Axl Low Matchup Thoughts

I am incredibly busy lately, so instead of any insightful analysis, I’m here to provide a list of how I think my current main in Guilty Gear Strive, Axl, measures up against the rest of the cast. Our resident British zoner has done pretty alright for himself, I think, and 2 months of playing later, I think Axl is proving himself a force to be reckoned with. For context, I play Axl mainly on the celestial floor in Strive, and generally rack up enough wins to be in the top 50 Axl’s every month: so I’m no tournament superstar, but I play enough at a decent level that I think I have the experience to speak somewhat authoritatively here. So, without further ado, here we go! Oh, and I’ll be using numpad notation here, so here’s a primer if you need.

Anji Mito

Opinion: 5-5

Anji’s a weird one, because he’s definitely low tier, easy to deal with when it comes to mix, and predictable with approaching: so why’s this even? Well, it’s because his spin is really damn hard to deal with for Axl. A lot of characters deal with the spin with strike/throw reads: they’re able to threaten effective punches and slashes while also being close enough to dash in and grab him out of the spin. Axl can’t do this, due to his effective range meaning that any attempt to throw becomes really obvious. Winter Mantis is nice, but the slow startup and endlag means that it’s incredibly risky to throw out with the high damage punishes Anji gets. Add in that his fans can easily challenge your sickles when he has momentum, the fact that j.5S means you can’t threaten throw, and relatively high health, and suddenly Anji seems like an Axl main’s greatest terror. Luckily, he is low tier right now and a lot of his tools just don’t threaten you very much up close, so all these weaknesses don’t mean so much. Just keep an eye on him, for a buffed Anji shall be terrifying. 

Axl Low

Opinion: 5-5 

I mean… yeah. Practice this mirror match a lot, it’s a weird one, because when you fight another Axl you’re no longer a zoner, really. You never outrange your opponent, so it becomes this strange game of midscreen footsies where sometimes attacking first is right, sometimes it’s wrong, and you just sort of need to feel it all out. Know Axl’s deadzones, know how fast every attack comes out, and above all, get good at reading your opponent’s patterns. I don’t have a lot of in depth advice, just practice a lot and be ready to shift your mindset in the mirror.

Chipp Zanuff

Opinion: 4-6

Yeah, uh, good luck friends. Chipp is one of the best characters in the game right now and a solidly losing matchup for Axl. He’s a rushdown character that can start enforcing scary mixups at ranges you can’t properly react to. He has 3 jumps in the air, bypassing almost all of your anti-air game. Low health as a downside isn’t as bad for him when you’re a low-damage zoner. It’s pretty self-evident as to why Chipp sucks for you: just play any match against a competent player and you’ll feel it. Couple of things to watch out for in particular? j.2K is really bad for you, try to avoid it or just block it otherwise, because your 6P sucks and can’t check it at all. Use 5K a LOT in this matchup, because it makes Chipp know he can’t just run you over. Find safe gaps to use it to enforce the option in Chipp’s head, because a Chipp that has to think about how to approach you gives you a better fighting chance. In a broad sense, putting space between you and Chipp is always better than trying to check him up close. If you see an opportunity to get away, take it, and don’t even think about trying to go for any fancy up close duels. When he’s jumping up, don’t try to 2S him unless you’re sure it’ll hit, because he can jump away into a deadzone and probably j.2K you. And be very, very careful when he has meter, as Zansei Rouga can on reaction punish many of your normals at almost full screen. Winning this matchup is very much about keeping your cool and not panicking. You still have advantage states, tentative as they are, and constantly forcing Chipp back into them is your best bet. Definitely what I’d consider Axl’s worst MU at the moment, and the best case for picking up a secondary.

Faust

Opinion: 5-5(?)

Look, there are so few Faust players out there that I’m legitimately unsure how to place this matchup. I simply don’t have the experience for it unlike pretty much everyone else in the cast. My best guess is that it’s even, because whenever I’ve played it, character strength does seem evenly matched. A lot of Faust’s movement and moves (particularly Love) leave him hanging in the air and an easy target for you, and his long range is slow and his short range is short, so you have a lot of freedom to zone. That said, he does have Scarecrow to get in almost for free with 50 meter, his crawl forces you into predictable ways to hit him, and worst of all, items are generally pretty good against you. See, a lot of the problems Faust has stems from his items being useless or even detrimental. Since you’re a zoner and struggle to rush in, any item that you might want is very hard for you to contest, and a lot of Faust’s items like hammer or bomb force you to stop extending your hurtbox, giving him space. Meteor is the worst, because it just lets him get in for free, especially awful for you. Faust is… not a great character right now, and I’m not sure how to place this matchup overall, but you have serious strengths against him and he has some pretty good strengths against you, best I can tell. 5-5 for now.

Giovanna

Opinion: 5-5

Giovanna seems like a nightmare to fight for Axl on paper, and if you’re not prepared, yeah, she’ll blow you up. This is one that a lot of people are more down on, and fair enough, but I do think this matchup is more “feast or famine” for both sides than lopsided. Either you or Gio are going to most likely run the other side over in every individual round. Yes, she’s speedy and has amazing advantage up close (also low profiles 5P for some ungodly reason), but she also fundamentally only has two angles she can approach from and no real way to threaten you from fullscreen. So if she gets in, she runs you over, but if you keep her out, you can frustrate her greatly. Gio up close is also not quite as inherently threatening as a lot of the cast, as you’ll very quickly realize that her pressure has certain gaps and her strike-throw game is not as ambiguous (she has to start a throw from her step dash, which is a tell). Axl also has a couple of clever tricks here, with a couple of non obvious checks, such as 2k after you block Sepultura being pretty safe. You can also actually use faultless defense in this matchup smartly, pushing her out of range and letting you pressure back after a blockstring. So Axl isn’t helpless up close, Gio is predictable at long range, meaning that yeah, while she’s fast and rushdown and has inherent archetypical tools against you, you can weather the storm with some smart play. Feast or famine as a matchup indeed. Also, a special note, don’t let her gold burst you. Her defensive buff plus how well she can use roman cancels mean it’s a special kind of hell for a zoner to deal with. Don’t let her hit it.

Goldlewis Dickinson

Opinion: 6-4

So uh, normally I don’t give opinions on newly released character matchups until it’s developed, but, yeah, Goldlewis is extremely obviously going to be bare minimum a 6-4 for Axl. He has no tools to get around your pokes, and it’s very easy to punish thunderbird or skyfish with j.S. He’s a monster when he gets in, but getting in on Axl with poor mobility and a huge hitbox? Yeah, good luck. I don’t have many deeper thoughts right now, but yeah. Poor Goldlewis. 

I-No

Opinion: 6-4

This is a matchup that Axl has historically won in previous Guilty Gear titles, and while I agree that he still wins here, he doesn’t win quite as hard as he used to. You have many tools to shut down her unconventional angles, as 5P beats a lot of her air approaches, 6K swats her away from afar, and 2H blows up Stroke the Big Tree. However, the screen is a bit more cramped here, which helps I-No quite a bit, not to mention that you’re one of the few characters that can easily get caught out by Chemical Love with clipped extended hitboxes. If she catches you off guard with Antidepressent Scale, that’ll force you to move, which is good for her. I’m not saying that this is a bad matchup, but don’t take previous game knowledge for granted here, because the volatile nature of this game and your limited options mean that a correct read on I-No’s part can be much more lethal than previously, and she sometimes genuinely can win a round off getting in once and doing her mix well. Patience is vital here, and a patient Axl play can blow even the best I-No player up. Just don’t be shocked if you get slapped around a little learning the MU.

Ky Kiske

Opinion: 5-5

Very straightforward matchup, where it’s obvious who has the advantage when. You have advantage at half screen or closer, your chains beating Ky’s fireballs easily. However, when Ky gets in and is able to apply shock state, your life becomes a hell of a lot harder, and you have to start to be very, very afraid of his mixups and effective use of tension. However, you have good tools. If you have a good read on Foudre Arc, the best punish is 6K, as it lets you lead into a very effective combo. 5P is an effective punish tool against Dire Eclat and Stun Edge blockstring finishers, good to keep him in check. And if you block stun dipper, you can often punish with 2H, straight up. You have a lot of fantastic tools to check Ky’s pressure, but remember that all this vanishes when you’re in shock state, and that his sword is a shockingly good tool to hit you further than a lot of other characters. If he does get in, his strike/throw game is really strong and hard to deal with if he keeps you locked down, which is what keeps this matchup from being really good for Axl. Ultimately, you control the pace of neutral, so keep it that way, and use your strengths there to prevent Ky from getting the advantage and running you over in the corner.

Leo Whitefang

Opinion: 5-5

Leo is a matchup of two extremes: when he’s in neutral, he’s slow, sluggish, predictable, has no real tools to deal with you. If he’s able to get into Brynhildr stance, however, he becomes a terrifying mixup machine that you realistically can’t counter. Everyone struggles against Leo in this stance, though, so really the fact that Axl does such a good job keeping him out of the stance is great, right? Well, a couple of things. Leo has better than average range, meaning some jump in angles force you to block as his moves will beat yours. His H.Gravierte Würde will generally beat your Rensen and j.S, not good news either. Realistically, you can’t keep Leo out of backturn the entire match, and eventually you’re going to have to deal with the blender and probably eat a lot of damage. That’s the main reason why this is even, because it’s just not realistic to win neutral forever, and losing even once can be really, really rough for you. So this matchup really depends on how much of a blood price you can make Leo pay before he gets into it, and then worming out at your first opportunity to make him pay that price again.

May

Opinion: 5-5

This is one I’m still not sure on, and I’m personally weighing it more negative, but I can see a lot of arguments for it being OK or being good. 5P and 2H both stop dolphin dead in its tracks (H leading to beefy damage), and your range means Applause for the Victim is even worse in neutral than it usually is. Her approach options in general are very predictable, and you can cover many of them at once with simple anti-airs. So May struggles to get in and many of Axl’s tools work well against her, so why is this even? Because, more than any other character, one mistake vs May is really bad news for you. Her damage is higher than most in this game, and on such a read based character as Axl, that can be rough. She also has ridiculous range and disjoints on many of her aerials, meaning situations where she’s flying toward you in the air aren’t easily reactable with your less disjointed chains, and you’ll often just be forced to block and let her in.The real problem, however, is her corner pressure. Axl’s tools just don’t match up well in the corner, and your options to contest her are slow and easily punishable on whiff, all mistakes which lead to massive damage. Your fastest tool in 5K just can’t match up to her disjoints in any way either. I am personally far more down on this matchup than most, but generally from what I’ve seen it’s the matchup with the most wide-ranging opinions for Axl right now. I think it’s at least safe to call it 5-5, but keep an eye on this one.

Millia Rage

Opinion: 4-6

It’s a tossup between Millia and Chipp for Axl’s worst matchup in Strive right now. I personally think Chipp is worse, but man oh man does fighting Millia make you want to tear your hair out. It’s a twofold issue: first, her aerial mobility. Millia boasts two air dashes and two special moves (Turbo Fall and Kapel) that can all alter her momentum in the air extremely quickly. What this means is that you, as a slow, committal based character with air moves can easily be baited into throwing out an attack that she dashes away from, then using a special to quickly propel herself into a punish or a blockstring. No two ways about it, her abilities in the air are almost tailor made to deal with your anti-airs. Everyone struggles against Millia’s mixups once she’s in, but you particularly struggle because you have no moves faster than her fastest move (6 frames), no reversals without meter, and a lot of your moves can’t be used when the disc is out because they’ll extend your hurtbox into it (particularly j.H). It’s pretty obvious why this is a bad MU, but don’t give up, because it’s not hopeless. She does have low health, so any beefy hits you manage to get on her will give you a lot of progress in the round. And, conversely, your fastest normal tends to outrange hers, so a lot of Millia’s ground approaches can be stuffed with 5K: don’t forget that she has nothing faster than that, so don’t be afraid to throw it out. Millia is rough, don’t get me wrong, but hardly cause to give up.

Nagoryuki

Opinion: 6-4

Nago is a very solid matchup for you overall, luckily. He’s pretty slow, has no air mobility, and a lot of his moves can’t properly challenge yours even in bloodgauge 2. All his fast movement options are grounded and all he has in the air is a slow jump, meaning he in particular is vulnerable to the threat of Winter Mantis. A special note also for 2H, as it’s a powerful space control tool for him, but if he whiffs it it’s very easy for you to 2H back and get a powerful counterhit into Rensen. You have to keep an eye on his bloodgauge, because the tools he has against you change depending on the level. At 0 or 1, his range is terrible but he has more freedom to use his special moves, so feel free to make him uncomfortable at midrange but keep in mind that whiffing moves is very risky for you due to his explosive nature. Bait him into using blood, and if you’re caught in a combo, don’t be afraid to burst out early, leaving him with high blood at full screen. In bloodgauge 2, it’s extremely easy for you to bully him as he’s locked out of free use of his special moves and only has a very easy to check superjump. This is your advantage state, in a sense, and it should be what you seek to take advantage of in this matchup. The game state will eventually shift to a huge advantage for you, and that’s where you take true advantage of Nago and use your range to frustrate him. Feel the matchup out, know when it’s safe to do what, and Axl has the upper hand in the long term.

