Cian’s latest blog post is : Cast and Crew

Additionally, I heard about some kick range testing going on in Bloodlines recently and tried it myself. As was reported to me, I also found that the nagi slash and kick distances were the same as the ranges of the HoD, Black Rose, and Wave. Is this an H4 finding? Makes one wonder.

I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s due to the animation. I can slash a kick from a katana and rarely ever miss. I might be late but my aim is fine. On more than one occasion I’ve tried to slash a nagi kick and failed while the nagi user was still able to connect with their kick.

Cian’s latest blog post is : Cast and Crew

As for the other devs using the same idea… I’m not so sure that it’s been a net positive yet. Or, at least, nothing else I’ve done has generated quite as much polarization. I’ve had some more thoughts on how to make this a bit more solid and less quirky that I want to try out this weekend, and if I’m right it does work correctly then of course I’ll happily share everything with the other devs and evangelize it as much as possible.

But the method used in the Taketori has known quirks, and possibly unknown ones, and until those are resolved I can’t feel perfectly comfortable trying to convince the others to use it. Did that make any sense?

“…and with all of the talk lately about the Taketori being unbalanced (which I am not at all convinced of, by the way)…”

My nontechnical opinion is the Taketori might be working better than the other 3 makes of katana, in that it responds to user intentions more consistently in varying conditions because of your lag beating thing you did (with the back up signal for all the strikes). At least I think that’s what’s going on *if* its not faster (you said something about having numbers to show it isn’t). That might explain the range of feeling about it; its so well made, and handles so nicely, that even if people with the system sensitivity to tell a difference are less bothered by it because it feels “right”.

The reason that I thought it might still be fast was because of the last time I sparred, with Silver in Bloodlines. I lost the first three while I used a Musashi. I was unable to counter most of the kicks (which is usually an easy thing to do while taking vs a katana) and the follow up slash I couldn’t block. So everything she did was a step ahead. I could tell it was a sword issue right away, so switched to my Taketori. I won the next 2. The difference was very obvious, it was like “oh, that’s how she was doing it”. So point was I couldn’t keep up until I switched to a Taketori, and the difference was really unmistakable.

But again, it might be just that the Taketori was handling better in the lag because of your solution, and the Musashi could not keep up (even though the pace did feel distinctly faster than what I expect in a katana vs katana spar). So if its not faster, it is at the *very least* faster in some conditions relative to a Musashi (and probably the same with an ashes or arch katana).

Much more subjectively, I think it makes a lot of sense for the other developers to do what you have done with their models, since the Taketori does handle so well. It might not make sense to make yours as clunky and inconsistent as the other weapons for the sake of balance, especially when balance has become a marginal concern in the community.