Thoughts About Fighting Games

[Nester the Lark]

This is something that has been on my mind on and off lately, and I started thinking about it again after the Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection was announced in the Nintendo Direct.

As I’ve mentioned before, I feel like I’ve given up on fighting games. It’s a genre I could enjoy, but only on a very casual level. I often struggled with things like combos, and sometimes even just pulling off regular special moves. There was a time during the Dreamcast era when I spent more than a year trying to get better at them, but my skill level hit a wall early, and no matter what I did, I never got better. So, I resigned myself to simply enjoying them casually. Ultimately, though, it felt like most fighting games weren’t really meant to be played that way, so I decided that maybe they just weren’t for me.

A few months ago on the Kit & Krysta Podcast, Kit talked about feeling like he was over trying to memorize long strings of inputs for combos and special moves in “traditional” fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. He also mentioned how “non-traditional” fighting games, like Smash Bros and Pokkén Tournament, were easier to play while still having a lot of depth to them.



This sums up my feelings pretty well. Some fighting games do include accessibility options to make them easier to play, but they still feel like they weren’t really intended to be played that way.

I’ve experimented with this a little bit recently. The GameCube version of Capcom vs SNK 2 includes a mode called “GC-ism” in which all punches and kicks are done with the analog shoulder buttons (the strength is determined by how far you press them), and all special movies are done by simply tilting the C-stick in one direction. It took a little while to get used to (my muscle memory needed to be deprogrammed), but I eventually played to the end that way. It worked OK, but the game clearly wasn’t designed around it.

I also popped in Tatsunoko vs Capcom because I couldn’t remember if it had a simplified control scheme or not. It does, but only if you play with the Wii Remote. I didn’t spend more than a minute or two trying to play that way, though, because it just didn’t seem effective at all. (Now that I think about it, I felt that way back when I originally played it, too.) I couldn’t get back into it with traditional controls, either, due to it having such a combo-heavy gameplay style. I was able to play it to some degree back then, but I’ve no interest in trying to relearn it.

So, yeah, if I do decide to get back into fighting games, it’ll likely be Smash Bros. Even though I’ve also said that I’ve lost interest in that series, it was due more to weariness of the concept than issues with the controls. I could see myself getting interested again at some point.

Finally, there’s the infamous SNK Heroines, which probably does the best job of combining streamlined Smash-style controls with more traditional fighting game gameplay. It works better here because the game was actually designed around it rather than it being an afterthought. I have not revisited it lately, but gameplay-wise, I do feel like SNK was on to something, and it deserves another chance. (Incidentally, in a very recent interview, producer Yasuyuki Oda said he was still quite fond of SNK Heroines, and would like to do another someday.)

Not to drag this out too much longer, but I think it’s also worth mentioning that the big draw for me in fighting games is less about the gameplay, and more about the character designs. If I’m drawn to certain characters, I feel compelled to learn how to play as them to some degree, even if they’re not considered “good” characters.

So, yeah, I really do come at fighting games from a very casual perspective. Most fighting games, however, are aimed primarily at a more hardcore audience, and I’m at a point where I have little interest in getting into them that deeply.

[nocturnal YL]

I wonder if you've tried 3D fighting games. I know very little about fighting games, but the examples you gave here are all 2D fighting games (the kind Capcom makes), while 3D fighting games (the kind BANDAI NAMCO makes, where you can move between depth levels) play quite a bit different.

With the 3D ones (I've had very little experience with SoulCalibur on Dreamcast and Naruto: Clash of Ninja 3 on GameCube), at least with CPU players, you can avoid enemy attacks relatively easily by just sidestepping away, and in SoulCalibur you can lure the enemy to the edge and push them off-stage, which is an instant win. They have complicated commands, but for simple single player play, you don't need to learn those.

[Nester the Lark]

In terms of fully 3D fighters (as opposed to modern 2.5D fighters where the graphics are 3D, but the gameplay is still on a 2D plane), I've played a few. I even own Soul Calibur I (Dreamcast) and II (GameCube). They are a somewhat different beast, and they can feel a little more approachable in some regard, but maybe that's because I feel like I have less control over them. They can still be demanding on a technical level, though, if you really want to become proficient. My favorite is probably Project Justice on the Dreamcast, although it's more of a 2.5D game with side-stepping, but it's pretty accessible in terms of being able to do combos and such.

Also, Capcom needs to bring back the Power Stone series. It's as close to a 3D Smash Bros as you can get.

I suppose my previous post was just a whole lot of words to say "I stopped playing fighting games because the controls are too complicated," but there was a subtext to it that I was hesitant to say outright because it's a bit of a hot take.

The reason I think the controls in fighting games are too difficult is because, to me, they feel archaic. Special moves are difficult to pull off because they were originally intended to be secrets for players to discover, and weren't meant to be used consistently. Similarly, combos (the ability to cancel one move into another) came about as the result of a programming oversight in Street Fighter II. The devs were aware of it, but decided not to fix it because they didn't think players would get good enough to exploit it. In both cases, though, players did become proficient at them, and special moves and combos became a part of normal gameplay. Future fighting games were designed around them.

The problem, in my mind, is that as part of regular gameplay, those elements should have been streamlined. Still being expected to do complex movements to execute normal gameplay elements feels like being required to use a pencil and paper to draw my own maps when playing a modern RPG.

I somewhat liken fighting games to shmups in that the core fan bases of both genres tend to be rather orthodox and resistant to certain types of change, and developers of these games often cater to those bases rather than taking a chance on making something that might be more approachable to a mainstream audience.

Some might argue that that's just the inherent gameplay of the genre, but to me, it's a barrier to the gameplay. The strategy and give-and-take of the fight is inhibited by archaic controls that are overly difficult to come to grips with.

And that's my rant on the subject.

[Fryguy64]

I really enjoyed Street Fighter 2 back in the day - but I was like... 10 years old. I could fire off a few moves, I could beat the game on a reasonable difficulty level, and I was good enough at it to beat other 10 year olds in my peer group sometimes.

After that, I tried to get into a few more, but failed. I lack the split-second coordination and memory recall to react strategically. I can probably struggle along on the lower difficulty levels, but it doesn't take much for me to come completely unstuck.

Back during Covid times, I tried 100% completing as many first party N64 games in chronological order as I could. The first game I had to give up on was Killer Instinct Gold. I learned the moves and techniques until I could beat the game with every character and even unlocked a bunch of costumes. But once I unlocked that final difficulty... I was out. I couldn't beat a single character.

They seem to have a mass appeal, and they're fun to experiment with and learn. But I bounce off them hard long before I've gotten anywhere with them.

[Nester the Lark]

The thing with Street Fighter II is that it was also designed for casual players. There was no fighting game community back then -- SF2 birthed it. It's relatively slow, so there's time to think and react strategically. You can play through the entire game effectively without knowing any special moves. The game mechanics aren't super dense. You don't need to worry about "meter" or anything like that. It's still fairly easy to come to grips with now, as are games that took direct inspiration from it (Fatal Fury 2, Fighter's History).

For decades, it remained the best-selling fighting game of all time... until Super Smash Bros Ultimate, another fighting game made with a broad, mainstream audience in mind.