Evolution and Mechanics of Fighting Games

When Riot revealed the gameplay trailer for its upcoming fighting game 2xKO, a user on Reddit described the game as a Tekken-like which caused a collective facepalming of fighting game fans. It was like someone saw these spring rolls and called them burritos. Burritos? Well, they're spring rolls. Tekken and 2xKO are obviously different to fighting game players, but it's not surprising how these games could seem similar to the layperson. Look at how many have a character select screen, a side view angle of both players facing each other, and life bars depleting towards the center until someone is KO'd, win enough rounds, and win the match. How can these games be all that different if so many share these fundamental characteristics? But the same can be said about a genre of music like rock. Wait a minute, this sounds like rock and roller roll. Rock music mostly has some combination of electric guitars, bass, drum kits, and around three to five members, but everyone knows punk rock is not the same as blues rock. which is not the same as technical death metal. There are so many different types of rock music now, but if you go back in time, you can trace its roots down to the father of rock and roll, Chuck Berry. If you were to try and give rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry. Many artists contributed to the birth of rock, but Chuck Berry is described as the one who came closest to putting all the essential pieces together, thus forming an archetype. So too with fighting games, if you go back far enough, you can find its archetype, Street Fighter II The World Warrior in 1991. Yes, it was inspired by many iconic fighting games before it, but they also served as prototypes that laid the groundwork for what Street Fighter II would become. Karate Champ in 1984 brought forward the 1v1 side view martial arts game, but its clunky double joystick gameplay did not hold up over time. YR Kung Fu had health bars and multiple characters, but it was sadly single player only, and even with all the lasting innovation Street Fighter 1 had, it still did not let you select a character. These games were popular and sold well, but none would get close to the impact and success of Street Fighter 2, which would go on to sell over 22 million copies across platforms. It just had the right combination of design and gameplay that became the basis for so many fighting games going forward. forward, including major titles being made today. So what exactly are these design and gameplay elements that made Street Fighter II so successful that it transformed the arcade culture from one of getting personal high scores into one of beating a human opponent? Well, for starters, obviously, a versus mode. Having the objective be to mess up another human player is what largely distinguished the fighting game genre from the single player and co-op beat-em-up genres. It's why people were confused when Sifu got nominated for Best Fighting Game at the Game Awards. What the holy dumb sh-Excuse me? If there were a classification tree for fighting games post-Street Fighter 2, the fundamental characteristic at the top should be a versus mode. From here, we branch off into two categories, archetypal and hybrid, or if you prefer, traditional and non-traditional, or, I don't know, classic and modern. Like many games before it, Street Fighter 2 was a 2D fighting game with a side perspective where both characters are always facing each other. This means that the character movement is described as moving backwards and forwards as opposed to merely left and right. Because it's a 2D game, you cannot evade attacks by moving to the third dimension any more than the original Pac-Man could jump over ghosts. This is why these NPCs can be so chill when a fight is happening right in front of them. They know they'll never get hit. Modern versions of these games might have 3D models and environments, but if the gameplay still takes place in those two dimensions, you still have a 2D fighting game, though some will call them 2.5D. But while you cannot evade by moving into the third dimension, you can evade by going up really high. So characters jumped higher than their own height, making the combat look like Cirque du Soleil. Making use of the 8-way joystick of the era, up was neutral jump, up forward was forward jump, and up back was back jump. Each of the three-way jumps are at fixed heights, trajectories, and distances per character. Hold forward to walk forward, hold back to walk backwards, and hold down to crouch. Simple enough, but the directionals also control the blocking. You hold back to block, which is the same input to walk backwards, and hold down back to crouch block. If you've noticed, all the jumping and blocking are done on the 8-way joystick. This is because the creator of Street Fighter 1, Takashi Nishiyama, wanted a six-button game in an era where two or three was the norm. He would argue that a six-button game wouldn't be too complicated if all the buttons did the same thing. Attack. Nishiyama got his way and Street Fighter would have no No jump button and no block button for over three decades and counting. But there was an unintentional consequence of a hold back the block system which has become a major part of the archetypal 2D fighting game to this day. The problem or feature of hold back the block is that the input for back changes depending on if your opponent is to your right or your left. If your opponent is to your right, you hold left to block. If they're to your left, you hold right to block. Simple enough, but which way should you hold here to block? Left or right? It's hard to know which direction is back if you don't know if your opponent will be to your right or your left. In this case, you must hold right to block because the opponent ends up to your left when the attack connects. Tricky, but that's what makes it so good. An attack that suddenly requires you to switch blocking direction to defend is called a cross-up. So the first guy I ever saw do cross-ups, his name was Tony Tsui. I was doing cross-ups myself, but didn't even know I was doing it. I just do that for whatever reason. If I jumped into somebody really deep, all of a sudden the guy couldn't block. A big part of fighting games is to make your opponent defend incorrectly by mixing them up, which is unsurprisingly called a mix-up, but more specifically in this case, a left-right mix-up. I always want to see this stuff on ESPN. Let's get rid of... The spelling bee already. I don't care about kids memorizing words out of a dictionary. There's no resets in the dictionary. There's no cross-ups in spelling. But it's hard to cross someone up when they're a moving target. Luckily, Street Fighter 2 also introduced knockdowns, which