strxwberry cat 🌸

fighting games

fighting games are the video game chess, but real time and with a lot more options and fast paced decision making. at least that's how i introduce them to people who don't play 1v1 video games, in reality i think chess is a turn based fighting game, not the other way around. fighting games also feel they share community feeling thing going on with rhythmn games and speedrunning.

i think the main thing separating video game fighting games from real life ones is how much more creative freedom you can have with the game design and decision making, and they also mainly require mental capability, which i think makes them a lot more fun and accessible.

at core they are about adaptation, prediction, conditioning, and other mental execution. we like to think of fighting games as a puzzle, except the puzzle adapts and responds to you to try and make it harder to solve. and, therefore, it doesn't really ever get boring in the right situation, there will always be more to challaenge brain and get it to think and get excited!

another core element of fighting games is community, which, maybe sounds unusual if you're unfamilar with them!

the feeling of improving at fighting games is incredible, and so is the feeling of just competing in general, and learning about the game you're playing. fighting gamers usually really love the game the play, and really like sharing with others what they know about the game so that everyone can get better and so they can talk about it in cool ways!

because of historically bad online play, and because of other historic reasons, fighting games are also a heavily in person social activity. regional fighting game communities form a really healthy communal bond and i think it's beautiful. for us, fighting game communities has been where most of our friends are from, and have also given us the oppurtinity to meet lots of different people in the places we live and visit, which is really nice!

for a lot of people, the community is so much more important than the game itself, at least after some time. these are people you will be friends with and love for the rest of your life, long after you've forgotten how to play the game you met them through.

i think to some extent, physical fighting game community also stimulates our love for people and also our transportation and geography special interest. it is so cool going to hang out with people and then hanging out and finding people you've never met before and making friends.

from what we've heard about speedrunning, the FGCs feel kinda similar, although communities primarily form based on location, whereas speedrun communities form more based on the game they like. and also fgcs are physical.

fighting gamers usually have signficant overlap in the games they play. at just our local, there have been granblue fantasy versus, guilty gear strive, skullgirls, smash ultimate, various smash brawl mods, rivals of aether, lethal league blaze, and power rangers battle for the grid setups, at the very least.

it's kinda shocking how excited fighting gamers get when there is the oppurtinity to try out and learn a new game. one of our friends made a joke once that "ultimate players will play anything as long as it isn't their game" when talking to us about a primarily ultimate tournament running other fighting games and how people in the ultimate bracket weren;t playing their ult sets cuz they were playing the other games.

we really love that kinda proactive thing, where people just love learning and exploring and meeting new people and discovering new things!! it's also very useful since a lot of these games would get very little participation because of how small their playerbase is.

my thoughts on games

there are two main types of fighting games, traditional games derived from street fighter 2, and non traditional games that have spawned their own formats. the most popular and respected non traditional type is platform fighters, dervided from super smash bros., although its not the only one.

there is sometimes a lot of division between these two trees and not much overlap, although in my case, i play both. i generally appreciate when games try new things, but that doesn't have to be something completely new, and can be iterative. i just like fighting games in general. generally i enjoy games with fun characters, good movement, and strong decision making.

pokkén tournament

im a real one and have played pokken on all of these LOL
  • arcade
  • switch
  • wii u
supercombo pokken wiki pikachu doing ewgf

that said. im gonna start by talking about pokkén. pokkén combines arena fighters and 2D fighters and tbh the game would've probably been a lot better if it was only the tradiitional style.

the game starts in the arena style field phase, where landing certain hits will transition the game into the traditional 3D styled duel phase. In duel phase, certain attacks also exit, but so do certain damage thresholds and other conditions. The majority of the game's depth comes from duel phase, which sucks, cus you'll only get one or two neutral interactions in a given duel phase before being forced out. The field phase is SIGNFICANTLY less fleshed out.

field phase feels more like a means to an end, and duel phase is usually where most of the signficant interactions occur.

