4 Things I Wish I’d Known About Fighting Games
The hard-learned and hard-earned lessons that taught me how to love and appreciate this genre a bit more.
This essay is going to be a little more personal than the last few, in a very literal sense.
The title makes it kind of apparent, but this time around we’re going to look at some biases and bad habits I had to grow out of (and am still learning to apply) in fighting games. That’s part of what makes it personal, but the other part comes from how much this genre as a whole has given me, and the constant bad rap it gets on a mechanics level.
Fighting games sit in this place where they simultaneously have a lot of misconceptions they don’t deserve thrown at them (accusations of button-mashing, of not having to think, of being non-interactive) paired with a lot of difficult things about playing them (information complexity, decision making, judgment, the nature of competition past a certain point, and keeping a cool head) that are factually true and honest deal-breakers for some people.
So, the main goal here is twofold: 1) to manifest the things I wish someone had told me about fighting games much earlier than I learned them & 2) to share these things with people who have any interest in fighting games, even if it’s just playing against the CPU in arcade mode.
I don’t expect to convince people who have their minds made up that fighting games are complete crap, but as with a lot of other things I write, if you read this I hope it does give you a new perspective on how you look at fighting games even if you don’t actively play them or even if you dislike them.
1) Abandon the pursuit of constant perfection.
(Inevitably, you will lose. And that’s OK.)
This is one is exactly what it sounds like, but let me put some more explanation into this.
A lot of people think that being good at fighting games means turning yourself into a robot that does perfect inputs at exactly the right time every single time and never allowing your opponent the chance to play. Other people think that if you refuse to learn combos or special moves or super moves that you’re not “really” playing the game or able to appreciate it (which can be enforced by the way that some top players will talk about games, or even mid-level players lacking perspective).
For the longest time, especially when I was younger, I believed all of that. I thought that to be good at fighting games was to be the unbeatable, to be untouchable and unstoppable. To know my combos back to front and in my sleep. To know everything about everything. That people who never wanted to learn that were just holding themselves back.
As I am right now, 30 years old, with what I would call roughly 10 years of actual, semi-intentional fighting games experience and maybe around 15 years playing fighting games period, maybe longer, I will tell you this: that’s not really right, and perfection, at least for me, became the worst reason to play fighting games at all.
What fighting games excel at in a genre sense is letting you pick a character and try to express yourself with them. The terms of that expression are as different as different types of dance, different schools of martial arts, or different mediums in art. It’s basically learning to speak a language through performance with your character, and what each game and each character allows for is different based on the rules. And just like with any other expressive art or any language, the more complex the ideas you want to express, the more practice you need, the more study you need, the more time you need to express yourself fluently.
If your interest isn’t in pushing yourself to that level — that’s also completely OK. You don’t need to know how to play a fighting game like a professional to be able to enjoy it, in the same way you don’t have to be a professional dancer to like dancing, or a trained singer to enjoy karaoke, or a professional artist to enjoy drawing. It’s that simple. If you’re actively enjoying yourself without learning the more complex parts of a given game, then continue to do that.
But, I feel like even if you’re not really taking it on a deep competitive level (or any competitive level at all, really), I have to underscore this: it is inevitable that because you, the player, are only human (and in a lot of cases, so is your opponent), at some point, you will lose. Nothing is guaranteed to you the moment you step into the match, in the same way that you’re not guaranteed a perfect performance when you play an instrument or a flawless dance routine when you hit the stage. And that is not an indictment of you or your self-worth, it’s legitimate fact. Fighting games are designed around the fact that their operators, their players, are not perfect — this is why “input shortcuts” for special moves exist, why “input buffers” exist to make doing certain moves slightly easier, and why complex maneuvers have a higher tendency to fail and maybe make you feel silly when you drop a combo or flub an input.
And all the same, sometimes you will do your very best, freeze up at a critical moment, and lose anyway.
Learning to accept that as a possibility is just part of the game, and it is fine to struggle with it — or if you choose to abstain from fighting games entirely because of not wanting to deal with that, that’s fine too. That you may encounter frustration while playing against the CPU, that you may feel inept because you weren’t able to beat someone — these are very natural things, but no one told me that when I was first trying to learn how to play fighting games, so I struggled with coming to terms with it because I inherently thought that because I lost I was bad, not that I just lacked information. (And that’s a whole other point to talk about, but we’ll get to that a little later.)