rendered a player immobile but invulnerable until they got up again. With the opponent on the ground, you can get in position to plan your mix-up. If it hits like this... There's a small window where you can score another free hit afterwards before the game will let your opponent block. This glitch is what we now know as a combo. From here, you can do a special attack before your attack animation finishes and get a third free hit. Game is starting to look busted now. Look at this janky animation transition. Starting another move before the previous one finishes its animation is called canceling, a staple feature of the 2D fighting game archetype and extremely impossible in real life. Street Fighter 2 lead designer Akira Nishitani said, We thought this was quite interesting, and it didn't seem to cause any bugs, so we decided it could be a feature to expand the gameplay. So, another genre-defining accident. This whole glitch-filled attack sequence where you planned your left-right mix-up feels like you were setting your opponent up, which is exactly why they're called setups. But the left-right mix-up would not have worked if the game did not have hold back the block and used the block button instead. This is what Mortal Kombat did in 1992. Mortal Kombat! When blocking is done with a button instead of a direction, there is no left or right blocking to worry about, meaning no left-right mix-up game to be had. Whether Scorpion throws his spear or does his side-switching teleport punch, the answer is the same, block button. This would actually be a nightmare to deal with if you had to hold back to block, because you'd have to walk backwards to block spear, and forwards to block teleport punch. But funny enough, this nightmare came true when Scorpion became a guest character in Injustice, NetherRealm Studios'first hold-back-to-block fighting game. How can you say that this move has been toned down? Look at it! It's ridiculous. Breaks the rules of the game. This became a great example of a guest character bringing over their abilities into a host world only to harass its people with never-before-seen technology. Basically, what I call the Predator Effect. Calls for tournament fans and nerfs would reach game director Ed Boon on social media where he acknowledged the issue and promised changes. A glance at the 15-page thread on the Mortal Kombat forum testyourmight.com shows how divided people were when they found out Injustice would be a hold-back-the-block game. Mortal Kombat is unique for being a major OG 2D fighting game that is not hold-back-the-block. Its rock music equivalent would be Elvis, a major OG rock artist who stood out from the others by doing his own thing, and taking the performative aspects to the next level. But even without a left-right mix-up game, you can still have the high-low mix-up game, the question of whether you should stand block or crouch block, also known as blocking high or low. The rule established by Street Fighter 2 was that blocking high will defend against high attacks and jumping attacks, but lose to low attacks, which makes intuitive sense. Look how vulnerable those ankles are. And blocking low will defend against both low attacks and high attacks, but will lose to jumping attacks. Not as intuitive, but that's the rule still used today. But high-low mixups in Street Fighter 2 weren't so scary because crouch block covered all attacks on the ground, and jumping attacks were easy to react to with stand block because everyone jumped so damn high. But there was a downside. ...side of crouch blocking, which was that you couldn't move. So a spacing game was played where you'd try to tag your walking opponent with a quick and long low attack while avoiding or blocking theirs. One of the earliest examples of footsies, the strategic combat focused on movement and attack ranges. But even still, crouch blocking was really effective, so they had to add a couple things that could beat blocking, namely throws and chip damage from blocked special attacks. But as you can see, Street Fighter had a this beats that but that beats this kind of rock, paper, scissors gameplay, but with every choice contingent on timing and spacing. Tomo taught me a method called the TDR. Timing, distance, and reactions. But a way to bypass this spacing game on the ground is to do a jumping attack. But the downside is that you cannot block in the air, making it risky. A big part of the game was to make people impatiently jump at you so you can strike them out of the air. Also known as an anti-air. What an anti-air! This is how the game of fireballs and uppercuts became central to its gameplay. Street Fighter II's combat schematic became the foundation of the 2D fighting game and has been used in countless titles. But like with anything, the archetype would evolve, and in the early days, much of it was thanks to SNK, who poached the makers of Street Fighter I, Takashi Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumoto. While Capcom focused on refining Street Fighter 2 gameplay with all its bazillion updates, SNK was working on new fighting game franchises and innovating like crazy. Matsumoto's Art of Fighting in 1992 would introduce meter, super moves, taunting, and dashing where you tap forward or back twice for quick bursts of movement. Street Fighter would add all these mechanics to its core gameplay much later. In 93, weapon-based fighting game Samurai Shodown introduced running. Tap forward twice and hold, something Mortal Kombat would again add a button for. Backdash and run would become standard in many fighting games going forward, but not all innovations stuck around. Nishiyama's Fatal Fury was the most experimental at the time, with its kind of 3D two-lane battle system, pulled down forward to crouch walk, and a 2v1 co-op mode that made the good guys look like bullies. Nevertheless, with so many fighting game characters under their belt, SNK made a crossover game called The King of Fighters 94. This introduced a team battle system where each player picks a team of three characters and the order in which they appear. When a character's life bar is depleted, the next character on the team takes over. The player who can eliminate all three of their opponent's characters wins the game. As their new flagship fighting game, SNK would continue to add features in each iteration. KOF 94 introduced spot dodging, a way to dodge in place for a moment to avoid attacks. A kind of a pseudo-dodge into the third dimension. In KOF 95, they experimented with the option to do a longer three-way jump, and Fatal Fury 3 experimented with the short hop. By KOF 96, you could do a running short hop called a hyper hop, which allowed for some sneaky high-low left-right mix-ups. Combine this with rolling, an invasion mechanic