Potemkin

Opinion: 6-4

Ah, the archetypical one-sided Guilty Gear matchup hasn’t changed one bit. It is extremely obvious why Potemkin is a good matchup for you. He’s slow, has a huge hitbox, you outrange him, and you have Rensen to chew through his super armored attacks. Your greatest tool in this matchup is by far j.S, as he has basically nothing that can punish it even if you whiff it or if he armors through it. It’s so self-evident as to why you beat Potemkin honestly, I’m not sure what else to say, so here’s a couple of things to watch out for from good players. 5H is a really good tool for Potemkin to contest space, made even better in this game due to the screen being slightly more cramped, so try to stay out of that range as much as possible. Good Potemkins can crouch and position themselves just right to make it so that the only normal you have that can hit him is 2H. This forces you to either be predictable at range (and easy to armor through) or approach him slightly, so try to make it hard for him to camp this range. Megafist can hop a lot of your normals as well, and good Pots can and will make it the last thing on your mind: it’s an extremely potent option for him if you forget about it, so do not forget. And finally, just uh, don’t get hit by Garuda impact? For the love of god just try not to even block it, as it’s practically a win state for Potemkin in this game and he knows it. This is a very good matchup for you, but do not get complacent and treat it as a free win, because good players will not make it such.

Ramlethal Valentine

Opinion: 4.5-5.5

Ramlethal is a matchup that seems oppressive, and it is, but it’s not as bad as at first glance. First, the bad: she wins neutral against you, somehow. Her moves are way more disjointed than yours and absolutely have the range to challenge yours, and she gets a lot more corner carry and therefore advantage state off stray hits compared to you. Being in the corner against Ram is still terrible as it is for everyone. Her supers are terrifying to you, as Calvados can be used on reaction to beat Rensen, and Mortobato has so much range as to threaten your normally safe oki. So what makes this not horrible? You have long range options when stuck in the corner that Ram has to keep in mind: she has to respect 5P especially as it can stop her dash pressure dead in her tracks and j.H/j.S can dodge the explosion and stuff her. While neutral isn’t great for you, it’s not unwinnable, and there are many angles that you do shut her down from, her j.H in particular being a very poor tool against an attentive Axl. And besides her supers, she has very little in defense or approach options, so she’s put in a position of having to approach while not being the most suited to it, giving you the ability to decide the pace of the match. Ramlethal is very scary and her corner pressure is particularly nasty to your low-guts zoner self, but this is the “best” of your bad matchups and the closest to 5-5. Don’t give up by any means, stay out of the corner, and lab out your unique responses to her pressure.

Sol Badguy

Opinion: 5-5

What? Sol “Clean hit viper” Badguy, famed top tier of the game, has an even matchup with Axl? Yeah, actually, I don’t think the Sol matchup is that bad. His pressure game is terrifying and one wrong move can blow you up, but there’s a lot going your way in this matchup, mainly that his approach is very linear. Sol’s approach options aren’t fantastic and he has little in the way of challenging your tools. Vortex is very easy to blow up with 2H, and bandit bringer’s air hang is just begging for a sickle to the face. His gunflame as a pressure ender is easy to challenge with 5P, and in general your ability to pressure oki from far away means his ridiculous DP isn’t as much of a threat. All that said: it’s still Sol, f.S puts you into a very nasty guessing game, his damage is cranked, and you have to play this entire matchup on eggshells. But it’s playable and winnable because he’s so linear when he’s not up close, and proper play can mean he has to give up almost half health to get in close once. Your greatest strength is that this is ultimately a straightforward matchup where almost every situation (besides f.S) has a clear solution on your end, meaning that if your reads are on point, Sol can be shut down. Don’t crack under the pressure and Sol is manageable. 

Zato-ONE

Opinion: 6-4

Zato is my pick for most currently underrated character, but luckily for you, this matchup is not overrated for him, as it’s pretty solid for Axl. Zato’s air mobility is slow and predictable, easy to check, and his grounded approach options are terrible on account of your 5P clipping his dash. Full screen Oppose might seem like it provides cover for him to get in, but oops command grab beats that too! In general, Eddie is also not very useful from fullscreen because you can safely poke at him in order to desummon him, so Zato is stuck fighting by himself anywhere besides close up, making your advantage state in neutral smothering. Now, Zato is terrifying up close when he does pressure you, yes, and very often when he gets in it’s next to impossible avoiding getting wallbroken, but that just means you get reset back to neutral, where you have a crushing advantage. Again, not a free win, but a floaty, predictable character whose main strength gets shut down at full screen is going to be in your favour. Check him well and especially abuse your command grab, and he’s going to have a really bad time.

So that’s everyone! I think Axl is in a pretty good spot in the fledgling meta, all things considered. There’s only one top tier everyone thinks he loses to right now, and he can trade blows very well with many of the strong and mid tier characters in the cast. I can’t think of anything in particular I want changed about him, as no matchup (besides Ramlethal but that’s more on her, not him) feels wonky or underdeveloped. Axl’s fundamental gameplan is very solid as is, and putting him into the explosive damage environment of Strive has ended up with a zoner that’s more about tripping the opponent up off one big hit instead of death by a thousand sickles. I can’t think of any tools it feels like he’s desperately missing, and he fills the niche of patient, neutral dominant playstyle with some fun (albeit linear) combos as a reward. Short of adding new moves, I can’t think of anything besides a better 5P hitbox I think he needs. I’d probably place him just under top 5, or maybe even #5 in the cast, though I am an eternal character optimist. Axl is fun, worthwhile, and has defined strengths and weaknesses that are fun to play around. What more can you ask for in a fighting game character?

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So, How Does Guilty Gear Strive Feel Anyway?

Older Guilty Gear titles were never really my thing, despite the clear quality of almost every game in the series. They were fantastic games in every way: an incredible combination of depth and speed in gameplay with smartly considered system mechanics that promoted frantic, fun offense. On top of that, they were incredible visual and audible treats, with a killer aesthetic that I personally think no other series has even come close to. Guilty Gear was never that big, but among the fighting game audience, it’s always been pretty revered. But like I said, it was never much my thing to sink my teeth into and really practice. I’d play them with friends and have some casual matches in matchmaking, and they’d be fun, but the games never really called out to me as something that was for me, and thus I retreated back into my comfort zone of Super Platinum Street Fighter. But no more, because a new Guilty Gear has come out, Guilty Gear Strive. It is incredibly different from all the old ones, and this new one is incredibly my thing. This game has all the style and bombast of the older games, but has dramatically rethought the general pace and functionality of the systems, and as a result has created something very, very different. Is it better? Worse? Well, it’s mostly just a difference, and let me tell you, that difference plays into my tastes in fighting games extremely well. So what makes this new game so different, and why do I love it so much?

There’s been a lot of hubbub about the idea that Strive has simplified itself in the name of appealing to new players, and I figure that’s probably the thing to tackle first as a result. The developers have been very open about how this game is pulling back on a lot of the “complexity” of the older games to try to appeal to new players more. I’ll go into if I think this was successful later, but if you’re already into fighting games, your question is probably how this affects the actual game and your experience with it. I would say that this manifests most strongly in the number of systems and options being cut down, broadly. Basically, if you’ve played older Guilty Gears, this one differs in cutting much of the fat of older game systems and moves in a bid to really hone in on what they think the important stuff is, and all that important stuff hasn’t had depth removed at all. Where a character might have had 9 special moves in previous games, they’ll now have a total of say 5, and where you might expect dead angles, hellfire, danger time, burst supers and more, now the system mechanics are just a couple of key factors. It is important to point out that all the remaining stuff in the game is still as rich as ever in their own individual corners, it’s just… less. I would say this is more of a lateral shift in quality at a high level, mostly because as many other fighting games have proved, less options can make for some very interesting interactions between players. If I only have one decent combo starter as Axl, then the mindgames turn from “what option of like 5 will they choose that all overlap” and it becomes “will they go for a blockstring or grab, or a sweep”, all of which now have very specific and defined counters, making the game not slower, but more deliberate in how you have to choose what option to throw out or respond with. This game is lesser in the number of options, but don’t think for a second that’s stripped away any depth, because the mindgames are still there, still in full force, and in an extremely interesting spot because of how limited this game is compared to older games.

But, OK, so I clearly think depth has likely been preserved just fine, but how does the game feel to play? Well, in a word: fantastic. This game just feels so damn good to play, and it’s because the direction taken has been so confidently executed. You’ve probably heard that Strive is a high damage game, and that’s absolutely true: you’ll see life bars melt at speeds you’d never see in most other fighting games. This is fun, actually. Really damn fun. Rounds can swing wildly depending on who’s making the best calls or not, and it kind of inherently creates this fast paced play experience where you and a friend can hammer out rounds back and forth with each other, never discouraged by a quick loss and feeling great when you win. Part of why this works is because of the combo system, and how combos are intentionally much shorter. Losing a lot of health doesn’t really feel that bad when the combo will be over in like 5 seconds, tops, right? These two things work together great to make rounds feel fast and satisfying, but how exactly is this sustained? That is to say, if combos are simple, and there’s no need to go beyond those simple combos, isn’t the game going to get stale fast? That’s a fair concern to have, but have no fear, because Strive’s new Roman Cancel system swoops in to save the day. It works much like the old system in that it lets you instantly cancel out of any action, but this time around, it also sends out a shockwave that hits the opponent, and crucially, allows you to continue a combo from that shockwave hit. What this means, essentially, is that it’s possible to convert into an extremely damaging combo off almost any part of your character’s moveset, and the possibilities provided by that are incredible. All the expression and depth in long combos has been moved to your ability to find a good hit in neutral and then find a way to convert that into a powerful combo, and that’s such a unique and satisfying feeling to have a game give. Strive is a game all about optimizing how you can land that first hit for your beefy combo to follow. Do you use your resources to extend your mixups? Use it to confirm a light hit into a fairly good combo? Maybe you just want to save your resources to make your next good hit as damaging as possible. There’s a bunch of advanced stuff too, like using the roman cancel to recover out of a whiffed move faster and punishing your opponent’s attempted punish! There’s so much freedom available in everything before the combo, and the combo then becomes your quick and big reward for playing your cards right. That’s why Strive is such a unique and cool feeling game when you really dig into it and try to get better.

Another thing that I think has been an incredible success of this game is how polarized and varied the characters are. Fighting games in the modern era often have characters drift together closer and closer in how they play, mostly in the name of balance, and I get why: you want to make sure nobody is giving up once they see their bad matchup appear on the opponent’s side. The days of Dhalsim basically being guaranteed to beat Zangief at your local arcade are rightfully seen as frustrating and slapdash, and it’s why you see characters being given tools to deal with said frustrations, inevitably kind of sanding away character weaknesses and strengths. Strive is, I think, an admirable attempt to make every character feel incredibly distinct through polarization and careful consideration of anything that goes against their archetypes. First: every character in Strive is polarized into their archetype niche to an incredible degree. Potemkin is a grappler, with almost no mobility, but a terrifying command grab that can do about 40% life. Chipp has the most options and incredible speed, but breathe on him and he might die. Ky can do everything well, but has an extremely hard time opening the opponent up with such a direct playstyle. Everyone is in their niche quite firmly, and it feels great to play a zoner who really will get destroyed up close, or a rushdown character so helpless at long range. The other side of the coin, however, is the reality that even the most polarized characters need ways to fight their most hellish matchups. Nobody is going to enjoy playing Potemkin if there’s a chance they’ll fight a character that they basically can’t beat, so these characters still need tools to be able to function at all times. For some characters, it’s as simple as using the universal mechanics. Ky can’t open people up well, but he does have the universal tools of an overhead and grab, and the developers made sure he gets terrifying lockdown and mixup off a grab, ensuring that his all rounder playstyle can never truly be stopped by a smart defensive character. Potemkin gets a slow dashing move with one hit of super armor, meaning that if he gets a good read on a projectile, he can indeed bypass it. Crucially, these tools never make the characters feel like they’re drifting away from their archetypes. Ky’s other options are still slow and readable, meaning that most of his pressure is still defined by obvious but strong options. Potemkin does get a dash, but it’s slow, lumbering, and clunky, still making him feel like a fortress of a grappler who is limited in movement. These characters feel defined and strong in their gameplay identities, and though this is still early, so flexible in how they can be played. I’ve seen Giovanna being played as darting in and out and as neverending pressure, I’ve seen Axl played defensively and offensively (my preference as a filthy zoner), I’ve seen all kinds of different mixup patterns from I-No. The game feels so rich in how it can be played.

