If you were like me and grew up with a PS2 or went to any arcade back in the day, you probably have already experienced fighting games in one way or another. You could be a straight-up masher spamming the cheapest Eddy Gordo moves you could, or you could be one of the mythical Mexican Akumas that demolished their opponent during a smoke break.
Fighting games were only ever a fun way to pass the time, but then I got to know them better, and now I can’t look back. I fell hard for fighting games, and in this article, I’m going to hopefully infect you with the same passion that got me on the grand stage.
Practice Makes Perfect
There’s no hiding behind it; there is a mechanical barrier when it comes to entering fighting games. To get the most out of a fighting game, you need to learn the timing and inputs of your character’s combos, ranging from beginner combos that just make the most of the opportunity to expert combos that flex on your opponent. But combos are just one thing; there are a plethora of mechanics that have to be learned even at the base level of fighting games.
Every game is an exchange of your character’s best pokes, punishes, and complex inputs. Heck, Marvel Vs. Capcom’s plink dashing and Tekken’s Korean Backdashing were just movement mechanics, but they required months of practice.
But I am here to tell you that all this time and effort put into fighting games is exactly what makes them more exciting to watch and play. Fighting games are an esport, and that’s because people expend their time, sweat, and tears to make sure that the tech they spent hours in the lab engraving into their muscle memory can be flawless when the time is right. Plus, no one talks about the pure high that you get after hitting the difficult combo you obsessed over. Let me tell you, the first time I hit a Mishima electric twice in a row is a type of bliss I can’t find in any other type of game.
More Than A Fistfight
While mechanical skill is crucial in fighting games, that’s not all there is to it. I learned this the hard way early on in my fighting game journey after I labbed a combo for every launcher until I could do it on both sides with my eyes closed. I took that mechanical skill into a real fight, and I ended up flopping around, throwing out punishable launchers and hoping they weren’t blocking. It felt like I was fighting a brick wall, and I was embarrassed by how big a game I talked about, because suddenly, none of my high-damage combos were threatening or cool. Of course, I was discouraged from even picking up the controller again, but then I started to look deeper into fighting games.
Aside from mechanical skill, there are a bunch of other techniques and concepts that I needed to get a grasp on. Stuff like poking, conditioning, and the neutral tri-fecta were all new concepts to me, and it surprised me how much deeper the rabbit hole went. I began to look at fighting games less from the perspective of characters beating characters, but more like mental warfare between players.. This alien concept of the mental game in fighting games was something I enjoyed, and what has since kept me coming back to fighting games. Because while you can learn how to play every character in the game, you can’t learn every player in the community.
Community
Street Fighter, Tekken, Marvel Vs. Capcom, and even Mortal Kombat, all fighting games operate around one philosophy: introduce yourself by the way you fight. I believe that a person’s main character and play style speak volumes about the type of person that they are, and it’s because of this belief that I’ve gotten close to a lot of strangers without actually talking to them. I have one friend who loves to sidestep and duck, another friend who abuses lows to ruin my mental game, and another friend who prioritizes flashiness over optimization. They break under pressure, they learn, and at the end of the day, it feels like I’m connecting with someone on a deeper mental level.
This is the exact reason why I think fighting game communities are so tight-knit and welcoming. You can get to know a person just by playing with them through a first-to-5, and you’re going to come out a wiser person with a new friend. So through all the loss streaks, the hardships, the hours you spend in the lab, remember that there’s a community out there that struggled just as hard as you. Now say it with me, you did definitely tech that throw.
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