that goes through fireballs and people, and you've essentially got the control scheme for what we know as King of Fighters gameplay. Tons of new movement and jumping options added to the 2D archetype. I think what makes KOF unique in the current era of fighting games is that its movement options are kind of like a happy medium between what you would find in old Street Fighter and also in anime air dashes and whatnot like there's a run option which increases the speed of regular interactions, several different kinds of jumps that all have strengths and weaknesses, and classically also just really good buttons. In contrast, modern Street Fighter at the core still uses controls from Street Fighter 2, but with forward and back dashing added from 3 onwards. Yes, Street Fighter games have had mechanics like long jump, parries, custom combos, and focus attack, but these act more like guest mechanics that change from game to game, which is why each Street Fighter iteration is so different yet so familiar at the same time. But the thing that binds Street Fighter, KOF, and other SNK games together is the rule that you cannot block in the air. This keeps players closer to the ground, which is why there should be a subcategory for grounded fighting games. A great example of a grounded fighting game is Capcom vs. SNK 2, which lets you choose which mechanics you want your character to have through its groove system. It merges and compresses basically a decade of fighting game history into one game and tries to create all these different... mechanics or permutations of mechanics from each game's original series to make those characters feel like they could be at home. You can play with SNK style systems like with a spot dodge or with rolling with short hop. You can play with charge style meter or the stock style meter. You get a rage gauge and kick group that's kind of like ...am shows, but with Just Defend that makes it feel a little bit like Garo, Mark, or the Wolves. But you can also play Capcom characters in those SNK systems, and you can kind of mix and match to really get something that feels like it's what you want. Patrick, number one USA player at this moment. After Super Street Fighter II Turbo was released in 1994, Capcom finally started to flex their own innovations with Darkstalkers, their first post-SF2 fighting game. It would introduce a third type of blocking, hold back the block in the air. But there was a caveat. Air blocking could only block jumping attacks, not attacks from the ground, which includes uppercuts. This kind of partial air blocking was found in Street Fighter Alpha, and more recently, the Granblue Versus series. In terms of offense, Darkstalkers... implemented a primitive form of chain combos, where a loosely dialed in series of buttons would magically do a combo, a departure from the stricter link-based combo timings of Street Fighter and KOF-like games. It was around this time when combos were being recognized by both the players and the developers, and Combo Mania had hit a peak with the release of Killer Instinct, a game with a unique combo system that allowed you to do some that exceeded 10, 20 or even 30 hits during a match. But with great combos comes great one-sided gameplay, so they also incorporated a way to stop your opponent's combo in the middle of it, the combo breaker. But preferences for a combo breaker system can vary, and typically SNK and Capcom fighting games tend not to have them. But while Capcom says no to combo breakers, they were completely okay with adding dashing. Darkstalkers was the first Capcom game to add dashing. for the entire cast. But these were no ordinary dashes, and they varied from character to character. Some would hop, slide, or even fly like Morrigan. But Lord Raptor would go one step further and break the laws of physics by performing the first dash in the air. We'd also see cartoon physics in World Heroes, where the two ninjas performed the first fighting game double jump in 1992. But how absurd would it be if everyone could air dash and double jump? What if everyone could also do chain combos? What if people could block anything in the air without caveats? It wouldn't be absurd, it would just be anime. Guilty Gear in 1998 would have air dash, double jumps, and true air blocking for everyone, opening up way more interactions in the air, and truly distinguishing itself from its grounded counterparts. This new type of 2D holdback-to-block game was called anime, or sometimes air dasher. As a side note, the anime fighting game type mostly refers to the gameplay, not just the aesthetics. Some anime-looking games are known to have more grounded gameplay. I'm looking at you, Granblue, and DNF Duel. Anyways, in Guilty Gear X2 onwards, they added a clever combo breaker system called Burst, which became a defining mechanic of the series. It's clever because you can only do it when your gauge is full, which means there are times a player can do their combo uninterrupted, times when they can enjoy the counterplay of breaking the combo, or times when they can't. times when they counter the counterplay by baiting Burst and starting another combo, this time uninterruptible. These big brain mechanics are common in anime games, and it's where you can find the most creative and nerdiest systems akin to what you'd find in a collectible card game. In Under Night Inbirth, this grind grid gauge measures who has the most grid blocks by the time this ring-shaped meter is full, which then puts that player into a vorpal state which increases damage by 10% and gives them access to chain shift. Would you like to learn more? learn more, here's 27 tutorials and a PhD when you're done. How about a game with such long, unbreakable combos that players have time to take selfies while they're getting hit? Anime games take the 2D archetype and bring it up to 11, visually, mechanically, and musically. If Street Fighter 2 is Chuck Berry, anime games might be progressive metal. You know, they used to tell us our songs were way too long. We used weird time signatures, and there were too many guitar solos. In fact, this song is in 17-8, so... try to tap your foot to it. But we just won a Grammy, so I'm glad we didn't listen. But Capcom had been building up to their own anime-like game, or more precisely, a superhero comic-like game. Right after Darkstalkers, Capcom released X-Men Children of the Atom, which introduced their take on universal super jumps. Instead of making a longer fixed jump arc like in King of Fighters, super jumps in X-Men went really high. Like, so high they had to draw twice as much stage background vertically. They even made an indicator for the other player that was off the screen below. But it wasn't just the jump height that was unique. Super jumps also let you