Thoughts from Scrubchinko (me) -
Kan-Ra, as with most of the cast has fantastic animation, I love that standing animation. with the wrap just spinning around his limbs. Spinal and Saberwulf are still my favorites though.
Aesthetics aside though, he is certainly interesting to use. While, at first he has the same 4 special attacks that the rest of the cast gets (I'm talking in terms of inputs, not execution) the way his normals work and the range on each of those moves sets him on a whole other level. Playing him well would seem to require you to have a sandpit on screen at all times , so you'd combo with him in a similar fashion to spinal (teleports and such) but his moves are much more ranged based. I'd say the closest other fighting game character to him is Dhalsim from street fighter , simply because of the ranged normals but even then it's not really that close because Kan-Ras normals pull and push depending on what type you use. Not being an expert at fighting games in general I can only say that Kan-Ra seems to have a few more options to handle opponents , those options of course increase his complexity so I would say he's not the first character someone should attempt to use.
I haven't exactly gotten serious with playing this game yet, only put about 2 hours into it. Played through Basic Training and had 9 matches online as well as some NOOB survival and arcade to learn the game some more. I feel like I need to grab one of them Xbox 1 arcade sticks to really get much better, I can't hit the shoulders buttons quite as easily as I'd like to to progress through training and doing anything aside from "stick mashing" is hard. (stick mashing- doing repeated QCF or QCB motions and tossing in a P or a K to attempt a combo).
I've tried every character out for at least a couple minutes to see all of their special moves in training mode and my opinion of the cast is thus-
Easy: Jago- Fast and easy to combo, Jago also has the dojo mode so anyone new the game learns to play him first, he also seems to be the neutral character everything else in the game is based on.
Orchid- is even easier to combo with (I managed a 55% combo in training mode, my best so far)and hits a bit faster than Jago
Saberwulf- who is super fast but has a pretty good damage output too. Any of these 3 felt like good starting points to me.
Normal: Combo,Thunder - Both heavier characters, though thunder seems the slower and slightly stronger. Since they rushdown the opponent, I felt they required a bit more thought to play , scrub that I am,than the above 3 characters.
Hard: Glacius - super slow but his entire moveset is about trapping the character a safe distance away from him , it's like the opposite skillset present with my "normal" ranked characters. Simply stick mashing won't get you anywhere.
Maya- she CAN stick mash but it might not get the player anywhere if they aren't paying attention to where her daggers land and grabbing them as well as using their leveled up specials.
Sadira- She's fun to play as but very tricky to get good combos with , I've seen Max and others play her properly thanks to youtube and twitch and playing keep away in the air is much harder to pull off (for me) than it looks in those videos.
Expert: Kan-Ra - I went over kan-ra above but basically I'd consider him an expert character because of his enormous movelist , it's as though you almost need to get good with glacius and sadira then move up to Kan-ra.
Spinal- He isn't too hard to stick mash with but it won't really get you very far if you don't utilize his skulls properly and because of the whole skull/curse mechanic I consider him expert level.
Fulgore - I always thought he looked difficult to use well even from watching max's videos and finally playing a bit in training confirms this for me. He's got a sizeable move list , lots of options and that bizarre pip meter.
That was just my thoughts based on very brief use of the whole cast so far. I've heavily favored using Orchid and Jago (mostly dojo though) and think it's great to have characters of varying learning curves in the game. Hell, it might be the case for some that they find Thunder easier to use than I do or any character for that matter.
As it stands though, Kan-Ra, Spinal, Fulgore and Maya all have an additional gimmick not present with the rest of the cast so no matter who you are, they have at least a bit more to deal with.
Can't wait to play Riptor next month - Will he make it out by Christmas for Ultra owners ? It would be nice but I don't want to rush Iron Galaxy. So glad I finally bought a xb1 to play this
