from the usual ‘best of 3’ formula that most fighters follow. I wouldn’t at all mind if it stayed this way, but possibly it might be cool if NRS extended it so that 3 health bars was the default, rather than 2 (whilst providing the option to alter it to 2 health bars, or even down to 1), so that matches last roughly as long as ‘best of three’ Street Fighter matches tend to.
Chip damage
This is where I reckon Injustice could do with taking a cue from the recently released Street Fighter V.
* Special move chip damage: This should be set at a quarter of whatever damage the move would deal on hit, or a token 1% if the aforementioned figure is <1%. No special move has any right to be doing >10% on block, ever, especially if it’s difficult or even impossible to punish on block.
* Leading on from the above, rather than the incredibly tiny chip damage dealt by Injustice normals, I reckon a better idea would be to do away with normal chip damage entirely, and instead introduce a GUARD METER a la Soul Calibur V. With this, normal attacks (and specials too) would take away from the opponent’s guard meter, which would slowly replenish any time where the opponent is not in hitstun, blockstun, or lying on the ground. If all of the opponent’s guard meter is depleted, they get thrown into a Street Fighter-esque extended stun which allows you to land whatever combo you want (or, if the clock is wearing down fast, let the game time out for the win – lol) This would encourage a little bit more offense in the game, but not to the same extent as in MKX, and in a much different way.
Stance switch
Either remove that damn button or give it an actual use, tbqh. Maybe something like ‘do it at the exact frame an attack hitbox connects with your character and it will pass through them harmlessly’ – seriously, anything at all.
Meter system
The four bar system should definitely stay – in a world where three bars seem to be becoming the norm, it helps keep Injustice distinctive!
Clashes
Injustice clashes actually make a nice contrast to the usual combo breaker. For the most part, I think they work fine, but IMO they could be even more strategic if they were altered so that the health recovered was determined by something like the following formula:
Health recovered = Base + floor(3 * ln(h))
where Base = 15, 20, 25 or 30 damage (depending on how much more meter the winning person bet than their opponent!)
and
Floor function = basically rounding down whatever’s in the brackets (e.g. floor(6.8) = 6)
To explain what that means in practice, if you successfully won a clash when your opponent’s life bar was full, and bet one bar more meter than then, you’d recover 28% health. If you won the clash with the same amount of meter when your opponent has, say, 20% of their life left, you’d instead earn 23% health.
Under the most generous circumstances (betting ALL four bars of your meter vs none of theirs, while they have a full health bar), you’d get 38% of your health back.
This would function a little bit like Smash 4’s ‘rage’ system in the sense that while it’s ostensibly a comeback mechanic, in practice it tends to benefit whoever gets the first kill considerably more so, as if they can force their opponent to use their clash at this point, the health reward from the clash could easily be 10% less! That ‘magic pixel’ would become a lot MORE magic.
Multiple traits
Now, I’m someone who is MASSIVELY against the idea of variations coming to Injustice – that mechanic should be MK-exclusive IMO. However, the idea of each character having a choice of three TRAITS is actually quite an interesting one.
Grundy (to a very limited extent) already has this in Injustice with his trait allowing him the choice of greater damage, greater defense or massive resistance to chip damage. Reptile in Mortal Kombat X also gives a pretty good idea of what it would be like, since his variations each functionally have their own ‘trait’ differentiating them.
If coming up with three separate traits per character would be too difficult a task, a choice of two would be a decent compromise.
Throw system
Actually completely fine as is, to be fair, but I reckon reducing the token damage on throw breaks wouldn’t go amiss – 1% as opposed to 2%. This one I don’t care about too much lol
Pushblock
Pushblock is a really cool concept, but it’s in an odd place in Injustice. On the one hand, it feels too good to only cost one bar of meter… but making it cost two bars seems a bit steep. I’d say the best way to balance it a bit is to still have it cost one bar, and simply slightly (only slightly) reduce how far it pushes the opponent back
Interactable normalisations
OK, this is one of the few cases where some cues from MKX wouldn’t go at all amiss.
For a start, MAKE THROWN INTERACTABLES BLOCKABLE. Having them do a hefty chunk of chip damage (but no more than 4-5%) would be fine, but having them unblockable AND difficult to consistently avoid (especially with wakeup traps) is flat-out unfair. I wouldn’t even care if they brought back respawning interactables AS LONG AS THEY CAN BE BLOCKED.
Secondly, if they’re going to have non-universal ways of using them (which isn’t a bad concept at all), can they PLEASE buff the ‘acrobat’ class of interactable users so that their interactable use isn’t complete dogshit. Gadget users at least had some uses for them that power users didn’t (even if, in general, they were still less useful), but seriously, do SOMETHING to make the acrobat users a bit better off.
My thoughts on this are prone to change, but at the very least the ‘no more unblockable interactables’ thing needs to happen.
No more ‘Hawkgirls’
By this, I don’t mean ‘drop Hawkgirl from the game’. Rather, I mean that when designing characters, they need to be careful not to create designs that get massively countered by multiple characters, or that massively counter multiple characters – or both.
I actually found Hawkgirl quite fun to play as, but it’s hard to deny that she’s a shittily balanced character who had WAY too many 3-7 MUs; not a good route to go down…
Alternative supers
Taking cues to some extent from Street Fighter, it would also be nice if characters had the choice of two different supers. One could be the standard ‘ultra powerful attack’-style super, whilst the other could be an alternative move which does something completely different (or just a different style of ‘ultra powerful attack’ – lol)
b3 and f3
These mostly work just fine. The only small change I’d want is that if you use b3 in the corner leading to a stage transition as a combo ender, it should have some level of ‘immunity’ from combo scaling. Specifically, regardless of how long the combo has gone on for, the stage transition does at least 30% of the damage it would have done from a raw hit.
Bounce cancels, in practice, ended up being very impractical most of the time, but how to change that… not so sure tbh. They’re too good to only cost one bar. However, if the above mentioned guard meter idea was implemented, possibly it could be altered so that the cost of a bounce cancel is only one bar… but you instantly lose 50% guard meter as well, and it doesn’t start recovering until the combo ends.
As said, I feel like Injustice is off to a really good start, and will probably eagerly buy the sequel as and when it comes about. Add in some of the changes mentioned above, and I reckon it would help round off the rough edges even further and make the game even more enjoyable to play.
is a great idea. If there are no counterparts like Dick/Damian, then they could make things like Future/Present, Earth/Alternate Reality, Normal/Bizarro, etc.