drift your character left and right in the air for the first time, kind of like you do in platformers. You could also do multiple attacks in one jump, and characters like Storm had an 8-way air dash and set- could literally fly. Combine this with the fact that you can block anything in the air, you wonder why even be on the ground. You'll just be susceptible to high-low mixups anyways. In the air, there is no standing or crouching state, so there are no high-low mixups. mixups to worry about. Holding up back to jump and airblock because you're too chicken to deal with a high-low mixup on the ground is called chicken blocking. But this made air combat so good that they also improved ground mobility with dashes that you could cancel into other commands. You could even dash and cancel into another dash, which is known as wave dashing, allowing players to move extremely quickly on the ground. But with movement, blocking, and multiple attacks all available while super jumping, you ultimately got a lot more battles in the air, like... a superhero comic book. This type of fighting game alone would be enough to distinguish itself from other genres, but this series of games was just getting started. They're just flying! They're just flying! Oh! In 1996, Capcom would release X-Men vs Street Fighter, which would become one of the first tag team fighting games, not to be confused with the existing team battle system in KOF which only switches characters when one gets eliminated. Black fighter lets you switch between two characters in the game, and the game itself your selected characters with a command, and depending on the game, you can even fight simultaneously with some limitations. But what really changed everything was Marvel vs. Capcom 2, which lets you call out your teammate to briefly assist you in the fight, also simply known as calling an assist. Again, SNK had a primitive version of this back in KOF 94, where you could call in a teammate only if you were stunned or in a hold. But in Marvel, you could call an assist almost any time you're able to attack, allowing for some oppressive offense and combos. Like, how do you block when your opponent hits you jumping while their assist hits you low at the same time? If perfectly synced, it's theoretically an unblockable. To give the defender a chance against this kind of oppressive offense, there was a mechanic that pushed your opponent away while blocking called push block. But the downside of having multiple characters on screen at once is that you can also get them all killed at once. When two characters of the same team are caught in a deadly combo, it's ironically called a happy birthday. Oh my goodness. Happy birthday! And in the rare case it's three characters, it's called a Merry Christmas, giving new meaning to the joy of giving. Oh my goodness, that was a Merry Christmas. I ain't seen a Merry Christmas in years. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 would establish itself as an archetype. for 2D tag fighters, which became known as a versus game. But this tag system is also seen in games like Skullgirls, BlazBlue Crosstag Battle, and Dragon Ball Fighters, which are varying blends of versus and anime. If you look at the three subcategories of... of the 2D hold-back-to-block games, you can notice there's a gradation that goes from �You sure you want to jump? � all the way to �Why the hell are you not jumping? � The archetypal 2D fighting game evolved to go more upwards. Makes sense because you certainly can't go into the background. But what if you could? Rewind back to 1993 and you have Virtua Fighter, the first 3D 3D fighting game with actual polygons and a 3D camera. At first glance, it looks like a 2D fighting game just with 3D graphics, but this is no 2.5D game. is now empty because it now has become part of the playing field. In terms of fighting games, and gaming in general, it was revolutionary. There's an old GameFAQs guide from 1994 that describes it best. Take a look at this. I found this on the internet. Different is good. With the release of their first ever fighting game, Sega has broken new ground by designing the only current martial arts game whose draw isn't violence or the ever-popular magic moves, but whose draw is realism, fluidity of motion, and genuine martial arts techniques. But this focus on realism and genuine martial arts also affected the gameplay. Walk speeds were more realistic, attacks had way more frames of animation, and high jumping became much less effective, to the point where 3D fighting games eventually phased them out. This basically eliminated the left-right mix-up game, and like Mortal Kombat, 3D fighting games focused on the high-low mix-up. There it is! It's Martial- He's your Tekken 7 champion! The high-low blocking rules are similar to 2D games, except that highs are now always duckable, and jumping attacks are now called mids. They changed the name because in 3D games, most attacks that beat crouch blocking could now be done from the ground. Moves like gut punches, knees, and hop kicks became typical indicators of mid attacks, and Virtua Fighter suddenly made it extremely dangerous to crouch block because you cannot react to most mid attacks like you can with Cirque du Soleil jumping attacks. In later 3D fighting games, these mids could launch you and lead to a juggle combo easily doing 40% or more damage. Whether they knew it or not, the mid would become a game changer. Over time, more and more 2D fighting games started to have mid attacks of their own called overheads with a visual cue of an attack hitting downwards or hopping attack, but they generally aren't as scary as mids in 3D games. Because crouch blocking became so risky, It became overall safer to stand block, which is the opposite of 2D hold back the block games. But the high-low mixups get even harder to block because Virtua Fighter allowed you to press certain sequences of buttons which would activate a flurry of attacks that can be a mix of high, low, and yes, mid attacks. These are called attack strings and recognizing these patterns can help you defend against them, but with so many strings and variations you're bound to get hit by something. This is the high-low mix-up game of the archetypal 3D fighter, and in a way, there are a lot of parallels to modern Mortal Kombat, which also has attack streams with mids and a juggle-centric combo system. But Mortal Kombat is a 2D game. What was it that made Virtua Fighter play like a 3D game, not just look like it? In 2D fighting games, you cannot hit a knockdown opponent by default. The attack just goes through them. This was likely preferable to being able to always hit them, which would lack any meaningful counterplay, unless you had some kind of shrimping mechanic or let everyone move like