2) Find the game that speaks to you.
(Fighting games are less the same than you think they are.)
Fighting games, much like any other game, are going to ask you to engage with them on their terms to some degree if you want to play them. And each fighting game has different terms to engage with — they are not a monolith of endless combos and perfect inputs and “thoughtless” button mashing. Forcing yourself to play a game that is popular but that you despise because of the terms it asks you to engage it on is only going to make you miserable — and it’s OK to drop games that don’t bring you enjoyment and look for those that let you really do the things you want to do instead.
Going back to my earlier “terms of expression” metaphor from before: each fighting game is like an individual dance style, or individual martial art, or if we extend the metaphor to art again, a different medium and style. There are certain traits shared between martial arts, between dances, between art mediums, but the individual medium or style is going to determine how you interact with it.
As a personal example: though I can hold my own in team-based fighting games like Skullgirls, Dragon Ball FighterZ and Marvel vs. Capcom, the pace of those games and the particular skills that they reward (using your other characters to create layered offenses and then using that as the pretext to start comboing once you can break open their defense) is ultimately a lot for me to deal with and not something I enjoy long term or seriously studying.
On the other hand, I like some of the team-building aspects inherent to The King of Fighters, and since most modern KOF games do not focus on tag-teams or layered offense using your teammates but rather on 1-on-1 elimination battles, I can play that game with generally more ease because I’m only considering one character at a time during any given round.
Other fighting games also have similar considerations to keep in mind. Samurai Shodown, for instance, very much does not care about combos and is generally designed in a way that encourages what combos there are to be kept short and to the point; the right hit at the right time is what really makes the difference in that game. Street Fighter rewards a strong ground-based gameplay style, with varying degrees of caution and careful tests of an opponent’s defenses until you crack them open, and while jumping isn’t always a bad option it can be inherently risky; Guilty Gear, in contrast, generally takes a lot of the risk out of jumping if you know when to use airdashes, and favors a very active offense even if it’s sometimes from a distance.
Some of these things are fun to some people. Some of these things sound unfair or “cheap” to other people. And honestly, that’s OK. Find what makes sense to you, what you like, what you enjoy in fighting games. It may take you a while, but it will be a better time for you and your opponents if you sincerely enjoy the game you’re playing above and beyond anything else.
3) Winning isn’t always progression.
(What do you learn from losing?)
This is a more subtle one, and one that definitely really only applies if you have an interest in improving (even if it’s only against the CPU).
To give a more personal anecdote of a thing I was working through when I originally started planning this article (and am still working through): Guilty Gear Strive received a balance patch a few months back where one character, Anji, got a very, very good buff to one of his moves, Fuujin, which is a rushing shoulder tackle. Before the patch, Fuujin’s four separate and distinct followup moves could only be done if Anji actually contacted you with Fuujin; now, he can do them without even touching you. Is he still in the opening part of the animation? Followups! Did he contact you with it? Followups! Did you get him to miss with Fuujin? Still has followups!
And even knowing that change, I lost pretty soundly to one on stream.
(Inevitably, you will lose.)
Was it frustrating? Yes. I said as much out loud while playing that match, and I’ve gotten into the habit of actively admitting it when I get annoyed. It’s a hard thing to deal with. But losing because of it taught me these things: first, that I need to start developing strategies for what to do against this move and its followups, and second, even though I lost, I still had moments where I did do something against that move and it worked. So I’d already started to build the strategies that will carry me forward.
Could I have learned some of that from winning? Yes. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know until I lost to it.
(Inevitably, you will lose.)
And losing, though demoralizing, though difficult, though frustrating as shit sometimes, is what gives you the next thing to strive for. If you win a lot, yes, that can be a sign that you’ve improved, at least enough so that your common mistakes no longer choke you up as badly, but a loss will — more than “keeping you humble” — let you know what else you may want to improve on.
Chasing only victory, and only wanting to ever win and never lose, is kind of like chasing constant perfection; it’s not reasonable and it isn’t sustainable. Because when does it become enough?
Another personal example to illustrate this point: I like playing Street Fighter V a lot. I played the open betas, I got it when it launched, I played the most heavily for the first two seasons or so and intermittently in the seasons after that, and for most of that time I spent a very long time trying to climb the ranked ladder to Platinum rank.
