Time for a New Stage in Fighting Game History

Fighting games need to grow up.

They’ve had their moment in the spotlight. We’ve seen all there is to see of their current paradigm. I get it already, developers. Every female character is going to wear a slutty outfit. Schoolgirls in short skirts are fair game. Boobs are awesome. Violence is equally awesome. Long strings of complex commands completely unexplained by the game are the norm. Single player exists because it has to and is deserving of little to no focus.

I’m not saying the current state of fighting games is bad, I’m saying it’s time to move on. 

JRPGs get a lot of crap for being stuck in the past. Everything about them is stagnant. From character designs to save systems to menus to combat, all aspects of modern JRPGs could have come from a decade ago with almost no change.

The only reason fighting games aren’t getting the same level of shit for the same problem is that they’re not as popular. 

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Virtual Fighting - Surprisingly Accessible

 

I don’t want to speak too soon and jinx it or anything, but I think Virtua Fighter 5 might have one of the best difficulty curves of any fighting game I’ve ever played.

And this coming from a game I was expecting to be massively complicated and extremely difficult.

Weird, right? I know.

To be clear, it certainly is massively complicated, but the game seems to acknowledge this fact. It doesn’t hammer me over the head with difficulty right from the start and just expect me to catch up like most do. It gives me plenty of room to be a total n00b at first. It gives me the time to build both skill and confidence without being stupidly frustrated by a game that seems impatient for me to be much better than I actually am.

What a freaking concept!

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The Mystery of Mortal Kombat

To celebrate my recent purchase of a shiny new Madcatz Street Fighter IV Tournament Edition Fightstick, I began scouring Xbox Live Marketplace for any demos of fighting games I might have missed. There wasn’t too much to be found, honestly, but one I did happen across was Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.

It was only five dollars!

Ah, what could be better than a bit of old-school nostalgic fun with the wacky cast of Mortal Kombat, right?

So I plugged in my stick and fired up the demo. After only a few minutes, I was left with one question.

How in Raiden’s name did anybody ever like this game?

All the characters play the same. There’s no variety in move sets, aside from a couple of lousy special attacks per character. The movement is slow and plodding.

Oh yeah, and the game has the worst, most frustrating AI in the history of everything ever created by man.

I’ve poured over 40 hours into Street Fighter IV at this point (a small number by hardcore standards, but a lot from my more casual standpoint) and I’ve put nearly 30 into BlazBlue. These are games are different from Mortal Kombat, but surely the 2D fighting game basics I learned in them would translate into at least enough basic knowledge to beat the first character on novice difficulty in arcade mode, right?

Nope.

I’m not ashamed to admit, Kitana handed me my ass over and over and over again as I tried out an assortment of stupid-looking characters trying desperately to get the hang of one of them. Never mind that they all played exactly the same, I thought that surely one of those times I would be able to beat her.

And I did, eventually, through sheer dumb luck. Yay for me. Then I was promptly defeated by enemy number two.

See, the problem with the AI isn’t just its difficulty. Oh, it has plenty of that, don’t get me wrong. But good fighting game AI will make you feel like you’re fighting against another person (at least to as large an extent as possible). Mortal Kombat seems to revel in its cheap, cheating, cheesy AI.

At no point did it come even close to fooling me into thinking I was playing against something smart. I was simply playing against a series of canned responses. Had I spent more time with the game and figured out some of its patterns and learned more good patterns myself I could have gotten farther. But as that would have been the opposite of fun, I did not.

Some deep, dark part of me has a strange fondness for the Mortal Kombat characters. I can’t explain why. I hated all the MK games as kid, too. My next door neighbor used to sucker me into fighting him all the time and continually beat me to a pulp because I had no idea what I was doing and he didn’t bother to tell me. My times with every Mortal Kombat game I’ve ever played have been almost universally negative, with the sole exception of playing the surprisingly decent Shaolin Monks with a friend.

Despite all of this, I still occasionally play an MK game, hoping to find something decent and justify spending more time with these terrible characters I love for some reason, yet it rejects me every time because, well, all of the games are absolutely terrible.

Street Fighter holds up well and is still playable to this day.

Mortal Kombat is a giant pile of crap and always was.

I suppose I was hoping to fire up the Ultimate MK3 demo and find something decently fun enough to relive a couple of memories for a few bucks. Maybe I was even hoping for an experience like I’ve had with Street Fighter IV recently, where I finally discover the game’s hidden secrets and find out why it’s so much fun for so many.