Aki. But in a 3D game like Virtua Fighter, they allow you to hit downed opponents because the counterplay is simple and elegant. Side roll into the background or foreground. This paved the way for the sophisticated get-up games 3D games are known for, and over time, 2D games started to add more get-up options to have more counterplay against setups. But the lateral movement in Virtua Fighter could only be done when knocked down. And sidestepping in a 3D game wouldn't appear until Tekken 2, but only one character had it. Okay, so Tekken 2 was a 3D game obviously, but it didn't actually have 3D movement. The only person who could actually do a sidestep was Kazuya. It's called the misstep and all you do is do forward neutral and it's like that. It'll move in and out. You can't really control the direction of it. It'll just randomly either go right or left. But he was the first one to do it. Side dodging as a universal mechanic was introduced in Battle Arena Toshinden in 1995 with this rolling move. In 96, sidestepping appeared in Virtua Fighter 3 using a new dodge button. In 97, Tekken 3 got tap up or down to sidestep and has had it since. In 98, Soul Calibur introduced its distinctive 8-way run system where you can move freely in 8 directions on the ground. Even with lateral movement, the characters would still automatically face each other. and the camera would lock on to the side perspective, though sometimes the cameraman needed to be fired. The ability to move laterally gave players two new ways to avoid attacks, sidestep left and sidestep right. In a way, this kind of replaced the role of jumping high to avoid attacks in 2D games, which is evidenced by 3D games phasing out its moon jumping. Jumping in 3D games evolved into realistic jump heights with the purpose of going over low attacks, but not mids or highs, further expanding its high-low gameplay. But in one of the most controversial examples of the predator effect in Tekken 7, guest character Akuma uses his 2D Street Fighter jump to go over Jin's otherwise safe mid attack and do a 95% damage combo. I can't believe what we're seeing here, look at the life bomb! That was the first time where people really started talking about Akuma before like the Pakistanis came around you know. And I think that moment in itself just shows just how dumb Akuma was if we're being honest. Having access to Tools like jump, which unfortunately crushes highs, mids and lows, I think that's just not fair at all. And again, it breaks the rules, the fundamental rules of Tekken. I'm Vincent, Super Akuma, they call me. I'll let you guess what character I play. Akuma is built around having great lows and not so good mids, right? He's obviously got good mids, but it's the lows that are the real problem, so you have to duck more. In 2D games... Most of your time blocking is crouching and you only get up for overheads. But in Tekken it's the opposite, where you're standing and it's the lows where you make the read or react and duck. You should not lose for simply holding back and I think that's the problem with Akuma. If you just hold back, you're going to die. And there's no other character like that, besides the 2Ds of course. And that's not Tekken in my eyes. I think he would be less hated, probably still hated, but less hated if he was just a brand new... Tekken character. The fact that he's a guest, you know, people are kind of xenophobic in that way, I guess. Because right now they feel like they're justified. You know, oh, he's got nothing to do in Tekken. I mean, yeah, but it's been six years, get over it. I think I've just gotten used to it at this point. I've been told many times by people, oh, all you've got to do is backdash Mr. Zakuma. I think that's great. I should backdash to the wall where I get killed for holding back. Great advice, guys. Thank you very much. Oh no, Spag! Watch out for this! Oh my god! It's the block! Joker! While the 3D fighting game has become its own subgenre, it's difficult to make further subcategories. because there are not nearly as many 3D games as there are 2D games, and the major 3D franchises are distinct enough to just be their own thing. In a way, Virtua Fighter can be likened to Buddy Holly, whose everyman persona brought a realism to rock and roll, while also pioneering new recording techniques like double-tracking to give a more three-dimensional sound. By the late 90s, the market was saturated with fighting games that were based on both the 2D and 3D archetypes, so naturally there would be games that combined aspects of both. In 1997, Capcom released Rival Schools, which had the familiar feel to it. gameplay of 2D games like high jumping, magic moves, and special attack cancels, but it also allowed you to sidestep into the background like in a 3D game. But these games were not very common, and even Fighting Layer, which started its series with with this kind of gameplay ended up shifting over to a more conventional 2.5D fighting game, though it looks like they're going back. There isn't a particular term for games that play like 2D fighting games while utilizing a 3D plane, so for now I'll just call them 5D fighting games because 2 plus 3 equals 5? I don't know, maybe it'll become a thing when Tekken Cross Street Fighter comes out. We had Tekken Cross... But there also isn't a term for a fighting game where you can jump downwards. There's a game called Antinomy of Common Flowers based on the Touhou universe that allows you to do a three-way jump upwards or downwards with the middle of the screen being the quote-unquote ground that somehow is the center of gravity with the characters floating in the air. This means you can do an instant down-back-jump forward-air-cross-up. Just imagine a 5D version of this game. At the other end, there are also ultra-minimal them a list fighting games like Divekick that only uses two buttons and has no blocking. All these games take an assortment of aspects of all the categories to concoct something unique while still being based on the archetype. These games are to fighting games what platypuses are to mammals, and so we have the archetypal Other category. If you've made it this far, congrats. This covers all the fighting game types based on the archetype, but there's still another half of the fighting game tree where things get really interesting. One day game designer Masahiro Sakurai was at an arcade destroying someone in King of Fighters, but when he found out the players on the other side were a couple who had no idea what they were doing, he felt terrible. It inspired him to make an accessible fighting game called Super Smash Bros. released in 1999. This game was also a 2D game with a side perspective, but it deviated so much from the original fighting game archetype that people wondered if it