in duel phase, the game has high low and mid stances, which can high and low profile some attacks, but there is no high low mid block system. the game uses health based shields that block everything in front with a button press. its generally a ground based game, with a kinda boring meter mechanic, and it also has an assist system that feels kinda underdeveloped. The game also has a core system of universal rock paper scissors(,,,), where attack beats grab, grab beats counter (counter is kinda like a focus attack where you tank hits and punish them after), and counter beats attack. You get stronger hits if you hit someone with the winning attack, called critical hits, and sometimes it can be devastating.

also, the game is themed around pokemon. uhm.

something i really love about pokkén is that it feels like a fighting game inspired by pokémon, rather than a pokémon fighting game. there is a surpirsing amount of mechanical depth and the characters work really well and have a lot of interesting mechanics that tie fighting games and pokémon. it's obviously made by people who know how to make a good fighting game. a lot of brand based fighting games feel kinda.. shallow, especially non-traditional style ones like pokkén is 30% of the time.

it was made by the same people who made tekken, and i remember the game being marketed as a cross between tekken gameplay and pokémon, and not as a pokémon fighting game. I... personally think this is extremely misleading, pokkén and tekken are nothinga like, but it does go to demonstrate the pedigree of the developers. also they gave Pikachu electric wind god fist and im not joking. Like iit's literally just EWGF.

the characters have really cool design decisions that feels really well fit and the character designs feel very thought out. and there is a shockingly small amount of homonogisation across the cast, which is super cool.

also i really love the presentation. its a very pretty game and the stage design and effects are really appealing. i just kinda love everything about the aesthetic of the game, and the appeal of seeing pokémon actually fight each other in high fidelity is honestly really compelling, although im mostly coming from this from a fgc perspective and not pokémon perspective.

i really love the roster decisions they made. there are a lot of extremely popular pokémon chosen, like pikachu and lucario and charizard, but also a lot of pokémon that were clearly chosen because the devs thought they could do something cool with them, like aegislash and weavile and chandelure. I do kinda wish there was less starter pokémon, which is like a third of the entire roster, but I do still think they achieve a wide appeal and diverse play styles, and the way they are actually designed in game does a lot to make them feel not archetypal at all.

im not super duper familiar with the characters in the game because i havent played it a lot but i really like weavile and braxien.

from my understanding, the game's meta is unfortuantely very zoning heavy and the system mechanics make it difficult to navigate.

a lot of the character meta seem to come from being able to force your opponent to stay in your character's dominant phase. chandelure, a zoner, is best in field phase, machamp, a grappler, is best in duel phase.

i kinda wish there was a sequel to this game that focused entirely on duel phase and had more mechanics and maybe also characters. it kinda feels incomplete mechanically, like there should be a couple more core mechanics to build the game off. i dont really know why that feels that way, and it could just be that you don't spend much time in duel phase?

also this game was launched as literally solved because of a exploit with shadow mewtwo and i think thats hilariouos

arms

  • switch
a communication error has occurred
robo springman on-reaction disconnected as soon as i hit a killing super

the allegations are not stopping.

this is another arena game like pokémon but its EXTREMELY different. Field phase in pokkén is much more typical of arena fighters, with lots of projectiles and things like homing attacks and stuff. Arms isnt like this at all. it's kinda... extremely fundamental in terms of design? extremely traditional.

instead of projectiles, the game is played using high commitment, reactable full screen attacks that extend your hurtbox. The fact that it's a long ranged arena fighter has very little impact, especially on the more basic stages.

every character has two main attacks that can be manueavered surpsringly heavily. you can use the two attacks independent of each other, although you can't take other actions while attacking.

there is button for blocking and grabs as well and then a few character mechanics on top of it. there's also a meter system with super but its also basically universal. sometimes the character mechanics are really minor and sometimes like Dr Coyle they define the entire meta.

i really like the aesthetic theming of Arms but i think its more like. its just reallly strong theming, it kinda falls flat under scrutiny. as in, its just kinda basic.

