all the matches i played were on US east and US west and they almost uniformly felt good to great. i can only recall one match that was iffy but it was still very playable. will try matches on overseas servers tonight

i need way more time with the game to accurately assess it but so far i like it a lot. the damage is probably still too high. most matches are about 30-40 seconds, which is pretty short. the presentation is astounding. ramlethal looks and animates like a character from a miyazaki film. stages are brimming with detail. sometimes it's a little busy and i can't quite make sense of the action, especially in the corner with ramlethal's swords and with chipp and millia pressure. the GUI fonts for combo count, meter names, character names, and battle notifications (just frame, counter, punish) are all different in a way that makes the design feel incongruous. hopefully they settle on something uniform that ties the rest of the presentation together

it's weird going from one game to the next iteration and the character you're using has far fewer moves than in the previous game. not even a pre-patch times balance change kind of thing where one move was removed or altered but a fundamental reset of the character. my muscle memory keeps betraying me because i want to throw ramlethal's fireball (gone), pull off her tekken dial-a-combo style P and K blockstrings and juggles (gone), use her command throw (gone), launch into juggle state off of normal dauro (gone), juggle with giant 2S and 2HS (gone)... she lost a lot of good tools. her neutral is strong though and it seems like footsies is a viable play style in strive. they did keep the sprit of her gameplay, which previously was full-screen corner carry via long juggling combos into countless long form corner mixups and combos. it's just less complicated to pull it off now, although you do have to spend meter for red roman cancel to get the really long corner carry combos. however having to use red RC at the correct time in the hitstun and then carefully positioning for the follow up juggle during the slowdown is interesting and challenging. her corner pressure is different but still seems strong, although corner pressure in general has been nerfed due to wall break. i think i like this change because corner pressure in xrd was pretty tough to deal with