There are problems, of course. In terms of game balance, luckily we’re far past the days of SF4 launch balance, thank god. However, there’s definitely still some clear problems if you’re a stickler for it, mainly in that Sol Badguy is very much overtuned right now, and there’s a general community sentiment that Faust and Anji might be slightly undertuned. Nothing major or gamebreaking, luckily, but you definitely get the sense that we’re still in early days of a new fighter, where balance is a bit rockier. If that’s going to be an issue for you, well, Strive definitely hasn’t broken that new game balance curse. And in terms of actually playing a game… woof. The game is still plagued by annoying server issues and more deep seated multiplayer design choices. Matches will fail to connect all the time, online takes forever to load, and it’s exceedingly frustrating to have your opponent pool be limited to only 23 other people at a time in a lobby. None of these are dealbreakers, I think, but it’s certainly a part of the game that’s worth considering for many, because yeah, getting into a game can be just as important as how the game feels itself. Here’s hoping many of these issues can get fixed down the road.

Finally, a note on new player accessibility: they knocked it out of the park, I think. This is a fantastic game with mechanics that inherently teach players new to fighting games key ideas and concepts. Not in terms of simplification per se, but in how the game feels to play and what you learn from that. A few things off the top of my head? Combos being smaller mean that new players can see themselves doing substantial damage without feeling frustrated in the process, which feels very good. By the same token, because they’re so short, the feeling of being stuck in your opponent’s combo is short and fleeting, so frustration stemming from that is also lessened. The removal of the traditional gatling system means that there’s no way to get confused about the purpose of each move: punches are to interrupt pressure, slash is the best combo starter, and new players won’t get bogged down in mashing. This means that the game is pushing them to use each move with intentionality, which is exactly the feeling you want people to have. I have never seen a fighting game where more people are trying to intentionally interrupt pressure instead of mashing for some combo. Roman cancels give you time to reset and continue your combo, so at a low level they’re easier to use, while the slowdown is still creating interesting choices (like a side switch) at higher levels. The heavy emphasis placed on counterhits in UI and gameflow are also a good indicator to new players that, hey, this is important, you can do something off this, and gives them a chance to really react. So, like, yeah, we can debate how this game feels to an experienced eye all day. Just remember that in terms of appealing to and teaching new players, I think it’s a smashing success of design that deserves recognition. Every part of the game is explicitly designed to make it easier for new players to play with intentionality faster. It goes far beyond “simplification”. 

So, yeah, about 3 weeks on, Guilty Gear Strive feels fantastic, and is a hell of a lot of fun, with a lot to chew on. The game’s intricacies are still being discovered now, hell, I’m still discovering ways to use system mechanics for my gameplay even after weeks of nonstop playing. Most importantly, though, it just feels punchy, fast, and engaging on a basic level, and you have no idea how happy I am to report that. I was a little bit worried that the game would lose its identity as Guilty Gear, making such radical changes. But with matches still feeling so fast, with the music still pumping, with style and energy radiating from every match? Yeah. This is still Guilty Gear at its very core. It feels as fantastic as ever, and I think it’s going to be a great staple of the genre for a good while to come. I personally hope this is not the direction of every fighting game franchise going forward: I still want crazy complicated, tech heavy, wild fighters out there. But taken on its own, Strive is such an interesting and fun take on the anime fighter that you won’t hear me complaining that it’s like this. It’s a great time, through and through.

Thanks very much to my lovely patrons, and a very special thanks to Acelin,  Cynamon, emma space, Jane Wick, Kelli Mariella K, Margarida Silva, MerrylBerryl, Modnar, Shaun Adarkar, Sinon Lynx, and Zachary Griesbach.

If you like what you’ve read, consider donating to me on Patreon and joining these lovely people. Thanks for reading!

Some Tips For Starting With Fighting Games

Fighting games are a bit of a beast of a genre to learn, intentionally so. They’re one of those kind of games that try to deliver engagement through competition and the drive to learn, that is to say, the engagement isn’t handed to any player automatically. It’s a bit of an agreement between the game and player, where it can be a lot of hard work to learn, but it’s self directed, engaging, and rewarding hard work. Getting better at fighting games has been a lot of fun for me over the last few months, and now with Guilty Gear Strive being out and being fantastic, I’m seeing a lot more interest from people in making that climb or at least trying it to see if it’s for them. That’s awesome, but it’s also understandably a little scary for some people, not knowing where to start or what best practices are. I don’t have all the answers, but I do still keenly remember what it’s like to be new to the genre, so I figured why not put to paper some starter tips that I think can help a lot of newbies out. This isn’t the be all end all, just some stuff I think can help, and hopefully you can take something from it.

One of the first things people tend to ask me is, well, Lauren, if I want to play fighting games, what fighting game should I start with? Fair question! It’s not obvious like with a lot of other games, because if you want to learn League of Legends or Counter-Strike, you just… play those games. Fighting games tend to be awash in sequels and share mechanics, however, so a starting point is not as obvious. Now, I could say to just play what you want, and sometimes that’s the right choice. If there’s one specific game that grabs you and motivates you through style, or if you’ve got a good friend group that will be a blast to hang out with and learn, then pretty much anything will work. But if you don’t have an obvious choice, the greatest piece of advice I can give you is play something new. If you want to learn fighting games, picking something new is vital I think, because that is how you guarantee a population of new players who are at the same skill level as you. It’s all well and good if KOF 98’ on fightcade calls out to you, but there will not be a lot of fun to be had in slamming your head against a wall of experienced veterans. I don’t care how much you could hypothetically learn from facing vets, it is not fun to get curbstomped, and if you really want to learn fighters, having some fun in the process is vital to staying motivated. Fighting other players at your skill level is important, and if a game’s not new, that’s gonna get a lot harder. It doesn’t matter what game calls out to you, if it’s Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat or Guilty Gear. They’re all good choices to learn the genre, any game is: but if you’re miserable when trying to learn, what’s the point?

So you’ve chosen the game you want to have a shot at. Great! The next big question awaits you, however: what character do you pick? Fighting games are a genre where applying what you’ve learned is only possible if you really understand the character you’ve assumed control of. That is to say, bouncing between characters is probably not the best idea if you want to build a solid foundation, because you don’t want to be constantly reevaluating and messing up due to constantly changing tools. Not to say that you can’t! Many people find it great fun to just mess around with a lot of characters at a beginner level, and that’s very alright, but if you’re interested in gaining competence, I’d say that finding your toolset to learn with and sticking with it is going to help much more. In that spirit of learning, a lot of new players will ask what the “best” character to learn with is, who will give them “solid” fundamentals. People will often then direct them to the most standard characters, like Ryu, Sub-Zero, Ky Kiske. Sure, these characters are the most basic, and if that appeals to you, hell yeah. But I think that the idea of one solid core of fundamentals in most fighting games is kind of flawed. Every character in every game has something unique about them, a gameplan different from everyone else’s. They will still have to contend with the core mechanics, resources, all kinds of situations. Ryu doesn’t teach you “Street Fighter fundamentals”, Ryu teaches you how to play Ryu! A solid core understanding of any game will simply come from engaging with the mechanics with any character, frankly, and you will always have to learn character gameplans even with the most basic shoto. Honestly, everyone going to these “easy” characters is a problem, even, because what if you don’t like them? What, you’re supposed to be stuck with this character you don’t like the look or feel of? So I say, choose who you want, and don’t worry about who will teach you the “right” way. There’s no right way to play a game, just your character’s way, and you’ll always have to learn one of those.

But, like, how do you pick a character even? There’s a lot of ways, but if you’re new to the whole genre, a lot of them aren’t going to mean much to you. “They’re a grappler” or “they’re a zoner” isn’t going to be helpful if you’re not sure what’s even fun to you. So, here’s what I’d recommend. Pick some character that looks cool to you, whatever reason. Now, don’t go into training mode and memorize all their moves: check the command list, and then just jump into some matches, whether against real people or the AI. I’m serious! The thing is, what ultimately matters about a character in the long run is how they feel moment to moment, if the things they can do feel satisfying to you. The ability to enjoy their gameplan will flow naturally if you just enjoy how they feel. So go take that cool looking character and just mess around with them for a bit! How do they feel, are there any moves that jump out to you, do they feel visually satisfying. It doesn’t have to be much! I know people who decided to play Ken in Street Fighter because they loved how his step kick felt, or Baiken in Guilty Gear because they thought her animation was stellar. It doesn’t have to be much, but something has to make that character fun to you on some basic level. If you mess around with them and aren’t feeling it, cool! Go try someone else. But don’t worry about if a character is too hard or has an unfitting playstyle, none of that. If a character feels fun, it is worthwhile to go the distance with them. Every time, when I play a new game, without fail, I never regret sticking with a character whose basic tools just felt good when I was flailing around and new. It’s the best measure I’ve ever found for trying to figure out how you want to play.

This is all basic stuff, the initial choices you make, and certainly, it’s important to overcome that uncertainty and just go for it, but where do you even start? Everyone starts somewhere, and sometimes it’s with whatever interest them. Some people practice in training mode for hours because they simply enjoy a mechanically demanding challenge, which is what that often is. But you are probably not like that, and want a way to learn without being bored out of your skull. I would say that you want to focus on one thing at a time, and then try to execute on that thing in real matches, regardless of how “optimal” it is or how inconsistent you are. Let’s say you’re struggling with quarter circle forward inputs, which is pretty common for new players. Go into training, and make sure you can do it semi-consistently first. Then hop into real matches and focus on opportunities for your qcf move as possible. New players often run into the issue that they think that spending endless time in training is the one right way to learn these games, and let me tell you, it doesn’t. You want to use training mode as a way to practice new concepts, but ultimately you do have to implement them under pressure in a match. It doesn’t matter how good you are at a qcf in theory if you can’t whip it out as soon as you need, and the same goes for every other technique you can think of. So don’t sweat it: make sure you can do what you need to in a vacuum, and then focus on being able to do it in a real match. You won’t get bored in training, you’ll get actual experience besides that one technique, and you’ll have a goal to shoot for as you play. That last part is vital, because it’s easy to get wrapped up in learning everything at once. Breath, slow down, and focus on implementing one new thing at a time while also having fun. When you want to learn something new, then, you’ll have a gameplan to follow, and a way to learn while also not just cooping yourself up in training mode. I’ve done this for something as basic as when to use a kick and as complicated as high resource combos. It is an engaging and active way to learn fighting game concepts, and I think a lot of people find it that way too. Don’t overwhelm yourself, and remember to just play for fun sometimes if you need it, too!

Finally, for new players, there is one vital piece of advice that you absolutely need to know: don’t worry about combos for a good while. Seriously. It is very easy to get tempted by impressive looking combos, because it’s the most obvious thing to you when you watch experienced players going at it. Trust me though, you do not want to fall into the trap of trying to jump into that deep end right away if you’re new. The most important reason is frankly because the core of building up skill at fighting games is in your ability to win interactions, not combos. Controlling space, building momentum, getting stray hits, that is what wins games in the long run, and if you just focus on combos, you’re going to miss out on all this. Experientially, however, I also think it’s just important to not focus on combos at first because combos are harder when you’re unfamiliar with a character. Without actual gameplay and feel experience, you’re just trying to execute a series of contextless buttons with no understanding of the timing, space, feel,  none of that. As an example, here’s a basic combo for my Street Fighter V character (Poison): crouching medium punch, medium punch, qcf medium kick. That’s the combo, but that series of 3 inputs by itself tells you nothing about how you have to time the combo. You’re not going to know you need a bit of a delay between the crouching and standing punch, you can’t tell you need to quickly input the qcf without delay, and you don’t know what signs to look for to learn how to link these moves together. Without some time spent with the character, getting to know how their moves feel and interact, learning combos is incredibly frustrating and unenjoyable. Once you get a feel for how long x move takes to finish, or the stagger time on x move, then you can start to look at combo guides and just get a better feel for how to link it all together. Don’t feel discouraged if you can’t do stuff like that at the start. Focus on getting a feel for your character, and once you feel confident in controlling and understanding all their individual moves, then I think you’ll be surprised how much easier putting together a combo can become.

I hope that if you’re new to fighting games and concerned about the process of learning, that this has given you some small amount of guidance or reassurance. Fighting games aren’t about spending days locked away in training mode studying for a test, at the end of the day. They’re experiences you should enjoy at every moment, playing the game, having fun, and learning through that fun. That’s how you should learn fighting games: however is the most fun to you. I’ve mostly just tried to give advice that helps most people with having fun, really, and that’s what you should hold most important if you really do want to learn this genre. There’s a lot to be gained, a lot of work you can put in, and a lot of genuine accomplishment and community to be had by taking the plunge. None of that is going to come without having some fun, however, and when you’re starting out, picking the right game, character, and mindset is so much more important than any theory or combo. Play with friends, play with random people of your skill, and learn when you can. But never forget to always have fun first.