I think i like this game, i play minmin cus i like minmin a lot and cus i find her character mechanics interesting. but its really hard to get deeply invested in the game cus its really... just core mechanics. it kinda a more extreme version of pokkén, but in the opposite direction. Good core mechanics to build a game off, and then nothing else. the characters do all have differences but it still feels. Wrong. Instead of being built around a moveset concept, characters are built around the core mechanics, and then have a handful of traits added ontop to distinguish them from the rest of the cast. their core gameplay is all very similar.

i think i like it because i like neutral based fighting games that are honest and don't have much abstraction away from the mechanics. But I don't really like it for any of the things the game itself puts forward, other than its strong theming and style decisions. but those arent gameplay! i like the game cus i can force someone into a mindgame where i throwloop someone over and over again cus i know what getup option they want to use and think its absolutely hilarious. I just love BM so much.

also its just fun to play with my friends, including the teams

project M/project +

  • wii
  • potato laptop
is this okay? mom and boton

project M and project + and all the derivatives are a mod of brawl to make it more like smash melee.

the longer time goes on the more and more apparent how soliid of a game PM is. it is absolutely the most definitive way to engage with brawl.

it changes a lot of the characters to be more interesting and adds a lot of polish and finishing touhces to brawl that makes it feel a lot more complete, even with the single player. its very easy to be interested if someone asks to play PM.

I really love the direction it takes Brawl as well. There are so many artistic redesigns and new character models and skins and stage skins. I love snowy dreamland and cherry blossom smashville. It makes the game feel a lot more fun cus there are so many small touches to discover and also makes it less boring to play a lot. especially p+. like theres a special thing you can do with your name tag which lets you play a whole match as mario man. thats so cool.

pm has so many cool things that feel so right for smash bros that a good amount of it made its way into other platform fighters, even smash bros. squad strike was first in project M, and then nintendo decided to put it in ultimate. pm also had donkey kong roll for dash attack before nintendo did

The melee gameplan comparison doesn't give PM enough credit, either. PM is a lot more polished and well designed and accessible, and is in some ways an iterative evolution of melee, rather than a reimplementation. a lot of the characters in PM also have completely unique identities from Melee. roy for example is different in PM. the characters in general got a LOT of love. even te characters that didnt get much work have so much love. and the ones that do have changes have so many and are incredibly faithful.

something that has always felt really unfortunate about smash bros is that rarely does official smash bros actually hit the potential of the concept. like, smash bros is somewhat (although not very) homogenous in terms of character design, and it feels more like. a character follows a template. everyone needs a forward tilt that functions roughly the same way, etc.. and so the devs of smash look for a move in a characters source kit that would make sense as a forward tilt, and then add flairs based on source material. If they cant come up with something, they just make something up. this is very different from PM or a game like pokkén, where characters are designed from the getgo to have a certain gameplan and style of gameplay, and that is inspired directly from the source material. smash does do this, but much less. a lot of smash moves are just like. Moves.

so pm redesinging the characters makes them feel a lot more cohesive. instead of a character just having some tacked on normals cus that integrate with a character, it feels like everything is intentional. and characcters feel so much more faithful to their source material in pm too.

guilty gear strive

  • computer
  • switch
  • playstation4 and 5
dustloop wiki im least im not french

guilty gear strive is really. Cool. the game is one of the rare examples of a mainstream fighting game. and its unapolagetically guilty gear. a lot of corporate media is extremely safe, in order to appeal to as mass a demographic as possible. guitly gear strive has mass appeal despite this.

ggst has a style and you will like it. heavy rock music and really impressive and well done animated aesthetic and awesome mechanics like getting to just cancel anything at any time and fullscreen mid histun combo breakers.

the story is Insane and the characters are Insane and the mechanics are Insane. its awesome.

fighting game mechanics

BLOCKING!!!

one of the core parts of fighting games is the ability to defend against incoming attacks. it is probably so universal because it is a very natural way to introduce some decision making and risk reward to a fight!

some games

resources

Every Fighting Game Type Explained

index

smash bros (why dont we make this title pretty?)

super smash bros