Samurai Shodown / Samurai Spirits series Thread
2D SS games, brokeness meter
SS1 - good, I suppose its too simple to be unbalanced
SS2 - ok but slightly unbalanced. Its upgrade on SS1 engine
SS3 - super broken, everyone has infinite, competitively is a joke
SS4 - ok until you "dont know what you are doing", but broken on very high level play. Its upgrade on SS3 type engine and fixed SS3 errors.
SS5 - unbalanced and Yoshitora has easy infinite, competitively is a joke as well
SS5sp - perfect balance (achieved because they did lots of public tests + corrected SS5 bugs and stuff) plus bonus characters/arenas. Its like UMK3 to MK3.
SS6 - unbalanced because of ton of characters (dreammatch with all 2D chars). Engine is new and doesnt feels like any one of the old. This is like MKT and MKA combined (some of worst part of them). This game is liked best by SS noobs, but disliked by hardcore parts. Feel of engine, atmoshpere, music, and violence, blood, fatalitites were thrown in the window.
Good part of game is ton of characters and bonus characters, everyone getting new moves and stuff, Spirit groove system allowing to slap on a character gameplay system on either SS1,SS2,SS3,SS4,SS5,SS6 (original),Animal,Demon and custom Matsuri (last 3 on console version only).
Zantetsu has some infinites and nasty stuff as I heard. Judging from your character mix however, you should play as Galford and Ukyo in SS. Also dont attempt to play SS5 online unless you just like to see pretty backgrounds. Go to
http://2dfighter.com and play SS5sp online instead.
About pace...
SS1 and SS2 are tactical, you can use waiting game. Both have simple gameplay systems
SS3 and SS4 are agressive combo rush and you can combo from grab (not unlike MKD, but not so broken)
SS5 and SS5sp are again tactical, but gameplay system is pretty complex, dealing with specific character properties
SS6 - depends on spirit groove, overall damage is considerably cut down in this game, new engine has annoying things like little recoveries after attacks, big drain of sword gauge energy even on whiffed attacks, opponents being pushed towards you if you combo them in the back, and possibility of flipping opponent's weapon behind screen's border. Also arenas are shorter and smaller as I remember
There are also 4 3D iterations, I havent touched them in this post