Depends on what you look for in a fighting game. Right now the majority of the big name fighting games are all starting to lean too heavily into generic rushdown "explosive" gameplay.
Characters in FGs are starting to become less important as their own identity but rather how well they fit into the homogeneous system which leads into easy to pick up but overall boring gameplay.
SF6's drive system ends up making or breaking characters depending on if they have a cancel window with their best pokes that lead into a ez bake 30%+ combo and even without that raw drive being so powerful and cheap to get plus frames off a jab even on block leads into more volatile gameplay. Thats on top of the longer lingering hurtboxes and the fact that the cancel window on moves are so tight you can't confirm moves late so you have to really know you landed that hit. Really turns the game into an obnoxious gamble when it doesn't need to at times.
MK1 doubled down on MK11's mediocre gameplan but added assists so you can be safe on most of your strings if you're not already backdashing and shooting people with John Cena.
Tekken 8 I dont care for but the general consensus is that it's less traditional tekken due to how absurdly aggressive it is, which leads to a very unga game.
These days I stick with SNK's games since they haven't completely rework their whole game and it feels less like smashing two action figures together.
Overall think most modern fighting games lost their way cause its just as much care put into the casual viewer's experience as it is the gameplay itself which needs to be easy to follow and easier to execute so everyone can feel like Daigo.
Man I really dislike SF6 so time for a random autistic vent. I'm good enough that I got multiple characters to master rank and could stick around MR 1550 after only picking it up in April. That's not a gloat, idgf about being good at a game I dislike, it's more to contextualize that I was playing the game pretty effectively(top 3% of ranked players I think?). I don't know what the obsession is with it, but modern games seem to want to cripple your character and then use resource management as the balancing factor, I guess it's easier to homogenize things that way.
-The total lack of free plus frames is a total killjoy. Despite all of SFV flaws, at least that game let me have some damn plus frames and turn steals, now it's locked behind half of my resources(drive rush),
- The game really hates people turtling up, it wants to throw 20 options on your mental stack and also punish your resources for blocking too much.
- The game is not intuitive in its effort to be completely intuitive. I've seen several situations where a person walking into a hit by accident has been more beneficial than blocking the hit because blocking the hit would have put them in burnout and probably checkmate.
- Game is too spacing trap dependent in replacement of plus frames. I like spacing traps but I don't care for them being so up front in a game, this one may be more of a personal gripe rather than anything concrete.
On the plus side I think the ranking system is amazing in SF6, I'm not sure if you need a large playerbase to pull it off but I'd love to play a game I like with that ranking system. It's the only thing that kept me addicted as I slowly learned to hate the game for the "proper" reasons.
In terms of homogenized stuff, I think it can sometimes be fun, or at least to have some mechanics homogenized.
Under Night has pretty standard damage for 90% of the cast, and everybody has giant screen filling buttons + solid defensive system mechanics, yet they managed to make them all feel different despite the pillars of the entire game being built on these elements.
Melty Blood you can play half the cast with launcher into BC BC air throw combos but the game is fast and snappy so they are the most satisfying lame combos I've had in fighting games.
KoF has short hopping playing a critical role almost everywhere, but it's a great shared game mechanic. Under Night's assault feels partially inspired by it. Waiting for the next SNK games to drop because they look they retained a lot of fun in this modern era. Only reason I never played the previous game was because they fucked up matchmaking so badly.
Matchmaking is important because all FGC groups are full of trannies and consistent gayposting, need to be able to play the genre where you can't see or hear the degenerates.
