NeoEmpire Interviews James “jchensor” Chen

I like James but his comments on MK compared to MvC3 leads me to believe he honestly knows next to nothing about the game nor does he care to learn.
Now I like MvC3 for all the things it does right and I agree when he says the game has yet to be fully fleshed out, however I disagree on the comparison between MK and MvC3. Just look at the tournament results. In MvC3 we’re seeing the exact same results in terms of what teams are being used, team synergy, and overall effectiveness of skilled players using particular teams. Granted, there is much to be discovered among the rest of the cast, however since it is a tourney season players will just use what they know works. However, a deciding factor among those decisions are the capabilities of the DHC glitch and a character’s effectiveness with X-Factor (particularly lv3). Even the commentators at ECT brought up the overuse of DHC teams and Phoenix teams (even worse combined, lol). These gimmicks alone really limit what is possible in this game for a hardcore competitive scene. It doesn’t matter how much depth there is to the rest of the cast when all you need are the same 12 characters in set teams relying on the same gimmicks. If it works THAT well, why bother exploring any further when nothing else works as well? Sure, bring up how Spiderman or whoever can snuff out a D. Phoenix transformation, but are we seeing that? No, because using those characters compromises the greater strengths of more capable teams.

Now lets look at MK’s recent tournaments. Yes, at the beginning we saw a lot of the same characters and NRS’s debuffing of those characters could have led to their decline in popularity, but look at how many players have been placing with different characters in each tournament. For the first time we’ve been seeing phenomenal play from Liu Kang, Jax, Sindel, Sektor, and Jade. More than half the cast is more than viable and more players are doing amazing experimentation with characters once thought ‘low tier’ (there are players now doing scary scary things using Sheeva of all characters). Now most of this is due to the constant patching. He claims it hurts more than it helps, but if thats the case than why are we seeing such huge variation among results? What we have is a very vocal minority who believe the patching hurts their playstyles, yet we’re seeing the opposite from the majority of players who are getting favorable results from trying new things and experimenting with new combinations. If anything, this game has yet to be fully explored to the 70% he claims. Now there’s no way to prove what percentage MK or MvC3 is at without approaching MIT professors, but I can see that Jchen’s view is no where near the actuality of it. Why does he state this then when results show he’s absolutely wrong? As with any under performing student he’s just not paying enough attention.