Fighting Games and the Pursuit of Perfection

I’m incredibly passionate about fighting games and the scene around them, but to many players, the higher tier of play is incredibly daunting. This article is a short documentation of my experiences getting deeper into the world of competitive fighting games.

To me, fighting games are the ultimate combination of skill and growth in the gaming industry, seamlessly blending the challenge of knowledge, execution, and comprehension in a way to keep the skill ceiling sky-high. Beginning to try and grasp this in a more serious manner is an incredibly tough task, from understanding simply how characters work, how the game's system mechanics impact certain features, along with the task of learning how to execute specific moves in different instances. Despite the challenge, this leads to one of the most satisfying changes I have personally experienced in a gaming setting. It’s hard to know where to start, but in my experience, I tried to grasp a couple of characters, most recently, in Street Fighter 6, and get a basic understanding of movesets and game plans before delving deeper. Playing some matches at a low level also indirectly gives the player knowledge behind matchups and how different characters play, giving them a much more dynamic learning experience than just trawling through tutorials for hours on end to understand concepts better learned through practice. Beyond this, players simply need to get an understanding of what is even going on — some things can be incredibly unclear at first glance — and the general mechanics of certain games can be difficult to grasp. Tekken 7 was my biggest struggle with this; the mix of high, low, and mid attacks was incredibly difficult to understand due to the visual indication not being clear in some instances. Many characters in fighting games also have unique properties behind attacks, which can be problematic to learn when that character is entirely foreign to the player.

While experience is the best way to truly grow, there are times that players may have to take to training modes and tutorials to begin to climb up the ranks faster and to be able to subsist in the higher tiers. Combos are an incredibly important tool, which is also one of the most satisfying things to learn. Mastering a difficult (or even just stylish combo) can be a fantastic moment, and actually managing to land it in a game leads to a dopamine rush other gaming experiences have never really matched. As shown by both the mechanical and mental benefits, combos are an utterly invaluable tool for growth. This also leads to another difficult concept for new players to begin to get to grips with: motion inputs. These are a type of input requiring people to move the stick or D-Pad in a set of directions which is very uncommon in other genres. Many of these can also be highly precise and require quite a lot of practising to get down consistently. However, newer fighting games are introducing different control schemes, such as Street Fighter 6’s Modern controls preset. This control scheme gives access to special moves with a single button press instead of being locked behind motion inputs, leading to a much easier learning curve.

Inevitably, after a differing amount of hours, players will begin to hit a wall, growth slows down, losses begin to pile up much more than before, and frustration can really begin to settle in. At this point, it’s important to remember, though, skill increase is absolutely not linear. Growth in the beginning of a game’s lifespan is bound to be much faster due to the ease of learning fundamentals compared to having to learn much more advanced mechanics. These can be knowledge-based, such as learning how to handle different and more complex matchups, or purely a matter of execution, such as learning and implementing harder combos into a player’s arsenal. Despite this struggle, breaking through this wall is the most satisfying part of the process, behind maybe pulling back a win in an incredibly clutch scenario. Whether it’s beating a player or character you’ve struggled with in the past or reaching a rank you’ve been aiming for, these self-implemented goals help stick through these hard times.

Fighting games are daunting, there’s no denying that fact, but behind that intimidating facade is a world full of depth and intricacies. So many fighting games fall short of a wider gaming audience due to this, but hopefully, with these new improvements to accessibility, such as Street Fighter 6’s Modern controls preset, we’ll soon be seeing a new age of fighting game pros.