But to have an experience like that, I suppose the game would have to be good.

Even the port of the terrible game was terrible. The menus were basic, amateurish, and ugly and the game had almost no options. I couldn’t even find a way to remap the controls to make them work better with my arcade stick. What arcade fighting game in its right mind, no matter how terrible, doesn’t allow players to easily use an arcade stick? Madness, I say. I know the game was an early example of an XBLA release, but man does it ever show how far we’ve come since the early days.

Well, I can definitely say this: had I bought this Xbox Live Arcade rendition of Ultimate MK3 based on some crazy notion of nostalgia that came from nowhere, it would have been the worst use of $5 I’ve had in quite some time.

Come to think of it, though, I haven’t tried Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe yet.... Maybe that one is better....

Out of My League

I make no apologies for the fact that I am a casual fighting game fan with decidedly average skills. I am not terrible, but I am not terrific either. I am constantly attracted to their depth, shiny graphics, and high replayability, however I simply do not have the time or inclination to spend the amount of time necessary to get to the higher levels of play.

Most of the time I am fine with this. It does produce more than the occasional frustration, as fighting games in general (to their detriment, I think) aren’t really built for a person like me. The casual player is an afterthought in the construction of most of these titles.

Still, when I find a fighting game’s mechanics to be fun enough, I will often fight through the punishing difficulty and fight through the complete lack of tutorials or any way to learn how to play the game within the game itself. I have fun with these games on the level that I like to have fun with them, and that’s fine for me. I wish I had more human competition and I wish I were less afraid to go online, lest I get torn to shreds by the type of players that actually like to go online with these games, but I still manage to have fun with them.

Spending the amount of time necessary to pull off some of the insane combos and techniques that the higher level players do would require a level of single-game dedication I don’t give to any genre. Sure I envy players that can do this, but it is a type of envy that is fully aware that my inferiority will be a permanent state of being. I do constantly strive to get better of course, but within the bounds of what is reasonable for someone with my abilities and relatively short attention span.

The more I play them, however, the more I continue to be frustrated with how much this genre seems not to be made for me. I yearn for a fighting game tailored more for a person like myself - with enough depth to satisfy, but with enough accessibility and friendliness that its difficulty is not punishing, its secrets not locked to all but those who put in huge amounts of time. Smash Bros. is one example of something that's at least in the right ballpark, but while that is certainly a fun title, it’s not exactly satisfying on the same level of depth as a true one-on-one fighting game.

These frustrations have only become more and more prominent recently as I have increased the number of fighting games I am spending a lot of time with. Previously, the only title that was able to hook me for long was Soulcalibur - about as close to the approachable fighting game nirvana as it currently gets. As I have written about previously, however, I have now managed to discover the joys of Street Fighter and have recently begun to become quite fond of BlazBlue as well.

Perhaps it is my inexperience talking, but the 2D fighting games seem to share a particular contempt for newcomers. It’s hard to blame them, really, as they must cater to a fan base more hardcore than just about anything else I can think of, but the problem remains.

As much as the genre frustrates me due to its stagnancy, I shall continue my search for those fighting games that manage to hook me. I have had tons of fun lately learning of the addictive qualities of Street Fighter IV and penetrating the weirdness that is every single aspect of BlazBlue.

This has indeed been a terrific period for fighting game fans and I am living proof that the genre’s newfound (and somewhat unexpected) resurgence has served to draw at least a few newcomers into the fray.

I can’t help but wonder, however, if the “member’s only” nature of the fighting game genre as it stands has turned many of those dabblers away. It nearly happened to me, were it not for my stubborn insistence to finally learn what the hell this Street Fighter thing was about.

I’m glad I stuck with it and I’m sure I can’t be the only one who has discovered the joy of fighting games in recent days (or in my case, at least the expanded joys of fighting games, as I’ve been a Soulcalibur addict for years). I hope that someday, sooner would be better than later, a developer realizes that there’s room for middle ground. I fully believe that someone could make a fighting game with enough depth to satisfy those that wished for it while maintaining enough fun (and reasonable difficulty levels) at a lower level of play to satisfy those that merely wish to make an entrance to the scene.

Meanwhile, I'll just continue my struggle to fit in while trying not to throw my controller at the wall too many times.