The style system worked for DMC3 because you couldn't overcomplicate things when you were forced to use a single style but now I think, well, no, I know that they kept the style system because people insist on keeping it. I think I mentioned this before but when I said that they need to get rid of the style system at 4chan people got rabid and I got more than one 'go back to DmC' responses. The reason they're keeping the style system is because too many people are attached to it, people who spent the last 10 years getting good at it and blame DmC's shortcomings on it's absence. If it didn't have those loud few would've made the situation with Dante's song seem positive by contrast and, yeah, we've all seen how 4chan reacts negatively. I'm pretty sure capcom is sick of getting demands for their staff to kill themselves.
Right, it's absurd that a system that really only existed because of technological constraints is being touted as an infallible feature. DmC showed us an interesting way to have a lot of capabilities with a lot of different weapons without being confined to a system that segregates your skillset so starkly. Then again, DMC4se shows us the exact same thing when there's four entire characters that work in extremely intuitive ways without having to adhere to Dante's outdated design.
Probably my biggest misgiving with how Capcom handles this is when saying that "Nero is for new players," and "Dante is for intermediates." It's sort of missing the point, because the only reason Dante is for intermediates and masters is because his control scheme is an unintuitive mess. Your left thumb does so much between movement and input tilts, but then is also for on-the-fly switching, while your fingers get used for cycling forward through and sometimes
over weapons. Like in DMC4, going from Nero who has
all of his combos on a single button, to Dante whose **** is literally all over the controller, that's not a step up in complexity, it's a break down in UX.
Dante's intermediate handling should come from execution, not design. Like, look at the Combat Adjudicators in DMC3: it's all about execution, and to bust up the high-grade versions, you
have to master and understand everything you can about a
single weapon, all of its effects, what can flow in to what while weaving together a massive chain of attacks so repetition can't cramp your style.
That's an amazing push for higher level play, that's what feels like the core of DMC4 as well - once you get to a mastery of Nero, you're thrown into the big leagues. Going from Nero to Dante hinted at this when Dante didn't build Style nearly as easily as Nero did, because your stylishness was spread out over more tools. Unfortunately, it was also unnecessarily spread out over more of the controller.
It all comes back to my simple complaint -
why can't Dante do ground and air combos on a single damned button? It's the core of the argument, especially now that we're two generations of technology removed from DMC3's limitations that birthed the system. It bugs the ever-lovin' crap outta me that the answer seems to be a strict adherence to the past. Yet, what is there to expect from the fanbase that **** on the two games that tried? Buncha ****gibbons.
Developers should never listen only to hardcore fanbases, because they are used to specific features of their favorite games and don't understand the needs of ordinary gamers.
I'm reminded of someone who complained about Metroid: Other M and its problems. While most could be argued, the most asinine thing I had heard was "The game doesn't let you sequence break, so it sucks." Their point was somehow that because most Metroid games could be sequence broken, Other M's lack of such a capability meant it was somehow lesser, despite sequence breaking not being a feature or something that was ever part of the design in the first place.