Thanks very much to my lovely patrons, and a very special thanks to Acelin,  Cynamon, emma space, Jane Wick, Kelli Mariella K, Margarida Silva, MerrylBerryl, Modnar, Shaun Adarkar, Sinon Lynx, and Zachary Griesbach.

If you like what you’ve read, consider donating to me on Patreon and joining these lovely people. Thanks for reading!

Why People Still Love Third Strike

Street Fighter 3: Third Strike is a fantastic fighting game, and spend any time around fighting game communities, and you’ll quickly understand it’s a beloved classic. But more than just being a classic people think back fondly on, it’s actually still pretty relevant in the scene, surprisingly. People talk about it all the time, find new tech and scenarios to experiment with, and if you log onto Fightcade, the online multiplayer arcade emulator, you’ll see hundreds of people playing matches. Third Strike isn’t some relic from the past: it’s an active and growing community with a lot of engagement and activity. This leads a lot of people to ask, well, why? We’ve had a lot of Street Fighter games since this one, and it’s been over two decades since this game came out. What is it about Third Strike that gets people still excitedly entering tournaments and sparring against strangers? Well, I’ll tell you right now that it’s not because this game is secretly better than more recent fighting games in some objective manner. Third Strike gets so much attention because of how completely unique it is. You can’t get the experience it offers anywhere else because so many of the little details are completely different from more modern fighters. The little details can be hard to spot, though, so I thought it’d be fun to explain to the uninitiated out there why this game still holds such a dedicated fanbase.

I bet you’ve all seen this clip, right? It’s the single most iconic thing this game has produced, have no doubt, and fittingly, it spotlights the mechanic this game revolves around: parrying. Parrying in Third Strike is simple in concept, tap forward or down depending on the move, and you’ll parry an attack, take no damage, and be in a position to follow up with a move much faster than if you’d have blocked. This clip is what most people instinctively think that leads to, which is high paced games where superhuman reaction times of parrying a 17 hit super is what wins games. While moment 37 is an awesome piece of fighting game history, I’ve always felt that it kind of misrepresents what Third Strike is like to play. Frankly, adding parries doesn’t make every game a godlike reaction time slugfest where every move is being parried left and right, not even close. Go watch an average match where people know what they’re doing right now (here’s a nifty example) and you might be surprised how much blocking is still being done. So how does parrying actually impact the game?

Let’s put this in context first. Remember that Third Strike was a followup to the endless rereleases of Street Fighter 2. While certainly a fantastic game, many players had a common complaint about it, right or wrong: too much projectile spam. With how strong pushback and fireball damage was in that game, and the limited options around them, fireballs and zoning ruled the meta of SF2, or at the very least was frustrating many, many players. In light of this, and the limited defensive options a player had in general, the devs of 3 clearly wanted to give everyone better tools to defend against ranged play and a bit of spice up close, and thus, parrying was invented, giving every character a way to swat away fireballs and close in. However, there have definitely been a lot of unintended consequences from this mechanic, all of which end up giving Third Strike an incredibly unique feeling. Let’s start with that fireball problem: parries completely dumpster fireballs. Normally in fighting games, you throw a fireball to try to force the opponent to move or to force them to take chip damage. Parries are so quick that fireballs barely impact how a good player can move around the screen in many circumstances, and because they make you take no chip damage, the opponent has essentially gotten nothing. If I throw a fireball and my opponent parries it, they’re not in blockstun, taken no damage, and even build some meter, while I get nothing. This is why a good Ryu in SF3 will not throw fireballs nearly as much as a good Ryu in SF2, because what you get and what the opponent gets has been drastically flipped on its head. This completely changes how it’s best to play the game, obviously, and 3 is a much more close ranged game than almost every other Street Fighter as a result. A lot of characters clearly had to be designed with this in mind, with more tools at the close range, and there are many characters with more inventive takes on fireballs (Ibuki). This isn’t some random side effect, it was clearly considered quite a bit, and regardless of the ultimate outcome, it is clear that many people enjoy the more limited use of projectives Third Strike forces. It is not better or worse, just different. The projectile game is clearly still there, but fundamentally altered, and it is extremely interesting to dig into for many.

Let’s also consider the ramifications on the air game. Street Fighter is a series that usually positions the air as an extremely risky place. You can’t alter your arc or speed usually (think the old Castlevania jumps), and you definitely can’t air block in most of them. What this means is if you jump at an opponent, you’re absolutely risking them swatting you out of the air, and if they’ve correctly guessed your action, there’s literally nothing to be done. A jump in in Third Strike, however, is not so simple, because you can parry in the air, thereby bypassing the anti-air and probably getting some damage back. Does this make anti-airs useless? Not at all! Since parrying requires precise timing, you can simply delay your attack to fake the opponent out, making them whiff their parry input and giving you that sweet, sweet punishment. Of course, the opponent could realize this, and start varying up when they want to parry just as much, and they might just realize that, hey, if you’re looking for a parry, you’re not looking for an attack, and that’s an opening! This then quickly spirals out into all sorts of mindgames and conditioning that fighting games live on. Like, if I’ve been parrying all my opponent’s anti-airs, on my next jump in, I know they’re more likely to do nothing, which means I can get a free attack or just jump in for my sweet command grab… and so it goes. This game turns jump ins into a whole minefield of mindgames, where instead of “did I catch them off guard” it becomes “did I correctly read how they’ve been playing in this moment”, and that feeling is incredibly fun to a lot of people. Parries fundamentally change the air game of SF, is the point, and no other game in the series has really done this, and for fair reasons. Parries ultimately end up limiting the kinds of characters that can be made in many ways. Committal anti-airs with wind up become next to useless like this, and it’s clear that it makes jumping generally less committal than the design of some games wants. Like I’ve mentioned, I play Poison in 5, and a huge part of her gameplan is trying to bait the opponent into jumping over her whip attacks, and if you do it correctly, you’ve then checkmated them into eating one of her very powerful anti-airs. That kind of design would fall apart if every jump is functionally a mixup scenario instead of a win state for Poison, you know? It’s not better or worse design to include parries, but it’s clear that the developers of later games have felt that the design space that they want wouldn’t work with parries. People play and enjoy parry and parry-less SF, and parries create interesting scenarios that grip the mind of many players. That’s why a lot of people stick with 3: it’s just a kind of design that they love.

There’s also some miscellaneous stuff that people generally think is cool about the game. The whole parry thing makes frame data less of a sure thing: a character with a 2 frame startup punch (Chun-Li) can often just throw it out for free against a character with at most a 3 frame punch (Ryu), but of course, Ryu can just try to go for a parry! It makes the differences in frame data less of a gulf, and more of a better tool that still has counters besides “block”. Speaking of gulfs, powerful system mechanics generally tend to make the differences between tiers of characters less pronounced. Any low tier can make a good parry read into a damaging combo, for example, making their poor tools less of an issue in many scenarios. Chun-Li is top tier and Q is low tier, but I’ve absolutely seen good Q’s in tournaments mess up good Chuns because they were able to use these universal mechanics to patch up their weak spots and find openings for Q’s (limited) strengths. Most SF games don’t have such a universal mechanic, with later game gimmicks giving characters specific tools instead of one sweeping, universal tool, so people who like powerful tools like this find that Third Strike suits their tastes better. It certainly does have the helpful side effect of scrunching the tier lists ever so slightly closer together, even if you don’t care for the tech exploration. Alongside that, something people like in terms of flavor is simply different super bar lengths! Depending on which of 3 supers you choose, you’ll get different kinds of super meter bars, which effects how much that super can be used and how much you can use EX moves (powered up special moves). Later Street Fighter games gave static amounts of super bar to everyone, which is probably for the best balancing wise (some 3S supers are useless due to this) but it’s a bit of flavor that again, a lot of people prefer and enjoy due to taste.

And finally, I mean, Third Strike is an audiovisual treat that basically no game since has replicated. Pixel art is expensive, time consuming, and hard to modify and work with in a modern era, so it’s no shock that most fighting game franchises moved to 3D or different kinds of spritework when it became standard, simply because of how flexible that shift could make them. Third Strike was basically the last big name game that really went all in on pixel art (besides KOF), and my god is it gorgeous. You might not think graphics matter too much to a dedicated competitive audience, but it just makes the game feel so good. It looks old school but feels so smooth and fluid, and it’s undoubtedly gotten a lot of people interested in trying this old arcade game out. I don’t have the knowledge or experience to explain it in detail, but I mean, just look at it. It’s good. The soundtrack is also aces, and also does something no game in the series has done since, which is progression between rounds. Each song is broken up into 3 parts, and a new part will play for round 1, 2, and 3. This generally gives a really cool feeling of progression to each fight, a musical up and down that hasn’t been replicated since. Quite frankly, it’s one of the biggest things I miss from this game when I go and play later games in the series, because man, that little pinch of buildup makes the whole match that much cooler. Plus, the music is very unique, with a lot of D&B influence that makes the whole soundtrack stand out. Plus there’s a rap at the character select! How can you turn that down?

Third Strike is so loved and played nowadays because it’s so different, jank and all. Yes, it’s old, yes, it’s unbalanced as hell, and yes, it’s got a bunch of weird ideas that never quite panned out. But you can’t get what it does anywhere else, and the quality of those ideas on display is evident for those who love them. What I want to emphasize here, more than anything else, is that Third Strike isn’t some superior tier of gaming. A lot of people get it into their heads that it’s for the toughest competitors, a true test of skill, and that’s not really true. Again, go on fightcade, and you’ll see a lot of people who are just random casual players having a blast with friends or strangers. Third Strike is simply an incredibly unique flavor of Street Fighter with many nuances that a lot of people love exploring, whether it be at a high level or just to mess around with. I am not an avid Third Strike player myself, but when I do play it, I can’t deny how fun it is to swat moves away and all the layers of mindgames that it introduces. Third Strike is a classic, but it has a playerbase for reasons beyond that. It’s incredibly unique, incredibly fun, and an incredible standout of the genre. You don’t need to be unwilling to move on from the old to enjoy it: just take it for what it is. I hope I’ve helped you understand at least a little bit why people still love this game.

Thanks very much to my lovely patrons, and a very special thanks to Acelin,  Cynamon, emma space, Jane Wick, Kelli Mariella K, Margarida Silva, MerrylBerryl, Modnar, Shaun Adarkar, Sinon Lynx, and Zachary Griesbach.

If you like what you’ve read, consider donating to me on Patreon and joining these lovely people. Thanks for reading!

Comeback Mechanics Can Be Great

If you ever go check a forum for a competitive game of some kind, you have surely seen people complaining about the most dreaded element: the comeback mechanic. You’ve definitely seen these before, some kind of element in a game meant to give an advantage    to the losing side. Whether it be a resource in a fighting game, blue shells in Mario Kart, or more gold in MOBAs, these mechanics understandably can feel frustrating for many. I’m winning, so why does my opponent get a boost for doing poorly? It doesn’t feel great experientially when you’re new, not to mention that poor implementations tend to seriously sour people’s opinions on the idea. But I do think that oftentimes, people kind of miss the point of why these mechanics exist. People will fall back on ideas such as “the devs want to bring in new players”, and sure, this might be true. However, comeback mechanics do serve a legitimate design purpose that’s easy to miss, and awareness of that is important. A game with comeback mechanics may not be your cup of tea, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean the design is objectively bad. A lot of issues are solved and a lot of fun experiences can be created with these mechanics. So what are those, and why am I a staunch defender of them as a legitimate game design tool?

So, think about what’s actually going on in a competitive environment first. Generally, both players start the match with resources of a sort (health, team buildings, race track length) and they want to use those resources in a better way than their opponents. Deplete your opponent’s health, or clear the length of the race faster, that sort of thing. You can use these resources to mark how much of an advantage one player has over the other. So the differences in health, or the difference in race length cleared, we use those to figure out how much somebody is ahead of the others. There are often two competing factors of gameplay here, however: how much work one person should have to do to win, and the mental stack that comes with being behind. This means that sometimes the finish line to win is right for balance, but that line is so long that somebody can feel inclined to give up if they fall too far behind. Let’s imagine a fighting game where both players have 1000 health, and the devs have figured out that this is the optimal number for satisfying gameplay. But, there’s an issue: when health values are more than 500 apart at some point in gameplay, the player that’s fallen behind starts to give up and tune out of the match, feeling hopeless. There’s a direct conflict between 1000 health being good for gameplay, but that much health leading to scenarios where a player simply gives up, seeing too much of a gap. Now this is hypothetical and not like, actual game design, but you get the idea. This is the problem that comeback mechanics seek to solve, ensuring that matches or resources or whatever can go on for long enough without totally discouraging someone who’s not doing well. Devs do not want players giving up or tuning out any part of a match because of game mechanics, because that’s bad  if the game is “over” before it’s really over. So, sure, that’s the idea, but how does this actually play out?