could even be called a fighting game. The most obvious difference is the percentage system and stocks instead of life bars and rounds. The goal is to knock your opponent off the edge of the screen to eliminate their stocks, and hitting them increases their percentage which increases how far they get knocked back. But the combat itself also takes a very different approach. Remember all that talk about cross-ups, left-right and high-low mix-ups, scary mids, overheads, and chicken blocking? In Smash, none of that exists because there is no auto-facing and the game's controls are indifferent to what side you're on. You just move left and right instead of forwards and backwards, which allows you to attack away from your opponent, which would be impossible in a 2D hold-back-to-block game. Smash also replaced the high-low blocking game with this intuitive shielding system. Holding the shield button will activate a protective bubble that covers your entire body until it shrinks. The exposed parts of the body are then vulnerable. This is much more intuitive than explaining to someone why this is a high attack. You also don't have to explain motion inputs because Smash did away with them in favor of a special attack button that does different things depending on what direction you're holding. If you've noticed, the way Smash works is like the many side-scrolling platformers you've played before. But also like platformers, the control you have over running and jumping is unlike anything in the archetypal games, even Marvel. In addition to double jumping, drifting, and short hopping, You can choose to fall faster by tapping down. You can also control the trajectory of your character when getting knocked around, which is known as directional influence....holding on, DI-ing in so he doesn't get pushed off. And all this is done with a 360 degree analog stick, which is more directions than eight....blasting off at a protractor measured angle. This level of control is why actions per minute enters the conversation in Smash at the highest levels, especially in Melee. It's no wonder Sp- Smash players call hold back to block games traditional. But as different as Smash is from the 2D and 3D fighting game archetypes, Smash has mechanics inspired by those games, like short hop attacks, roll, which makes you briefly invincible, and spot dodge, which are all mechanics found in King of Fighters. The most similar game in terms of movement is probably KOF, where you have a lot of different types of hops, like you have the short hop, full jump, dash, hyper hop, and a jump in can be minus or... Plus, depending on exactly when you time it, stuff like that. Armada has no shield. Armada has no shield! That's it! Leffen! Leffen is our EVO 2018 Super Smash Brothers Melee Champion. Hi, I'm Leffen. I'm a fighting game slash Smash player, if you think those are different. But I'm mostly known for Smash and more recently, through Dragon Ball and Guilty Gear Strive, I've been known more as a fighting game player as well. This is two different EVO titles in two different fighting games. Like we talk about Rare or Fight, I err. I think a lot of traditional fighting game players think that Smash has very different mechanics and stuff like that. The step from a Street Fighter or a Guilty Gear or Tekken to Smash is probably not nearly as big as they think. They can sometimes have pretty similar decision making. A lot of the hit-lag-block-stun, a lot of the grab versus blocking, whiff punishing and movement and all that stuff, it really exists in Smash, it just has different forms. And I think that's the same thing for like... You know, I've smashed a few traditional fighting games. A lot of them were like, oh my god, you're blocking forever. Is there any real counterplay? Maybe you don't shield as much for as long sequences, but it's not that different from someone who gets edge-carded for 30 seconds and then barely makes it back. That said though, I think it does take a long time to get used to the other if you're used to one. Now over two decades old, there are many platform fighting games made by indie developers and large studios alike, and major tournaments like Genesis that specialize in these games. Without a doubt, the platform fighter deserves its own subcategory under hybrid. The rock equivalent here would be the Beastie Boys, who combined hip-hop with rock music, inspiring a new sound that would explode in the 90s to the consternation of purists. So platform fighting games are a thing, but what about fighting game platformers? Before Smash, there was a game called Mortal Kombat Mythologies Sub-Zero, a side-scrolling platformer game that took place in the Mortal Kombat universe. It was a cool idea, but they forced the archetypal 2D fighting game controls in a side-scrolling platformer game which ended up being a hilarious mess. They kept the three-way jump, motion inputs, and backwards and forwards walking, but because it's a platformer, you sometimes have to walk in the other direction to get somewhere. Their solution? A turn around button. The fighting game platformer never took off, and Mortal Kombat Mythologies became its own thing. But that's not always bad. All sorts of unlikely genres have crossed over into fighting game territory with great results. Bust a Groove is a 1v1 rhythm game where you can attack your opponent and they can attempt to dodge. Puzzle games have versus modes where you can give your opponent garbage. Tennis games can have supers and so can Pong. You can PvP in MOBA or action RPGs. And of course, there's Maiden and Spell, a 1v1 bullet hell game. These games might not have any martial arts combat, but they have other elements of the archetype that give those games their fighting gaminess, and the most fighting gamey thing of all is the 1v1 zero-sum versus mode. Because each of these hybrid games are so unique without the constellation of varieties that platform fighters have, they belong in the hybrid other category. But I argue there's also a genre crossover game where you are undeniably in a martial arts fight, more so than in any of the games I mentioned. These games focus so much on realism, they don't play much like the archetypal fighting games at all, and have things like one-hit kills in the case of Bushido Blade, and even doctors who can stop fights in EA UFC. Yes, there's a doctor mechanic. The crossover genre here is simulator. And if you doubt there should be a distinction between a typical fighting game and a fighting simulator, consider the difference between Gran Turismo, a game that has turned players into actual professional race car drivers, and Mario Kart, a racing game where you can turn into a bullet. The difference is that fighting sims are not nearly as common, so off to the other category they