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Fighting Games for Dummies: Should We Reevaluate the Genre?

Fighting Games for Dummies: Should We Reevaluate the Genre?

Today the alpha for Rising Thunder releases, a game meant to redesign and rethink the entire fighting game genre. The primary design impetus behind the game is that fighting games are too complicated. Many players never get beyond the button mashing phase of playing fighters. If they do want to get beyond them, they need to grind out the game for months at a time, being able to pull out commands at will. So the whole genre needs to be simplified in order to appeal to the masses. Options need to be sacrificed for simplicity.

But is it really simplicity that we want, or the illusion of simplicity? Take the curious example of Smash Brothers . No one can deny that Smash is one of the most popular fighting games on the market. It’s also one of the most well received games on the market, as it eschews classic fighting game inputs like quarter circles. On the surface, Smash seems about as simple as it can get. Or is it?

On the casual level, players can pick up Smash and play the “basic” game. But casual players rarely touch hardcore concepts. Melee is perhaps the best example of this. Watch this video of a very simple move exchange in pro melee.

In this video, the player performs 40 inputs in 7 seconds. That’s about 5-6 inputs per second, and each input has to be pressed in a certain degree of time or hardness to get things like a short hop to work.

Fighting Games for Dummies: Should We Reevaluate the Genre?

Now let’s look at another combo example, the first combo in this video from Under Night In-Birth, commonly accepted as a complicated anime style game. That is a viable combo for professional play and it’s only 10 inputs in about 5 seconds, or two inputs a second. That’s less than half the complexity and less than a quarter of the length of the Smash input string, and that’s a viable combo in a pro match.

Was that combo too simple for you? Ok then, lets tune it up. Let’s look at the last combo, probably the most complicated one here. It includes rapid cancels and super moves and all sorts of good stuff. If you count every direction in a quarter circle as a separate input (which is nuts) this combo does 27 inputs in 13 seconds. That’s about 2-3 inputs per second. It’s a lower density, lower complexity, and lower input count in general than Smash! The only difference is, it takes more time.

And that’s the rub. Removing quarter circles doesn’t necessarily make games more simple. Instead, it makes them appear more simple. Some of the best fighting games of all time had this simple appearance with a deep complexity underneath. Marvel 2 comes to mind.

So the question is, will Rising Thunder actually be more simple, or will it simply appear more simple? Since you can change your loadouts between matches, earn new moves by winning, play interesting mixup games that utilize it’s only online nature, and more, I’d hazard that Rising Thunder will be far more complicated than games like Street Fighter . It’s just that we won’t notice because we can throw a fireball with one button.

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