A weaker example of comeback mechanics is a good place to start, so let’s look at MOBAs, particularly League of Legends. Now, technically, these games do have comeback mechanics of a sort: when you’re behind, you’ll get a huge boost of money when you kill an enemy who’s far ahead. However, that’s about as far as these games will go, and no help is generally given to aid this. The losing side gets no ways to be more efficient in fighting, farming, and just generally establishing progress, so if you’re losing, you gotta play smart and hunker down to build back up. Now, this is fine in terms of sheer game design. MOBAs take a long time to resolve a single game, so there’s a lot more time to work up from losing, plus the maps generally give space and resources to ensure it’s possible. When there’s a large amount of space between players, nothing will ever artificially reduce the space. This does have certain benefits, to be sure! It means that teams can always be on “even” footing and interesting design can come from that, such as the multifaceted map design that is made to accommodate winning and losing. It also appeals to a lot of people that they won’t gain or lose access to any special resources or circumstances, and that everyone is always on a potentially even footing: it’s worthwhile to many and that shouldn’t be ignored. At the same time, however, there are some pitfalls it’s understandable that many developers may want to avoid. If you’ve ever played League, “surrender at 15” is a phrase you’ve likely heard, and it’s generally from teammates who have simply decided to give up and surrender at the first sign of losing. Without a comeback mechanic, there is absolutely nothing in place to make this feeling go away, and thus the incidence of early giving up is likely higher. There also tends to simply be a point where the discrepancy gets so large that the outcome is a foregone conclusion, with little to be done by either side. If one team is all level 20 and the other is 12-15, then there probably isn’t much to be done and the outcome is a foregone conclusion, but still needs to be played out. That’s kind of a boring gamestate, and it’s a potential that is clearly also undesirable to many. It is not wrong for MOBAs, as the genre is very much designed around a balanced power state, but it’s obvious that these sorts of experiences aren’t desirable in certain other games to many. So how do comeback mechanics fix these potential issues?

Like I said earlier, comeback mechanics tend to squish the distance between players, at least hypothetically. The thinking is that if the player or team that’s behind gets a better ability to close the gap, they won’t give up as easily, leading to more exciting matches on both sides. Winning is fun, but isn’t it boring and not engaging if you win because your opponent gave up for the last third of a match? If you’re having a really good day in a fighting game, and because of that your opponent sort of gives up in the last 20 seconds of every round, isn’t that in some way a punishment for doing well? Basically, one of the biggest goals of comeback mechanics is to make sure the game never stops being engaging. When I play Street Fighter 5, almost nobody ever gives up on a round because there’s no chip damage kills and the opportunity for big damage with V-trigger. Some of the most exciting and tense moments I’ve ever had in the game have been when I have my opponent on their last foot, trying to eke out that last bit of damage, and them holding on for dear life. It makes every moment of a game far more likely to involve serious effort on the parts of both players, and in an age where you can be thrown up against literally anyone online, ensuring that dynamic between strangers is crucial. It also gets rid of the scenario where the end of the game is a foregone conclusion due to that boost. I’m sure we’ve all been there in a multiplayer match, and we can all agree it is boringgggggg. Either you’re about to lose and have to give up or fight a hopeless, boring match, or you’re about to win and you don’t have to worry too much, pulling back on engagement. Comeback mechanics can help alleviate that feeling. The losing side is searching for opportunities to put their advantage into action, and the winning side has to stay on guard and not play sloppily no matter how much they’ve been winning.  It enforces habits of always caring, paying attention, and just generally makes the mindset of players better. That’s really important in the minds of many developers, clearly. You can make a finely tuned gameplay system all you want, but players are human, and might choose to give up or see it in a misguided way, colouring the way they approach it in a less than ideal manner. Comeback mechanics try to smooth out the experience for everyone, trying to make sure that everyone is happy and nobody is losing their cool. It’s not inherently an attempt to appeal to new players or dumb down the systems, because these emotions can run high at even experienced levels of play. Who doesn’t feel frustrated when they’re losing badly and have little hope to recover in their mind?

They’re not perfect, of course, and I’m not trying to argue this. They can absolutely frustrate players who are doing well, feeling like their skill doesn’t matter if the losing player is artificially propped up. It’s probably worthwhile to ensure a comeback is from additional factors a player needs to use skillfully, instead of like, just more damage. It’s also simply not suitable for every genre or experience. I brought up MOBAs earlier because they show how a lack of comeback mechanics can have impacts, but there is a reason they’re not there. It can be so hard to push a game to the end, that if the losing team got a boost, there’s a real risk that games could be an endless back and forth: it’s not a genre where there is an obvious and easy to decisively finish state like health. They also do matter of fact change the experience of a game. Mario Kart has such wildly swinging item distribution and mechanics, to the point where your skill being in first can be undone by sheer luck rather easily. The comeback mechanic of item distribution firmly places it in the category of party games, and makes any efforts to be seriously competitive much harder because. These mechanics do have serious implications on the kind of game being made, and of course Mario Kart is an extreme, but the point stands. Comeback mechanics introduce some inherent chaos to a game, making matches more volatile, more intense, not as stable, and this isn’t attractive to a lot of people because it’s just not their thing. I happen to enjoy those feelings in a game, but it doesn’t mean that they’re some inherent good: it’s a design choice, like any other design choice. Some people will be turned off by this more volatile game state, and that’s OK. They work better in some genres, and some games in those genres won’t want that. But it’s important to understand why they’re implemented and how they impact the design beyond a simple assumption about developer intentions. They are created to guide the game in certain directions, and to solve certain problems that seem undesirable for the current game. They’re not some sign a developer has given up on high end play or veteran players, because in many ways the intent is to make such high level play more dynamic and ever changing. They are interesting, unique, and can make for fun gameplay scenarios. They are tools.

Comeback mechanics aren’t suitable for every game, but that’s what it comes down to: they are tools, and not some evil plot from game developers to make new players win. I am personally a big defender of comeback mechanics, because they introduce a lot of great design space and interesting experiences for us. They enable more back-and-forth type experiences, more chaotic games, and different kinds of mindsets and playstyles. That is… good! That’s great, because more things to play around with in terms of design means that more experiences that people want can be created and engaged with. Without comeback mechanics, we wouldn’t have things like the tense end of round standoffs of Street Fighter 5, and we wouldn’t have the hilarity and chaos of Mario Kart. They are a part of game design, not something to be feared and resented, but something to work with and incorporate into certain game experiences when appropriate. When done right, they can bring a game up to new and more interesting heights.

Thanks very much to my lovely patrons, and a very special thanks to Acelin,  Cynamon, emma space, Jane Wick, Kelli Mariella K, Margarida Silva, MerrylBerryl, Modnar, Shaun Adarkar, Sinon Lynx, and Zachary Griesbach.

If you like what you’ve read, consider donating to me on Patreon and joining these lovely people. Thanks for reading!

Why Good Netcode Matters

Why does good netcode matter? No seriously, actually think about this for a second, because netcode is a background element that most of us don’t think about too much in multiplayer games. As long as our opponent isn’t teleporting all over the screen, we don’t think about it, and really it’s a safe assumption that it’s on their connection in most games nowadays. But like, from a game design perspective, netcode matters quite a bit, perhaps not to the functioning of the core mechanics, but as a part of the overall experience, as a part of how communities form and how individuals engage past a surface level. You know this very well if you play fighting games, which have for a while been the last frontier of sorts, the genre with subpar netcode for a variety of reasons. That’s changing quite rapidly, and with most genres having sorted out the design of online play functioning, I worry in some ways it’s going to fade into the background. That’s a shame, because I do genuinely think an understanding of why online working well is important to the overall experience. We shouldn’t take any part of the experience of a good game for granted, and understanding how good netcode makes a game better experientially is important. So that’s what I want to explore today, using fighting games as a sort of case study as to how poor netcode can impact a game, and hopefully making you think and appreciate it more.

So I’m not going to get into the mechanics of any of this, really: no server tick, no rollback, none of those terms. You don’t need to know the technical details to know good netcode is a multiplayer experience working well, and poor netcode being slowdown, teleporting, issues connecting, and delays in actions going through (on a good connection, of course). We know what “good” and “bad” online feels like, so in those terms, why is online being good so important? Obviously, for some genres it’s vital: an MMO that needs large player raids needs a way to connect many people together across large spaces, and thus it needs an online infrastructure to facilitate that. But even on a smaller scale, with less people, good connectivity matters from a design perspective, as it’s vital to casual engagement with a genre’s multiplayer offerings. Imagine you’ve picked up a new game, a new shooter for example: you’re interested, but not that dedicated. You don’t know how much you’re going to like this game, so you just want to try it out. Now imagine if, actually the online multiplayer infrastructure didn’t work well, and the only way to get “real” games going is to go to a local LAN meetup or something. That’s a level of effort that new players are not going to make, because they’re new, unsure about their level of wanted investment, and nobody is going to take extra effort just to try an experience out most of the time.

This is the first step of why good netcode is important to game design, the level of casual investment. Online games have thriving communities, engaged player bases, but those players need to come from somewhere: everyone was new at one point or another. If part of the game design intents to retain a playerbase, the onboarding of new players is inherently vital to building this, and online is genuinely one of the greatest godsends possible from that perspective. No need to do anything but select an option in the game and find a portal to engage with other players, and this part of the game becomes opened up with minimal personal effort on the part of the player. That famous quote about how we shouldn’t require aspiring astrologers to build their own telescope rings true: people with interest in an activity will be more inspired to try it out the less obstacles are in their way. Are you more likely to try a new game where you have to meet strangers in person, or a new game where you can quietly see what’s up in the safety of your own room? Bad netcode would cut this off at the pass, make it impossible for people to use the low-effort way of trying the multiplayer out, and alienate a lot of people as a result. Fighting games have struggled with this for a good while, as many people’s first experiences fighting other real humans were in laggy, delay-based hell, and that accessible but miserable multiplayer experience has to have convinced many people to stop exploring the genre, unwilling to make a greater leap of faith to explore local scenes. There’s been many a debate about getting new people into the genre, but this vital avenue being cut off for years certainly hasn’t helped new players practice and see the potential in a safe environment. It’s fortunate that netcode has been mostly functional for most genres, then, because when you really think about it, it’s vital to the functioning of multiplayer environments as intended, as spaces where people can congregate as communities. 

When speaking of communities, it’s also important to underlie how important they can be to the experience of a game. Yes, they’re not part of the inherent part of game design per se, but a thriving community can do so much to lift up the experience of interacting with the game. I know that many people’s experiences are lifted up by community hubs, fanart online, engaged discussion, and a wider variety of perspectives. Community matters a whole lot, and the fact is that netcode plays a big role in expanding communities. If people from areas of the world that aren’t as close to the main game population hub want to engage, poor netcode would completely preclude them from trying it out, cutting off that community expansion. Again, fighting games have been a great example of the problems with this setup, as poor experience across large distances has been a neverending struggle for the genre. If someone from Brazil wanted to go online in a game with a primary audience around somewhere like New York, they’d be completely out of luck, and would probably give up after several matches of playing in metaphorical molasses. It’s why the FGC has kind of disconnected regions, why you hear about “NA” and “Japan” and “South America” and such as completely separate entities, because for a long time the genre’s netcode just hasn’t been able to support this long distance connection. Here, we see the effects of not ideal netcode on a game experience, as it directly impacts the ways in which areas of the world can come together in the game, making the community accessible to any one person smaller. This is part of a game’s experience, part of the design inherent to so many multiplayer experiences. A game needs to have the innate tools to connect people together, to enable community formation. Whether that be the appeal of in-person Mario Party or huge MMO raids, a multiplayer game needs to be able to get people together for the design to function as intended. It is part of the very design of the game to ensure multiplayer works, and through this lens, netcode isn’t just an auxiliary element, but core to the functioning of many community-focused game experiences.

When you see communities asking for rollback netcode or higher tick rate servers or whatever upgrade to netcode they want, I think it’s easy to see it as just some high end thing: certainly, this can be true. But I think it’s equally important to consider the ways in which netcode matters at all levels. The FGC hasn’t been asking for rollback for years just to make the top 1% of matches better, they’ve been asking for it to help expand the community and give an avenue to those in less playerbase-dense regions. Good netcode is not just something external to a game: it is game design, something vital. It is easy to not consider this, because yeah, most games do generally get it right. Boot up League of Legends, Overwatch, Apex Legends, and the online will generally just work. It’s a smoothly working part of the game, enabling everything to just function as intended. Realize how lucky we are that we have many of the best practices for network play figured out, that this vital aspect of game design has been working fairly well in most games for a good while. How many genres would be kneecapped without this? How many communities would struggle to grow? How would the fundamental requirement for many games needing a community break down without this important tool? Netcode is not just something to take for granted, as it takes work, and is important to consider as part of the overall package. I think it should be included in the conversation more than it is, perhaps not as a vital core to a game, but certainly an important aspect to understand and discuss. Nobody needs to be an expert on netcode, how it works, why it works. But we know when it’s good and bad, and we should understand why it is so important that it is good or bad. 

