Upper has a really bad guard crush error that needs a patch. A3U was supposed to fix a GC inflation bug, but actually made it worse somehow, and it wasn't caught before release. Game breaking due to guard loss being permanent for the whole round and makes V-ISM even stronger.

This was clearly not intended by the devs, since they were actually trying to nerf guard crush for Upper by fixing the inflation bug. This was a coding error that didn't get caught, and since NAOMI Upper was DoA in Japan, I'm assuming nobody noticed or cared to report it before.

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Did some testing on Double Upper and the Alpha Anthology PSP port, and it's still bugged in the former, but the Anthology version of A3U actually seems to have fixed it.

This just further confirms that this was clearly an unwanted bug and not some weird design decision because the devs did fix it for a future release.

Credit to the Japanese player @a2_s for first bringing attention to this.

To clarify the scaling of GC in Zero 3, you get the inflation bug after hit 33 of your block string. Whatever their idea was to fix it in Upper caused a side effect that makes resets really strong and shifts the V-ISM meta. Z3 inflation clip from m0nk3y.

Yeah, the idea was to get rid of that near instant guard break at 33+ hits, but instead they just made it so the instant guard break happens like immediately, lol.

@nycfurby Capcom do not actually know how to make games and just make good ones by accident.

@nycfurby To be fair, this was a problem in the original NAOMI version of Upper as well. It's just literally nobody played that version, so this wasn't common knowledge, and Capcom probably didn't know to fix it for this release.

Are you asking them to patch a 25 year old game?

This kind of stuff is a shame, because I think a finely-tuned version of Alpha3 would probably the best SF game.

My ideal version of A3 is a version of MAX with all the Alpha Anthology dipswitches. And a version that keeps the crouch cancels but removes the infinites via the method I mentioned before where you cut the CH state as soon as the shadows leave.