And I was miserable the closer I got to it because I hadn’t internalized that winning isn’t always progression, and so that meant me losing and actively seeing my ranking points drain down stressed me out. I thought I’d peaked, that I would never break through to Platinum, that I was a worthless player and not nearly as good as I thought because of that.
After leaving ranked play behind for a while in other games I was trying to learn, and just going into regular player matches, that was when I came to the realization that ranked, specifically, was teaching me to only value my ability to win, not my ability to learn. Coming to that realization made it easier for me to accept losing, because I stopped seeing it as an extension of my worthiness as a player and just a test of my understanding of the language of the game at that point in time.
4) Combos are not power (on their own).
(You have to understand the substance as much as the flash.)
This, quite honestly, is the one I often have on my mind when I talk to people about fighting games, and the sentiment I have to be really careful about expressing, because on the face of it, it sounds like I’m telling a lie to lull people into a false sense of security about fighting games.
So let me state it like this: I’m not saying combos don’t matter, but that knowing combos isn’t where you start really and truly learning a fighting game.
This is probably the thing that took me the longest to understand even by comparison to the other things we’ve talked about, because it’s subtle. Good players are always hitting combos, so to be a good player you have to learn combos and special moves first, right?
Nope. Wrong. Incorrect.
It’s good to know what special moves do, and it’s fine to experiment with them early on, but if you’re trying to learn a fighting game — especially one that’s your first ever, or if you’ve never gotten super deep into them before — trying to get combos down early on, to the exclusion of anything else especially, is actually detrimental to your growth.
Going back to our earlier metaphors, trying to focus on learning combos on day 0 of ever playing fighting games with no prior experience is like expecting yourself to paint the Mona Lisa without ever having picked up a paintbrush before, taking out a black belt in a spar, or dancing like Michael Jackson or Bey the first day you step into a dance studio: the goal is unrealistic for your (current) skill set because you have no base to start from.
Your fundamental skills — the first steps you learn in your first routine, the way that you learn to hold your brush or your pencil, your stances and the way you hold your body — begin with much simpler considerations, and if you’re interested in taking fighting games more seriously, you have to try them out. How do I block attacks? How do I move around? What do each of my attacking buttons do? How far do they reach, how fast are they, where do they go?
This is not me saying you have to study frame data charts or understand every system mechanic of a game before you even boot it up, let alone sit in training mode for weeks before your first match (because some things you only learn by playing against people, ideally at your level), but your fundamentals will make the process of learning combos and special moves much less painful because you’ll understand what your options are outside from the stuff that you’re most likely to fumble under pressure.
Combos have always been rewards for having strong fundamentals, not fundamentals in and of themselves per se. If you get that one hit after playing a solid defense, then you can go into the combo, but you have to be engaged with all the other stuff that needs to happen to get that first hit. (Are you blocking their hits? How are you moving? Are you checking people with normal attacks? Is your opponent afraid of you or of invading your space?)
Once I got my head around this concept, learning newer fighting games became less intimidating because I could give myself room to learn new, basic things, to feel out a system, learn its steps, and decide if I wanted to continue learning it. instead of immediately trying to jump to the hardest exercise in the room.
This pretty much wraps up everything I wanted to talk about in this article. There are a lot more things I could write about but I wanted to keep this one relatively short — I hope that it’s given you an understanding not just about how I think of fighting games, but what makes them tick, at least a little. If you’re really interested in developing some of the strategies that I talk about here, I personally recommend checking out the work of Pat Miller (@pattheflip on Twitter), as a lot of what I’ve been able to articulate here has come from reading his work and applying it to how I think about fighting games.
Should you decide to pick up fighting games yourself, whether for fun or more seriously, I hope that the things I’ve talked about here give you a better fundamental start than what I had before.
I’m active over on Twitter with more off-the-cuff game design thoughts and the occasional WIP. You can see me try to put some of these principles up above into practice on Twitch, particularly on my Fighting Friday streams.
Though I’m in-between game projects right now, you can check out Final Spike if you want an idea of what it’s like to play my work; for other support that has nothing to do with games, feel free to tip me on Ko-Fi or subscribe to it.
Thank you for reading!