A last point I want to make: there will always be things to improve: and we should view this as something important to consider. There are real arguments to be made about improvements to the game experience when asking for improvements, and those should be taken seriously. Take CS:GO for example: most pro games take place in a 120 tick environment, and public matches are in 60 tick environments. That basically means pros have the server make more calls than usual, and there are actual reasons people want better tick servers. This isn’t just a vague call for more precision: certain ways of throwing grenades will flat out not work on 60 servers, for example. From an experiential point of view, there is a real possibility that a fan could see a pro match, want to copy a smoke grenade throw, and be literally unable to in their game environment. On the other end, the developers have pointed out that making this swap would likely impact performance for lower-end PC’s, forcing more server calls and computer actions. There are considerations from many angles to make, and my point isn’t to give a comprehensive overview. But I think it’s important to understand discussions about changes to a game’s online structure as things with serious implications that can very much impact the game experience and development. Much like other changes to the design, it will change how players experience it, and it will have development time and opportunity costs, and it might impact some players negatively even. Netcode discussions are about the very design of the game, and not some external extra that doesn’t really matter. Beyond just understanding the impact of netcode, if you take something from this whole discussion, then understand discussion about improvements to netcode as actual, important discussions to the game experience. Don’t assume that good enough is always inherently good enough, and understand the conversation taking place and the implications. 

No seriously the technical details of netcode can seem like dark magic sometimes

Netcode is ultimately not something that needs to be understood in depth by the average player, but I think it’s nice to understand why it’s important, at the very least. It’s an arcane, magical system for most of us, but it’s like I said at the top: we know when it’s good and we know when it’s bad. We don’t need to know the why to understand the how in terms of how it changes our experience. Yes, most games will have working netcode, and most of the time you don’t need to actually consider it in choosing what to play. But consider why that’s so good, and why that’s so important to the design. That, more than anything, is what I think we could appreciate more about good netcode.

Thanks very much to my lovely patrons, and a very special thanks to Acelin,  Cynamon, emma space, Jane Wick, Kelli Mariella K, MerrylBerryl, Modnar, Shaun Adarkar, Sinon Lynx, and Zachary Griesbach.

If you like what you’ve read, consider donating to me on Patreon and joining these lovely people. Thanks for reading!

UI Nuances and Street Fighter

Have you ever really sat down and thought about how a UI in a game has impacted your experience? We don’t normally think about UI or how it impacts our game experience, and this is sort of by design. After all, a good UI doesn’t make you think about it, just communicates the information you need and otherwise doesn’t take up a lot of space in your head. However, UI can also communicate a lot more: a style, a sort of tone that an external element to the game world can get across. That line between function and form is a fine one, and doubtless many games have messed it up. What’s interesting to me, then, is when two games in the same series have taken wildly different approaches to the UI. They look and feel very different, try to evoke a different style, but are ultimately both trying to get the same information across. I think, if you’re interested in UI as a layman and just want to gain some understanding of how nuanced it can be, Street Fighter 4 and Street Fighter 5 are an excellent comparison to understand.

What’s good about this comparison, in my eyes, is that these games are fundamentally doing the same things when you get down to it. Health bar up top with a timer and round win counters. At the bottom of each player’s side of the screen, there are resource bars: super meter and ultra meter in 4, super meter and V-trigger meter in 5. There’s also stuff like a combo counter that slides in on either player’s side, the round start UI overlay, and space for any character-specific resources or gimmicks that need UI representation. These are absolutely games in the same series, both communicating exactly the same sorts of elements, but I don’t think anyone would for a moment say that these games communicate the same tone in their UI. You just kind of know, looking at it and seeing it in motion, you get the feeling that these two games just feel different in how they communicate their information, even if you can’t put it into words. I get a much different feeling when I watch SFIV compared to SFV, good part of that stylistic difference is absolutely in how the UI ends up functioning. So what’s different here?

SFIV was sort of a revival for the series, Street Fighter busting back into the fighting game genre after a decade of no new mainline games. The atmosphere for fighting games at this time was a lot more small-scale, more “indie” in sense. There wasn’t really big money in the scene, and for quite a few years now the culture had laid somewhat dormant in the west as arcades faded and no suitable replacement experience found its way onto consoles. SF4, then, aimed to be a bombastic return for the OG fighting game series in this climate, and you can see that expressed everywhere in the UI. If I had to describe the feeling the UI gives, I would call this a loud and expressive UI. The health bars pulse with energy, a colour gradient across them, and there’s a little bend downwards halfway through to make them stand out. The round timer has this slight glow effect on it, giving it a way to stand out without obscuring the numbers. Look downwards, and you see that same sort of colourful effect applied to the super bar, but more prominent, as full bars will constantly pulse with light. In terms of less vital moment-to-moment information, this UI will take even bigger flourishes. Character names and the big “SUPER” graphic with a full bar are displayed in flowing calligraphy, bursting out of the confines of the UI. You don’t need to read these in the midst of a match, so making them expressive is a way to make the game stand out without impacting visibility. The Ultra meter, too, is bursting with style, filling up in a circle instead of a steady bar, and pulsing with flames when full. The round start graphic is also flowing and in your face. And while not technically part of the UI, you really can’t forget the bombastic announcer who lied about how cool your combos were! This game oozed energy at every turn, a distinct style it was trying to really capture.

Street Fighter 5, on the other hand, went into the world in a different time and with a much different mindset. This game’s launch was a bit of a disaster, of course, but the UI generally has stayed the same and has clear, understandable goals, so I’m going to focus on that. SFV entered into a world where fighting games got big views on the stage, where the goals of getting better and being good at fighting games had much more prestige. In that light, the bombastic nature of 4 seemed a bit disconnected from the modern scene, and so something different was tried. 5 is a lot more restrained in many ways, and it’s clear that it wants a slick, clean look that’s clear to spectators and just gets the information across in a coherent manner. All the text is now in a clean, bold font as an obvious change, everything staying neatly inside the limits of the UI. The health bars are a straight line, and the colours are much clearer and contrasting, with full life, partial life, red drained life, and grey life all being represented with very standout and clear colours. There’s no frills across most of the UI: the box around the timer has been removed, the round victory tracker is tucked above the health bars now, and instead of over the top visual effects to signify a full bar, simple pulsing colours are the indicator. Speaking of bars, the EX bar and V-trigger bars serve much the same function, but they’re clearly trying to be less visually busy and clearer. You won’t find any curving ultra meter here, and everything is broken up into clear chunks of the bars. The round start graphic is simple and clear, and there’s no loud announcer during the round anymore either. The goals of this UI are clear, and that’s to get out of the player’s way. Don’t distract them, don’t be stylish, be clean, clear, functional. I don’t want to make this UI sound soulless, though. It’s hard to explain, but you can just sort of feel that a lot of care went into it. The colours pop with bright and pleasant tones, and special UI moments such as reversals have the appropriate amount of oomph to them with their bolded first letter. It feels like a UI that the people working on really cared about, one that was worked on for many long hours to give a visually pleasing but unobtrusive experience. Yes, there’s less style, for sure, but that doesn’t make it feel dispassionate. 

What’s interesting to me about these two UI setups as a comparison is how directly they map onto each other: they both communicate exactly the same information. Health, time, player, round counter, EX bar, and secondary resource bar. At their core, these two games have a UI setup that is exactly the same in what it communicates and how. But put someone in front of both games, and no way they’ll tell you the UI feels the same. That’s interesting, right? Same information, completely different interaction. Street Fighter 4 is a great example of how to evoke a tone through a UI. You just know what this game is going to be like by looking at a screenshot of gameplay, in no small part thanks to how flashy and in your face the UI is. It’s stylish and obvious, and that has a lot of value in making the game stick out to you much more than it would otherwise. It’s impossible to forget a flashy round start graphic, punctuated by an emphatic “FIGHT”, and you’ll never forget the iconic ultra meters either. It makes the fights feel a lot more intense, too. The graphics of the health bars and that flashy timer box kind of evokes a sort of underground fighting arena, with neon fluorescence flickering to complete the scene. Street Fighter 4 is often remembered as having a slight bit more of an “edge”, so to speak, than 5 does, and I think these sorts of elements are why. This is undoubtedly a good thing! The fact that this game is more than 5 years old and I can still go “yeah, that UI was really neat” speaks to how touching up a UI with style can really make it turn into something special. At the same time, it’s not a perfect UI, and sometimes it gets in the way of itself. The flame effects on a full ultra meter are incredibly distracting and flashy in an unhelpful manner. Not to mention some other elements: the contrast between a full and half full EX bar isn’t as good as I’d hope, the character calligraphy probably takes up too much space, and the health bar bend can have a slight impact on readability. These are small details, yes, but it is important to consider how style can encroach on the information if you’re not extremely careful. I have no doubt the team working on said UI was extremely skilled at their work, and even so, slight issues started to creep in when they tried to make the UI more stylish. That says something, I think, about how hard this can be.

That was clearly an issue SFV was trying to avoid, and hats off to the UI team here, because this UI is incredibly readable and clear. Everything pops out so cleanly, with the colour choices that read so perfectly against the game’s palette. The contrast between half full and full meter bars are so obvious, and everything is centered in just the right way so that no one part of the screen is obscured or over encumbered with information. This UI is so good at what it does, and in terms of functionality, I couldn’t ask for anything better. But in service of this functionality, a little bit of that style and expressiveness has been lost from the previous game. The flat colours don’t evoke anything, and there’s nothing really stand out about this whole package, honestly. Nothing screams “this is what SFV feels like” in this UI, frankly. That’s the dichotomy of SF4 vs. SFV in terms of UI. Style vs readability, being memorable vs being extraordinarily functional. Is it an acceptable tradeoff either way? SF4 is still very readable and usable despite a few small problems, and SFV still looks extremely visually pleasing despite not being as tone-setting. What’s better? 

Well, there’s no real answer beyond personal preference, I think. Me, I prefer the SFV approach: after dozens of hours playing a fighting game, all the style fades into the background and you’re just there for the utility, and in that mindset, eventually I’ll always prefer the one that prioritizes readability. But there’s no one right answer, frankly. The differences and intricacies of UI choices are really important and interesting, and such a close comparison really reveals how much even small comparisons can make a difference. How to make a UI that stands out, how one comes together that’s memorable, how to balance style and function: these are all extraordinary skills that always deserve a lot of appreciation. It’s a craft that can go in a lot of directions, and can have a huge influence on how you think of a game feeling. Even in the most similar experiences, the small things matter a lot, and that’s worth considering.

Thanks very much to my lovely patrons, and a very special thanks to Acelin,  Cynamon, emma space, Jane Wick, Kelli Mariella K, MerrylBerryl, Modnar, Shaun Adarkar, Sinon Lynx, and Zachary Griesbach.

If you like what you’ve read, consider donating to me on Patreon and joining these lovely people. Thanks for reading!

Unintiutive Fighting Game Controls

“Fighting games are hard”. It’s the rallying cry of people who are new to fighting games, don’t play them much, and a lot of people otherwise. To a lot of people, fighting games are these arcane experiences, wildly difficult to engage with, impossibly difficult to understand. Understandably, this does sort of chafe with a lot of fans of the genre, because in their eyes, fighting games aren’t that hard. Sure, they can demand a lot at a high level, but understanding how to play low level beginner slapfests with your friends isn’t that much of a struggle compared to other genres. And anyway, any competitive game at a high level is just as hard as fighting games, so it can’t be fair to single out this one genre, right? This has some truth to it, to be sure, but it does ignore the reality that yeah, fighting games do tend to get more flack for their “difficulty” than most other genres, and that’s got to be for some reason, right? Yeah, I think there is a reason, and what I’d posit as the most likely reason is the fact that fighting games work off such a different logic of control compared to most games.

