What you describe here is much closer to the more typical fighting game than what Fantasy Strike is trying to do.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but FS is a very specific attempt. Specifically it is, as it was put when I first heard it, aggressively accessible.
Before I go into my thoughts about your suggestions in terms of conceptual accessibility I want to define two terms so that there is no confusion on what I’m talking about. Those terms are complexity and depth.
Complexity is how many decisions a player has to make within a given amount of time. The greater amount of decisions and the smaller amount of time, the more complex the game. Fighting games operate on the time unit of frames (1/60 of a second), so that even a game like Dive Kick is highly complex.
Depth is how many viable strategies a player has access to. It doesn’t matter if you have 3 defensive options or 20 if only 2 of them can effectively defend you.
So, aggressive accessibility is about trying to maximize depth and minimize complexity. (Dive Kick sacrificed depth for satirical purposes.)
So, first to address adding in a second normal attack button. In terms of the FS as it stands now would add complexity to offense, but it would muddle what the attacks are for, and attacks would likely overlap/be redundant.
Crouching would effectively double available moves, making the game exponentially more complex, given that all choices are based on frames.
Adding dashes to the game has been suggested before. My situation for this is you are taking defense from 3 options to 4 (again adding a lot of complexity because of frame based decision). However, without a lot of work, it wouldn’t result in depth. The best place to put defense options for example in FS is against the Rook vortex. The two possibilities is
A) Back dashing is only effective against one option. For instance back dashing will dodge Rook’s command throw. In this case there would be little effective difference between back dashing and back jumping. Complexity has been added without adding significant depth.
B) Back dashing is effective against two of the vortex options (i.e. command grab & attack). In this case you have added complexity while actually reducing depth, as there is now a superior defensive option, making Rook a less effective character.
Lastly the HP suggestion. Simply put, the numbers themselves don’t mean a whole lot without knowing what effect they have. If Val/Setsuki have 140 health, but can still only take 5 damaging hits, there is no difference from the current health system. In that case all you are doing is adding in obfuscation (the Souls/Bourne games use this to increase the initial difficulty of their games. I’m not saying it’s bad, but it increases barrier to entry)
I’m not saying any of these ideas are inherently bad, but they don’t go with the FS philosophy of aggressive accessibility. What you describe could be, if done correctly, the next step up in complexity towards the current typical fighting game. Presently the FG market is dominated with a rather absurd barrier to entry, hence why FS was made in the first place.
