@Devil:
Is that so? I spent countless hours on both games and I hadn't noticed, I thought you either had to throw the enemy or be a Paramecia fruit user to be able to break your opponent's guard ( it's been a while since I last played so I may be forgetting something ), now I feel like an idiot xD. The Level 3 specials thing I did know.
And yeah, they should implement chip damage into the game.
Yeah your guard will start weakening the more you get attacked, until an exclamation mark appears over the character's head, indicating that your guard is about to be broken. I can understand why you didn't notice it, due to how the AI abuses the blocking mechanics, by exploiting the pauses in your combos in order to prevent their guard from breaking.
What makes me feel stupid however, is that when I went back to the game to test that, I noticed that the game does have chip-damage. I'm surprised I never noticed that before, since the chip-damage is quite noticeable. I guess I never really bothered with blocking in the first place, but still to miss something like that, I really feel stupid.
I'm not really sure what can be done to make the blocking less annoying. Its main problem is that the AI, who you play against the most, can easily exploit it and abuse it to the point that you can't even land a single hit. The only times I can hit the AI is when it's in midair or by exploiting the invincibility frames after getting knocked down, which make matches against the AI really boring.
I hope that they find a solution to that, or at least give us a good online multiplayer mode so that we can play against actual people instead of getting bodied by the AI.