Most games follow a consistent logic of control, even if we don’t realize it. Across genres, the way in which the act of moving around and taking actions works is actually pretty consistent, and it’s part of why playing a few games means the next game you play becomes much easier to pick up. Think of the most basic 2D platformer: the original Super Mario Bros., even. The way these games tend to work is that you use a stick or d-pad to move around, and then the other buttons are reserved for actions apart from movement. Left/Right in Mario makes you move around, and A/B lets you perform separate actions to basic movement, like jumping, running, fireballs. This general logic holds true across so many of these games, from Sonic to Megaman to Celeste in a modern sense. Now, think of a 3D platformer, a more modern genre, like Mario Odyssey. Again, movement and action are considered fairly separate on a basic level. Obviously, there’s a whole new axis of movement, but it’s still really easy to understand that a control stick will move you around on a basic level, and then everything else relates to actions separate from basic movements. These games often do have movement options separate from this: Mario Odyssey has the hat bounce and dive, for example. But in terms of basic, intuitive movement that will get you going on the simplest of levels, these 3D games still follow the same logic as older, 2D ones. Movement and action as separate functions in your basic, beginner level traversal.  And going further on, how about a first person shooter, like Call of Duty? Again, shooting, gadgets, and similar are all completely separate from what is going on with your basic movement with the left stick (or WASD). All you need to know to start feeling in control is that one set of inputs is for movement, and another set is for everything else. I’m empathizing the basics, because of course most games don’t stay this simple, and many games combine these inputs and actions in complex, interesting ways. But when you’re talking about intuitive control that gets you going out of the gate, this logic almost always applies. It’s why a platformer fan picking up a FPS for the first time is not going to be totally lost, because they understand that the rules of how to input beginner interactions are going to map onto this new genre in more or less the same way.

Fighting games do not work this way, not by a long shot. Movement and actions in this game are tied together, with the same input method, for a lot of stuff. Blocking? Gotta hold your movement back. Jumping isn’t a button, but it’s up on your movement method. Special moves require specific motions, again, on the movement input. This really messes with the internal logic and muscle memory people have built up, one that applies to like 90% of games out there. From the very start, this genre demands a basic level of interaction involving a fundamentally different relationship between movement and different actions, a more combined one. The input normally reserved for movement separate from action is suddenly inherently tied to a huge amount of actions: I can’t even think of another genre where holding a movement direction is a defensive action by itself. All the stuff you’ve learned about how games work gets thrown out the window here, and it’s like all of a sudden you’re playing your first game again, working your way around the basic ideas of function and interaction. Not to mention, many of the required inputs don’t have an analogue from other genres either. Like, sure, holding a direction to block, you’ve held directions before, but no other genre will ask you to perform a quarter circle or z motion with such precision on a consistent basis. This doesn’t mean that fighting game motions or the ways in which you move are inherently harder: I happen to think none of this is that inherently hard, and that most people can learn even weird motion inputs much faster than they think. But it’s such a different framing to different genres that it throws what you feel your confidence level with games is out the window, and that’s demoralizing and frustrating to a lot of people. We all build up a sense of self-identity and maybe even a bit of self-worth around our skill at stuff we enjoy, and it’s nice to feel like you’re in control of games. Breaking that sense makes a genre feel very offputting to a lot of people, and it’s understandable why! Feeling like you’re not in control is not an enjoyable feeling to many!

None of this is bad, or a flaw, I want to be clear: just because a game genre is unintuitive, does not mean it automatically has failed. The design space around tying movement and action together is incredibly valuable, and creates so many cool and interesting scenarios. The classic matchup of Ryu vs. Guile has been created in part because the very motions you have to do to execute their special moves influences the balancing and dynamic around the fight, and it’s a thing of beauty. Yes, it’s unintuitive and completely different from how most games handle interaction, but that’s why fighting games having such a different input paradigm is important: the difference makes these games unique in genuinely good and enjoyable ways. Anyone who claims these differences make the genre worse is flat out wrong. At the same time, though, the highs and interesting design space that experienced players immerse themselves in can make it hard to remember the initial barrier to entry harder, I think. It’s easy to claim that fighting games aren’t inherently harder than other genres, and it is true: high level shooters have just as much skill going on as a high level fighting game, for example. But fighting games require people to learn a different mindset in terms of basic interaction, and yeah, that is going to frustrate new people! Fighting games get this reputation as being especially “hard” because of this initial barrier to engaging, because nothing else can prepare you to engage with the basic control scheme. This is what I think new players mean when they say fighting games are so much harder than other games. It’s not technically true, but in reality they are struggling to engage much more than other genres, and this unintuitive control scheme is probably why. The lack of ability to feel like you can do an action on command with the skills you already have makes the game feel a lot harder! I think it is important to understand this perception of difficulty as probably stemming from this entry barrier, and to freely acknowledge said entry barrier, because nobody is helped by denial. Saying “fighting games aren’t that hard” to someone who feels like they can’t control the genre properly is just unhelpful and pretty tonedeaf. A better understanding of why new players struggle and being able to explain why they might be struggling can only help.

There’s also the fact that 1v1 is just not the most ideal environment to learn a new control scheme in, really. Going back to Mario: imagine someone is totally new to games, and the first game they play is Super Mario Bros., which probably was quite a common occurrence. There is a lot of space and time given to a new player, and no inherent pressure at every single moment to execute on the game’s controls. A new player could realistically just jump around in the first small area, learning to understand what all this movement entails, how A and B are separate from the directional movement, and nothing will jump out and stop them from the slow process of internalizing this paradigm. The player is in full control of when to move forward and experiment more with the level design. This makes learning easy to not feel overwhelmed by, basically. What about other games, what if someone jumps into a multiplayer lobby in Call of Duty? Well, these games have design space to not put the player in instant, overwhelming danger. Spawn points are usually placed far away from where an enemy can get to, and players as a result have some breathing room to get a handle on the controls, and control isn’t ripped away from them by getting shot for at least a little bit. Safe spawn areas are a staple of shooter design, and I think they really do a lot to help players learn the controls even if they decide to just go straight into multiplayer. Fighting games, though? You’re 1v1 against an opponent, you cannot get more than walking distance away from them, and their whole goal is to beat you up and take control away from you in this relatively cramped, enclosed game space. This is akin to Mario throwing an endless stream of enemies at you in the first area of the game, a denial of a safe learning environment that is easy and obvious to everyone. Most fighting games don’t give players a comfortable environment to engage with the controls at their own pace, and no, training mode doesn’t count. When people say they’re overwhelmed or feel like they don’t understand what’s going on, this feeling likely stems from the inability to escape an in game threat, no matter if it’s against a real person or a CPU. This is something that game design and better modes could fix: I particularly like the sidescrolling brawler story mode Granblue Fantasy Versus uses as a lower intensity way to start understanding the controls. But regardless, it’s not a surprise to me that new players call this “hard”.  Maybe it’s not technically true, but when they’re frustrated and feel out of control due to a lack of experience, it’s not a surprising conclusion.

What I think is important at the end of the day is that there be some wider understanding as to why people call these games hard, and why they’re struggling. Too often, I’ll see experienced players try to offer the advice of “oh, it’s not that hard to learn, all competitive games have a high skill ceiling”. While that is true, it’s missing the point, frankly, and pushing people away from a genre they might enjoy. Wider understanding about the struggle to get with this new control scheme paradigm and why new players struggle can only help, I feel. When communities understand that their genre uses a radically different control scheme compared to almost every other game, and that new players are probably feeling a disconnect between their usual level of competence and what they can do here, that mindset is going to create much healthier onboarding, I hope. The conclusion we should draw here is that this design around controls is really good and should stay, but at the same time, we also need to acknowledge that there’s almost no way to prepare for this genre, and that community and game design efforts should probably shift to find ways to give people time, space, and above all, understanding in the process of learning. Nobody is helped by saying “just push through” or “every game is hard” when their experience is so disconnected from how they usually feel competent at most games. An understanding tone that acknowledges their struggle, why it’s normal and not a them problem, and some specific advice could go a long way towards making people feel more confident. And I think that’s worth a lot.

Thanks very much to my lovely patrons, and a very special thanks to Acelin,  Cynamon, emma space, Jane Wick, Kelli Mariella K, MerrylBerryl, Modnar, Shaun Adarkar, Sinon Lynx, and Zachary Griesbach.

If you like what you’ve read, consider donating to me on Patreon and joining these lovely people. Thanks for reading!

A Better Fighting Game Mindset

Losing in fighting games sucks. It really sucks! It’s the most commonly cited reason as to why people don’t like playing these games. Even if you find a bunch of people around your skill level, people consistently report feeling really, really demoralized when they lose. As someone who’s been learning a lot about fighting games lately, working my way up to competence… yeah, it’s tough. It’s not really a design fault of any of these games, either, because the simple reality is that losing sucks, and fighting games, being so technical, often make losing feel like a process of losing control. So what do you do, to make the process of losing feel better? Well, there’s no one right answer for all, but seeing as many people often express this same frustration, I figured it’d be nice to try to give some tips about what’s worked for me across various scenarios. Fighting games have a lot to offer, and if you’re serious about learning them to whatever degree of skill you want, well, I hope that what I say here can help even a little.

So, the most common frustrating thing you’re going to lose to is simply put, people spamming moves. Some guy keeps throwing fireballs and you can’t get past them, or wow, she ran up and threw me again and I fell for it? Or maybe some random person online is just spamming everything they have so randomly that you have no idea how to even approach them? Yeah, this is infuriating. Take a deep breath, and step back. The reason something like this feels so frustrating is that to you, it feels like what your opponent is doing takes “less skill” and that because of that, your more intentioned play “deserves” to win: it’s a mindset we all kind of have. It feels bad to lose in a scenario where it is very easy to think that you might have put more thought and effort into a match. When you’re in this situation, try to not think of it as some reflection on your skill, because the fact is, being able to punish random move spamming actually takes a lot more skill than you might think. You have to identify what’s happening, what your opponent is doing, when they do it, and then be able to punish it. When you break it down like that, it actually becomes kind of clear that dealing with this is not as simple as a lot of us think! You are not a pro player, able to adapt on the fly to weird situations: you’re learning, working your way up, and being able to deal with spamming moves is not inherent: it’s something you have to actively learn, and something that doesn’t come naturally without practice. I’m not saying don’t get frustrated: because obviously, this stuff is frustrating, and tamping down on natural emotion is really not ideal. I’m saying that you should try to get your mindset to a point where you understand that maybe your opponent isn’t “good”, but they’re abusing a blind spot that we all have, a blind spot that we all need to develop. You haven’t suddenly dropped in skill by losing to a spammer: you just need to take further steps. Spamming is easy, and countering spamming is a bit harder than that, so remember that, and know that you’re building long term skills by taking a slightly longer road.

A related thing that we all sort of encounter at one point is the feeling of losing to a “worse” opponent, and in some ways, this can eat at you more than spamming. Sometimes, you eat a loss from someone who is probably not as overall skilled as you, and that can be rough. I think this is a mindset brought about by the proliferation of online systems in games, where you tend to fight people only once or twice before moving on. See, the thing is, you get a much better view of how “skill” plays out in a fighting game when you fight the same person for an extended period of time. The better person will win more overall, but is not invincible and can still absolutely lose. It’s why we decide tournament sets based on more than one game, for example! When I play a friend who’s better than me, I probably win like 2/10 games: so if I met them online randomly, they have a much better chance of winning, but they would never be guaranteed to win. When you’re playing these sorts of ranked modes, you absolutely have to remember that if someone seems “worse” than you and you still lost, it’s a small slice of gameplay you just got lost against. Maybe they have an unconventional playstyle and you didn’t have enough time to get used to it. Maybe you had an off match and they took advantage of that. Maybe they just got lucky! It’s so important to remember that your worth and skill is never decided or assessed in the scope of this one match, and it’s a fool’s errand to try to assess your skill vs someone else’s in such a discrete period of time. Even if you’re right, and you lost to a “worse” player? That happens, and it will always happen no matter how good you get at fighting games. So try to keep that in mind as you grind it out against a variety of opponents, and remember that no one game is a good reflector of your skill. It’s a mindset that’s helped me take all kinds of losses in a much better stride.

No matter what you do, how much you practice, at some point, you’re going to get a round or game where you can barely land a hit. You’ve gotten perfected, or maybe only got one hit in before going down hard. This… sucks. It sucks! It’s not fun to feel so utterly defeated, no sugarcoating it. So how do you deal with this? Well in some ways, in the moment, you don’t, because defeat isn’t fun, and it’s OK to feel bad for losing so hard. But after that, in my opinion, the single most important thing you can remember is that really good players have this happen to them too. This might seem weird, but I think it’s important to remember that getting perfected, even by someone near your skill level, does not mean you suck. We get demoralized by these kinds of losses because it makes us feel inadequate, like the time we’ve put into the game doesn’t matter if we can still lose this badly. I think it is genuinely good to remember it happens to really good players too, because none of us would say that they’re bad or that their time was wasted getting good. It’s a kind of objective marker of skill that they’ve reached, and yet still, they can get absolutely brutalized in some rounds all the same. If it happens to them, and we can still think of them as really good, it can happen to you without being a poor reflection on your fighting game skill! This is something that can happen in almost any fighting game, and I promise, when it happens, you are doing OK. Your opponent got some good reads, you made some wrong guesses, or you lost your cool. It happens to us all. It’s in the most basic loop, where you eat a combo, get knocked down, and now your opponent is in a much better place to set another combo up. Sometimes you’re going to lose many of these exchanges in a row, at every skill level. It sucks, and it’s OK to feel bad, but try not to let yourself sink into rage or depression about how bad you are. Getting perfected happens to everyone, it is a part of these games, and it will always happen to everyone: so don’t feel like you’re a unique letdown. 

