Thanks to some discourse on FGCN, I decided to finally watch a video I've disliked from afar for some time now. This video was a choose your main video by Rooflemonger for Vampire Savior (i.e Darkstalkers 3 or vsav for short). When the video came out, many in the vsav discord ripped it to shreads. A lot of folks described how it was full of mistakes and did not give a full or even basic representation of the characters represented. Some would go so far as to say it was misleading in some respects.
I trusted my fellow gamers to ignore the video for years. If the video was that bad, then I wouldn't want to give it extra views just to witness the train wreck. However, recent events have encouraged me to give it an honest shake myself, and I'm glad to report that those are 46 minutes of my life I won't get back.
My overall thoughts on the video is that it's just lazy. Like there's minimal editing and I doubt much of this video was planned out at all. Like all of the sections are just Rooflemonger explaining stuff whlie he's in training mode. He's sorta fumbling around without a very defined plan or routine on how he should talk about these characters. Which by itself isn't the worst crime, but this laziness is indicative of most of the video and its shortcomings.
For example, for some characters he'll compare them to a character from Street Fighter or something else more commonly known that's fairly similar, but he only does this for about five or six characters. I think it's fine that not every character be compared to someone else, but if you're making a video that helps people pick a main, then I making making some comparison with archetypes is pretty crucial to helping people make a decision on who they want to play as.
There's also the fact that he pretty much forgets Dark Force(DF) exists as a mechanic until he gets to Felicia. This sorta makes sense because more than half of the DFs in the game aren't crucial to a character's gameplan, but you do have good defensive ones like Bishamon's, Sasquatch's and Zabel's which offer super armor that let's them deal with stun moves like Fish's bubble. Jedah's DF is very essential to his character and his was skipped over completely. Felicia's DF was the only one he mentioned and while I would argue that DF is the "best" one, there are other DFs that deserve a spotlight if you wanna give new players an overall understanding of how a character plays. I doubt this was a case of skipping moves that are less useful competitively because he spent plenty of time talking about moves and supers for characters that aren't considered competitively viable, like Liilith's rhythm game super.
Before I get into other generalized thoughts on the video, I have to critique how he talked about my main, Jedah Dohma. Now he didn't foucs alot on tiers except of the best and the worst. Jedah is closer to the worst end of the spectrum, but that's fine that he skips that. Ideal even. My problem is that he focuses more on Jedah's unblockable moves and less on his mobility. Which is his actual strength. Jedah does have about 5 special moves that are unblockable, but "the character with all the unblockables" is not a way anyone with any experience would describe him. Jedah's strengths lie in his unrivaled aerial mobility and his great mixup potential. He's hard to play as, and talking about him like he's just got so many unblockables and is always breaking guards gives new players wrong first impression of the character. I think alot of that happened throughout the video, but this character is where I noticed it the most.
The video was little more than a video movelist with some color commentary, and he doesn't even go over all the moves! Also I have to mention that he leaves so much on about these characters unsaid. For example, when talking about BB Hood
He compares her to Sagat and it's wild!!
, he mentions the Sako combo. Now the Sako combo is very difficult and I won't knock anyone for refusing to give a live demonstration. But's it's a very famous combo and something many people know about the character, so even if you can't do the move yourself, you can find a video and show us what it looks like. It's that kind of laziness that just blows me away. Similar thing for Zabel's j.LK unblockable. It's very difficult to do, especially if you're a beginner, but find a video and show us. Let us see for ourselves what it looks like at least.
I don't want to give the impression that you should be a 10+ year veteran to make this kind of video, but I feel you should do your due diligence at least right? After the video came out, it was confirmed that Rooflemonger didn't consult anyone frpm the community on any specifics of his video.
Considering some parts of the video, I doubt he even consulted the wiki.
My fellow vsavers gave me fair warning, but I just had to see for myself this Sunday morning.
Before this video, I was fairly neutral on Rooflemonger. I would see his stuff on Youtube, but never clicked. After learning about this video, it really changed how I viewed him, because he has alot of these "Choose a Main" videos. I couldn't help but think "are his other videos about picking a main as lazy as the vsav one?
Being somewhat fair, he seems to actually like and know his stuff about Virtua Fighter, so maybe i can trust his judgement there, but otherwise I'll avoid any character advice for other franchises.
Anyway I just wanted to get that off my chest. Regardless of who you trust for your main-picking news I hope you just try to enjoy fighting games in general and in private.