go. But there is one more fighting game hybrid type that deserves its own subcategory, the arena fighter. One of the biggest things in common archetypal fighting games have with Smash is that these games all use a side view perspective. So what happens if you don't? In 1993, Sega released a game called Dark Edge, which was an early attempt at an 8-way movement 3D fighting game with 2D sprites, but the camera did not rotate with the players. This caused all sorts of problems, one of which was players'bodies obscuring the opponent. They hilariously kept hold back to block which meant if you're in the background You could hold up to block and do half circle downward special moves Good luck doing an upside down SNK motion from each direction The fact that you could reposition and attack upwards and downwards complete with matching sprites was novel But the eight wave free ground movement had been around forever in the form of wrestling games and co-op beat-em-up games in the 80s Later SNK took this control scheme added left-right auto-facing, and made the fighting game Aggressors of Dark Combat, which even flexes its free ground movement before the fight starts. It's starting to feel like there's nothing SNK hasn't thought of. But you still can't attack upwards and downwards, so it wasn't until 3D Engines with Polygons when this could be done convincingly. And so we got Air Guys, a polygonal fighting game with free ground movement, and Final Fantasy VII characters. The camera is higher this time to prevent characters obscuring each other, and the characters can face any direction. To auto-face, you must hold down the guard button, which locks onto your opponent, kind of like a 3D Zelda game. But they ambitiously kept the high-low blocking system, where you could block low by either holding guard and being still, or block high by either holding guard while moving, or standing still without holding guard. Did you get all that? While seriously unique and sophisticated, It's hard not to feel like they shoehorned this archetypal 3D fighting game system into an arena perspective. Just imagine if Zelda had highs, lows, and mids. Like Hold Back the Block in Dark Edge, it just didn't catch on. But a year later, Capcom simplified things with the game Power Stone, which had no blocking and no locking on. But it didn't need blocking because the free ground movement with jumping gave many ways to dodge, and without auto-facing, people had to aim their attacks. These games have a sort of isometric perspective where the camera has a limited range of movement and rotation. It's like playing a fighting game in a diorama. What's a diorama? But arena fighters like Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm have a camera that moves much more freely and rotates around the arena. Players have free ground movement and attacking makes you automatically face your opponent. But while a free roaming camera lets you see your favorite characters in all sorts of cool angles, It also means the whims of the cameraman will determine who will have the more favorable perspective and which direction on your controller will go forward. It seems unpredictable, but I'm sure someone out there has found the best strategies to make the camera work in their favor. But the arena fighter Dragon Ball Budokai Tenkaichi solves this issue by giving both players their own third-person over-the-shoulder perspective. But of course, this requires both players to have their own screens or play split-screen. But we've now come a long way from the original archetype and are getting into the perspectives of other well-established genres like third-person shooters. Both third-person shooters and third-person fighting games have missiles or missile-like attacks, but only the third-person shooter focuses on firearms. Firearms are antithetical to martial arts combat for obvious reasons. These weapons have practically unlimited reach and speed, fire instantly, And bullets are unblockable and undodgeable unless you're in the matrix. Firearms make distance and speed irrelevant, so much so that pistols in shooting games often function more like barcode scanners than actual guns firing bullets. This is called hit scan, and you can see this in action if you go frame by frame on a Valorant match. The kill indicator appears the moment the player clicks the mouse, even before the animation of the enemy getting shot. Firearms work in tactical shooters because aiming is a fundamental skill in them. But in fighting games, aim has never been the dominant skill because these games already do most of the aiming for you. Third person fighting games like Gundam Versus and For Honor have lock on systems and in the case of ARMS, the players are always facing each other. And if you think about it, fighting games taking place in two dimensions is a form of auto aim because there is no third dimension in which to miss your attacks. A fighting game where you pit two players in an arena with guns that automatically aim at each other would not be much of a game at all. Even beam attacks and pistols in Marvel vs. Capcom games have significant startup animations and travel time. are not even close to instantaneous. But in the genre to genre case of the predator effect, Guilty Gear Strive introduced Happy Chaos who brought with him an actual hit scanning pistol that fires instantly and aims automatically. Seriously. With the pistol drawn, you can fire at any range. fire while running and jumping, and even while punching and kicking. But the caveats are, you need Concentration Meter to use it, you need to reload, you cannot block with the pistol drawn while your opponent can block the bullets, and the reticule needs time to lock on. But if you hit your opponent with a water balloon, the reticule will lock on quicker until they get dry again. This was definitely a bold character design that is totally anime, but just appreciate what it took to make the gun balanced. It was controversial because you cannot react to an attack that happens instantly, keeping your distance is futile when an attack has unlimited range. There's not much to time when the goal is to shoot first. It upsets Tomohiro's fighting game notion of TDR, Timing, Distance, and Reactions. Know what moves will counter-attack from a given distance. Once you got the timing and distance down, you can concentrate on the arm. Reaction. This is why fighting games tend to stick to projectiles and martial arts, and it's why so many of these games use the side perspective. It's simply the best angle to gauge the speed and range of the huge variety of moves that each character has, making it the go-to perspective of competitive play. This is not to say the perspectives used by arena fighters are not suited for competition, it's just that