Another common mindset problem that I see people fall into all the time is the curse of the bad matchup. Maybe this is actually a very bad matchup for your main character, or you’re just not the best against some character, but when people see a MU they struggle with pop up, defeatism and worry very easily follows. This isn’t a good mindset to carry into matches for fighting games, because at the end of the day, living in worry of losing because of a few characters you can’t deal with is a recipe for frustration and quitting. So. What I’ve found helps me quite a bit when dealing with problem characters is to step back and take a look at what specific thing I’m struggling with. No overall gameplan, just maybe one specific state (I can’t handle them jumping in) or one or two moves (that command grab always gets me). Think about what you are able to do to be able to respond to those things, and more importantly, why what you’ve been trying hasn’t worked. Now, just try to… do your best response when that problem situation comes up, and don’t sweat the match too much otherwise. Easier said than done, but I find that breaking a problem down into one or two small parts to focus on makes it much easier to actually keep your cool and practice in the moment. In Street Fighter 5, I play Poison, and the M.Bison matchup is absolute hell for me in a neutral game state because he can completely disregard my zoning with fairly safe dashes and pressure attacks. So I stepped back, thought about the situation (neutral), what wasn’t working (my usual zoning tools), and thought of my best options (wait for mistake and knockdown or jump in). So when I went up against Bison again, I kept my cool and just tried to use the one or two things I thought of. I still lost against Bison, pretty badly, but the main difference was that I didn’t feel as overwhelmed anymore, because I was breaking the game state down into smaller chunks that I could focus on and learn about. Yes, it’s not an instant path to victory, but it’s an important mindset to focus on, where you make your victories smaller and what you want to do in a match less, because a bad matchup is very, very hard to get used to at first. It can be demoralizing, and in the learning process, the most important thing to do is not to get demoralized or angry. Winning will not come for a while, and you have to be able to accept that and focus on something else. Save your overall gameplay practice for character fights you’ve got a better grasp on.

Maybe you’re reading all this advice and going, “well, isn’t a lot of this advice just ‘suck it up’”, and, OK, fair! The thing about fighting games is that ultimately, the only path towards getting better and feeling better about losses is getting better. I can’t sugarcoat that core truth. Learning how to deal with spammers, losing to worse people, losing badly, all that takes self-reflection, a lot of effort to think about, and probably quite a bit of time investment. Compared to a lot of other genres, it can be a pretty brutal and solitary climb to a better skill level and mindset. But I don’t think that should be a reason to adopt this as a harsh community mindset. While a lot of my advice here does kind of boil down to “get better”, I don’t think there’s any reason to state it in such harsh and unwelcoming ways, because there are always healthier ways to get better, you know? Fighting games are worthwhile because they take effort and reward dedication, but they should be worthwhile in a kind, welcoming way while doing that. Better tutorials can help, but when it comes to tone, the true change has to come in the average community advice and how newcomers get that advice. What I hope I’ve been able to do here is give some advice towards the process of learning these games, and how I’ve found myself to be able to learn in a way that’s kinder to myself. It’s ultimately not very helpful to people who are new to just tell them they’re going to lose a lot and to prepare for pain: that’s going to make people quit. You can’t make new players lose less (trust me, I lose a lot), but what you can do is make that process of losing easier, more informative, and less harsh.

So, whatever you’re playing, whether it be Street Fighter or Tekken or Melty Blood in the washroom, I hope that this advice helps the process of learning in some way. Yes, fighting games are harsh, and yeah, if this sounds like work that you don’t want to bother with, that’s fair! But if the process of learning is something you’re into, these games can be so rewarding and enjoyable. I don’t want that reward paired with a harsh and cruel community sentiment, and though plenty of fighting game resources are great, there’s still a distinct lack of mindset advice with a kind touch. I hope that one day this kind of thing becomes standard, but until then, I wish you luck in whatever game you want to learn. It’s a fun journey, despite the bumps.

Thanks very much to my lovely patrons, and a very special thanks to Acelin,  Cynamon, emma space, Jane Wick, Kelli Mariella K, MerrylBerryl, Modnar, Shaun Adarkar, and Sinon Lynx.

If you like what you’ve read, consider donating to me on Patreon and joining these lovely people. Thanks for reading!

How We Form Fighting Game Narrative

Fighting games are cool. Very cool, actually! Watch some of the best rounds of Guilty Gear, Street Fighter 3, Marvel Vs Capcom, and you’ll want to see more of this absolutely incredible play. While fighting games tend to struggle to get more people into playing them, I think it’s easy to agree that watching high level matches can be infectious, wanting to see more and more until you’re up after midnight watching some tournament you can’t put down. But like, why? Why is watching this particular kind of video game so cool, why is it different than seeing someone stream, for example? Well, fighting games, simply put, are amazing vehicles for us to form narratives around, and those narratives time and time again get us into tournaments and into the matches. And to show this, I want to use an example, and not one of the “big game” events. I want to look at a smaller side event from a tournament, Combo Breaker’s 2019 Street Fighter Alpha 2 tournament.

So, let’s put this event into perspective: Combo Breaker is a well known tournament, and it draws quite a few names from around the fighting game scene. It’s not what I would define as some genre-defining event, but it’s kind of the platonic ideal of a “big tournament” without being as well known as something as EVO was. Street Fighter Alpha 2, however, was definitely not one of the bigger games at the event: it’s got a small passionate fanbase, but it’s not a modern game that’s actively getting support or eyes on it, nothing like that. This was a small game at a big event, enough to get some eyes on it, but not enough to be an event defining occasion that everyone will deeply care about. That small, dedicated fanbase was happy to have their (very cool) game as an event, though, and that was kind of the spirit of it all. Sure, money was on the line, but at the end of the day, that was secondary to seeing some cool Alpha 2 get played. I think this is an important note, because the sort of narrative that ended up taking hold during the tournament was in that vein: relaxed, fun, not the most serious. Those aren’t the conditions you think of that lead to an engaging tournament narrative, but I think it goes to show that what I’m about to describe can happen whenever, egged on by the wide variety of games and the expression players are afforded. And here, Justin Wong was about to express himself in an interesting way indeed.

You might know who Wong is, but if you don’t, rest assured he is considered one of the greatest fighting game players of all time, having made his largest marks in Street Fighter and especially the Marvel Vs. Capcom games. He is really damn good at these games, to say the least, but he didn’t really make a name for himself as a SF Alpha player. He’s a definite outsider to that small niche of a community, mostly because Street Fighter as a main series isn’t quite the same as Alpha as a subseries. That being said, it still is very much Street Fighter, so Wong was able to make it to top 8 as would be pretty much expected of him. So here, already, we’ve got a dynamic going of an outsider entering a community’s game, and showing his stuff on their “home turf”. This might seem cool, but in the context of Wong being one of the most famous fighting game players ever, a sort of for fun defensive instinct started to form among the players and casters. Who’s this big shot guy coming into our small game and acting like he owns the place? We gotta show him it’s our game! From the sheer fact that he’s a famous outsider, Wong gets established as a sort of temporary villain: nobody actually dislikes him or that he’s here, but it brings the community together to act like they gotta bring down this titan of the FGC. A villain in how he makes people act, not in how he acts, so to speak.

There’s another aspect of this that I find super interesting though, and that’s the mechanics of Alpha 2. It’s got all the typical Street Fighter stuff, but there are two key mechanics (besides air guard) that really make it stand out. First is the alpha counter, a universal way to force your opponent off you. Spend a bit of meter while blocking and the game will be reset to a neutral state, essentially. The much more impactful mechanic, however, is the custom combo system. You can spend one bar of meter, and for a short time you’ll be able to chain any normal and special moves into each other, creating a glorious and highly damaging combo you’d never be able to do otherwise. Basically, you can delete huge chunks of your opponent’s health if you use this correctly. Alpha as a whole has more powerful defensive and offensive options than other Street Fighter games, and it makes for really intense matches where any one read could totally swing the momentum. And yet, go watch Wong’s matches: he’s barely using any of these mechanics. He is fundamentally not really taking advantage of Alpha’s unique gameplay, and instead is playing a really damn solid game of Street Fighter in general, while also using a universally agreed upon top tier character. You can even hear the commentators talk about how “lame” he’s playing. This is nothing new for Wong, as he’s always taken a patient, defensive style and isn’t concerned with playing to a crowd: he is going to play as boringly as possible, wear you down, play a “cheap” character if needed, and leave no holes for you to exploit. I personally think his dedication to “boring” play is admirable, because over the years every single complaint and insult has been thrown at him for it, and yet he stuck to his guns and won so much regardless. But anyway, here, his mindset meant that he wasn’t going to take risks with an unfamiliar system he wasn’t as experienced with, and was just going to play what he knew.

So, that’s the scenario we’re left with: this big name outsider guy is butting into a niche scene, kicking people’s butts, and he has the audacity to not even use the cool game mechanics? Well this guy’s obviously a villainous threat to take down! That’s the atmosphere that formed around this top 8 set, the tension that ended up taking place: Wong vs the community, an impromptu rivalry that gave every match with him more stakes and interest than two good players going at it alone ever could. To be clear, Wong was not actually hated, nor was anyone upset he was winning: these were informal, for fun roles that formed in this moment, roles that would fade away soon after, no actual malice ever involved. But like, that’s what’s so cool about this environment, isn’t it? How certain players can take certain roles to form an impromptu narrative, and there’s no reason for it beyond the fact that narratives pump us up and get us so excited for every set of a game that’s gonna be played. It’s the tension of some unknown player tearing up a scene and wondering how long he can keep this up, the self appointed villain making themselves a target for challengers, and yes, a titan of competition potentially being felled. Even when big money is not on the line, these games create amazing, tense and exciting scenarios. It’s all one on one, all or nothing, and it’s quick and rapid: a great formula.

Another really cool part of all this is how so much of the narrative formed around the game mechanics and their differences and nuances: it’s one of my favourite parts of the scene. If two soccer teams go up in a tournament, the game will always be the same, not really affecting the dynamic inherently. Same goes for RTS esports, which is mostly just Starcraft that gets a spotlight. But fighting games have so many similar concepts and general inputs that people can move between games all the time, and the sheer breadth of games means the way any individual game works can have a huge impact on the stories we read into them. The experience of watching the explosive Guilty Gear is totally different from watching the defensive Tekken, and seeing how people react to these games and take them in, and to see how one established figure takes on a new game, this kind of stuff is something you can’t get anywhere else. Fighting game narratives form out of these things, out of community figured, and out of the history and development of how players use the game mechanics to their fullest. Every new game is a chance for new stories to form, for new players to rise up, or for old players to prove why they are to be respected. That is why I find the ways in which fighting games create stories to be so cool, because it’s not just the players who create stories: it’s the games themselves.

Why Combo Breaker Alpha 2, though? Well… it’s because it’s not that huge of a tournament, and still, these cool small narratives formed. This was not something on the level of EVO or similar, it was a smaller event at a prominent tournament, enough for some eyes but not enough for inherent hype to it. But still, these roles formed, and everyone got super into the whole thing. It’s a cool effect! Another reason this top 8 stood out to me was the fact that the cool and exciting thing didn’t happen: Wong won the whole thing, and no titan was toppled this time. But I think it’s telling, personally, that the cool thing didn’t need to happen for everyone to get super excited about the possibility. Just the tension of it all, seeing high level play, and then knowing that at any moment something wild could happen: that’s the true fun of watching fighting games. Fighting games make narratives, or more accurately, we create these wild narratives around them. The most climactic moments may not always happen, but ultimately, that’s OK, because not knowing how things will eventually turn out, or seeing a novel playstyle, or just seeing some cool fighting gameplay, that’s enough to tide us over until the next climax happens. Fighting game stories are cool because they always happen, there is always the potential for some cool stuff to happens, and so much of that is informed internally to the game alongside the external factors of the players.

This is why I love watching fighting games, and I think it’s part of why these big events capture the attention of a lot of people even if they don’t normally play fighting games. You don’t need to be good or experienced to appreciate a great, live story unfolding in front of you, and even if it’s low stakes, a story will almost always form in these games. I hope I’ve been able to demonstrate why, even at a seemingly smaller event, really cool stuff can happen and these games are completely worth paying attention to. Even if you don’t care one lick about playing these games, watching them can be completely worth your time in so many ways. It is so cool to watch mechanically deep experiences be enhanced and expanded by the people who play them, and that is why I love watching these tournaments. They’re a one of a kind narrative.

Thanks very much to my lovely patrons, and a very special thanks to Acelin,  Cynamon, emma space, Jane Wick, Kelli Mariella K, MerrylBerryl, Modnar, Shaun Adarkar, and Sinon Lynx.

If you like what you’ve read, consider donating to me on Patreon and joining these lovely people. Thanks for reading!