>>14589743I think plenty got things right beyond it as far as controls go. The 2K games had a great setup back around 2K19 but they fucked around and remapped the controls to streamline them and then went and shit all over movesets by adding that stupid combo system that took away all control on how you get to do certain moves
Regarding momentum I even feel like the AKI games could get a bit lopsided. If you were down on momentum sometimes it just became impossible to flip things around. It was also a very easily exploitable system too between taunts and throwing people out of the ring. Running away when people had a special. Even just playing against the cpu if they had a shit ton of momentum all you had to do was constantly spam weak grapples and eventually it'd taped off
The AKI engine was brilliant. Still is. It's aged really well. But it's hardly unique all these years later and there's a lot that can be improved. Hell, honestly once they added that pin kickout meter in SVR2010 I think it was that's when the current games kind of overtook it for me. Something like that is far better than just having to blindly button mash in hopes something might happen
