I had never said that games with combos can't have good combat otherwise, but the execution of combos itself (pressing buttons in rhythm) is one of the worst gameplay imaginable.
What. "Otherwise"?!
So you just dislike action games and have bad reflexes, okay. I am by no means an expert, and there are people on this forum (like MaroonSkein and Edward R Murrow) who could explain this much better than I can, plus I ramble too much, but... But all your complaints about combos are so wrong... I guess your problem is that you takes combos in isolation -- as
a combo, basically, when in fact it's all about the
flow of combat. Timing
a combo is the easiest thing imaginable, and if you personally suck at it, that just means you won't even be able to scratch the surface of a good action game's difficulty. Sure it can be tedious when you have troubles executing even a single combo! But when you say combo-based combat is inflexible and non-adaptive, that's when the bullshit begins. As a matter of fact, it's one of the prime examples of a flexible and adaptive combat system. Again, the most important thing here is the combat flow -- you present things as if combat in this kind of game
started, logically, with executing a combo, i.e., as if it were centred around timing a pre-set button sequence, as if that were the top priority... But that's NOT how it works! It starts with discerning the overall pattern, the full picture and your place in it, figuring out the enemies' patterns of movement, enemy positioning, and most importantly, getting in control of your movements -- being able to
move correctly comes first, and
experimenting around with combos second -- and getting in full control of the combo system only n-th. Because, believe it or not, in a good action game every combo actually makes sense, so that you can and should figure many of them out on your own, and do it
naturally. "Naturalness" is the key to this kind of combat system, which is paradoxical given the nature of
a combo, but
that's what they're there for. Again, a combo is nothing by itself, yet when the game is well-designed, it fits perfectly in the gameplay -- after all, you
are already dancing around the battlefield, and a combo is just one movement in that dance that you must time in perfectly not just within itself, but
with all the other movements you execute as well.
If you have troubles with a combo, that only means you have problems with action combat as a whole. One flows naturally into the other, and in a combo, you only have to continue doing what you've been doing before: moving around, timing, manoeuvring, surveying the surroundings, and most importantly,
adapting -- to how many enemies there are, how they are placed, how they are moving, the patterns of their attacks, etc. (Just like you'd have to adapt to the pit and obstacle placement in a platformer; think of combos as sequence jumps, which should come naturally as soon as you've figured out the full picture.)
