#Snk athena how to#
#Snk athena series#
#Snk athena free#

Also, her damage on all her special moves is awful.īy itself, I wouldn’t recommend taking this tack for a fighting game character, because it’s generally kind of frustrating for the person trying to play her. It’s not immediately apparent how bad these moves are until you take ’em for a spin and realize that you’re not going to get to play a fireball/DP game like Ryu or Ken, nor can you rush down with divekicks/teleports or mix up with command grabs. A projectile reflector that isn’t very good.A Dragon Punch with very poor invincibility, and.A teleport that she can be thrown out of,.A command grab with the worst range in the game,.A divekick that doesn’t really set anything up,.A fireball that is useful pretty much only at max range,.#2: She has a lot of bad special moves.Īthena can do almost everything a fighting game character can do, but she’s not very good at it.

It adds to the fun in ways that don’t connect to wins and losses, and that’s a very hard thing to do in a fighting game. She projects enthusiasm and joy in her performance, and some of that rubs off on the person who’s playing her, too. There’s no way you can play Athena and not take joy in hearing her scream “TELEPOOOOORT” and “PSYCHO BAAAAAAALL” or occasionally feel tempted to mimic her super-girly attack animations. Rumor has it she’s the only one in King of Fighters who changes her clothes. So she gets new outfits in every single game, and her voice actresses always sound like they’re channeling Usagi from Sailor Moon. That’s a departure from the usual for both Capcom and SNK character designs Street Fighter typically skews towards Serious Martial Artists, King of Fighters towards Angsty Teen Martial Artists, and for all the high school-aged characters between the two, no one looks or sounds quite like Athena.

#Snk athena free#

I’m gonna talk a whole bunch about gameplay stuff in the next few sections, but I wanted to point out something rad about her audio/visual design, first.Īthena Asamiya is a psychic magical girl pop star (who apparently designs websites and plays lacrosse in her free time, according to her SNK Wikia page).

#1: Her visual + vocal flair rubs off on the player. (GIFs in this post come from a video of me bodying some guy named Ram Jam at the UFGT CvS2 auction tournament, he paid $86 to get one-character-victoried by Athena.) And so those feelings of mastery were combined with a feeling of ownership my Athena knowledge became rare expertise.

#Snk athena how to#

There weren’t many Athena players then, and not many of them were playing with my preferred Groove (K-Groove, if you were wondering), so the job of figuring out how to win with her was up to me and me alone. SNK 2 is an unusual fighting game in that it has a lot of pre-match decisions that change how you play it you choose 1–3 characters at varying levels of power to form a team, as well one of six “Grooves” that give you access to certain offense/defense/mobility/meter management mechanics. SNK 2, I had that experience with Athena Asamiya. This feeling can peak into something even more intense when you reach a point where you’re looking at others’ play for inspiration, not memorization you look around and realize that no one else is doing quite what you’re doing with that character, and it’s up to you to use your experience to push her to ever higher heights.įor much of my early years playing Capcom vs. One of the most compelling emotions available in fighting games is the feeling of growing your mastery over a character. Check it out and let me know if it’s a thing you’d want to read more of! Also see: Pharah, Chipp, and Thresh.

#Snk athena series#

I’m trying out a short blog series about character design in competitive video games! Simple format - five things I like about a character, and one thing I’d like to fix.