it makes the gameplay take a huge departure from both the archetypal games and platform fighters. Anyone who has played both side-scroller and 3D Mario games knows how different they can be. But regardless, Arena fighters are fighting games if not just for the fact that they are more that than anything else. And ultimately, they literally brought fresh new perspectives to an old genre, either by using one camera angle or by giving each player their own angle. And just like that, this completes the fighting game tree. An interesting thing to note about this tree is that Dragon Ball has a game from every category except one. But just to be complete, what about the first person fighting game? There are novelty modes in fighting games that have tried this, but you'll soon realize one, you can't see your own character, which is sad. And moves like rolling or spinning kicks will probably just make you throw up, unless your body can rotate without your head, like Exorcist Ryu. The closest thing is maybe chivalry, which allows you to play in both third and first person modes, but here's the thing, there is no lock-on system. So is this a first person fighting game with swords? or a first-person shooter without guns. At this point, we're hitting the limits of what we can confidently call a fighting game, so we'll just leave this to the scientists. This might all seem like an ultra-nerdy exercise in making genre classifications for something already so niche, but it particularly matters in fighting games because the sheer number of games and game types create a diverse culture not so different from rock music. Like a music festival, The Biggest Tournaments hosts a variety of fighting games with multiple stages, And people choose what they want to watch and play. Many people like to play multiple games, but some might only deeply care about one. Some people only like the old games of a series, and some feel the latest is greatest. There are communities within communities that have strong feelings about game mechanics, franchises, and yes, popularity. In 2002, Nickelback got rocks thrown at them for playing at a metal festival by a few audience members that did not take kindly to their type of music. I have no idea what we were doing there, and it was just a horrible, horrible mistake. In their defense, if I went to a metal festival, I wouldn't want to see Nickelback either. This isn't to say Guilty Gear fans are going to start throwing rocks at Smash players, but it's good to know a little bit about the audience you're speaking to. That was one that our manager got spanked for heavy hard. He was like, what were we doing here, dude? Why the f*** were we playing in Portugal with a bunch of metal bands? And he's just like, sorry, I didn't know. It's like, well, you need to know. So if spring rolls are not burritos and 2xKO is not a Tekken-like, what is 2xKO actually like? There's no question it lands somewhere between the versus and anime archetypes, which means it's an archetypal 2D hold back to block game with left-right and high-low mixups. In addition to the standard three-way jump, each character can do a super jump like in KOF. Except the game lets you slightly drift in the air like in Versus games. You can block anything in the air and some characters have jump modifiers like Ahri's air dash and Ekko's forward hop. The game also allows both dashing and running, but like in Versus games you can wave dash making for extremely fast and expressive ground movement. But the biggest Versus element in 2xK0 is that it's a tag fighter where you must select two characters. Like the title of the game suggests, the goal is to KO both characters of the opposing team. The tag system blends versus game rules with those of Tekken tag games. Like in versus games, your partner can be used as an assist by holding a direction and tapping the tag button, which can help you or hurt you if you get happy birthday'd. But like in Tekken tag games, switching characters does not bring them in attacking, and you can also do a tag launcher that switches characters so they can take over your combo. 2xKO also lets you switch to the character that is assisting you in what's called Handshake Tag, something we've seen in the anime fighter BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle. But if you choose the Freestyle Fuse, you can switch back again to the other character, allowing for some serious bullying. This allows for some oppressive high-low and left-right mix-up potential, and Sean made sure to show me by challenging me to games of Bet You Can't Block This. Whoa! What? What? What? So, you gotta guess. But there are defensive options too. When blocking, you can dash forward to do a marvel-like push block, but there's a new mechanic where you can also dash backwards to do an escape called retreating guard. But this one can be beaten by lows, so don't be predictable. There's also a parry if you'd like a higher risk, higher reward option. As for combo breakers, there is a burst-like mechanic called dynamic save, that lets you break out of combos and switch characters. And for getting knocked down, you have multiple get-up options, including an attack with brief invulnerability, but be careful as it can be punished if blocked. But the most novel feature is the duo mode where one team can be controlled by two players, making 2v2 matches possible for a total of four players. We've seen Street Fighter X Tekken do something like this, but only the point character could summon their partner. This led to the infamous moment during Evo 2012 when Mike Ross wasn't allowed to play for an entire round. Wow, that's incredible! Mike Ross did not get to play! 2xKO will let the player off screen play by letting them assist and dynamic save, and with handshake tag and tag launchers, there will be many more ways of switching between players. But this will also demand a new level of coordination that fighting game players have not had to do. As you can see, This is not a simple game. Anime and Versa-style games almost never are. But what it does try to do is make learning and playing it as accessible as possible. The button layout has light, medium, and heavy attacks, which can be pressed in sequence to perform a chain combo, which can be cancelled into a special attack, which is done by pressing a special attack button, just like we've seen in Smash. And yes, there are auto combos like in Dragon Ball FighterZ, if you choose the pulse fuse. But instead of just mashing one attack button to do a combo, you can mash on your own combination to do different combos. But the most accessible thing of all is that it will be free to play, making it much easier to convince your friends to get into it. And the rollback netcode will make the netplay as smooth as possible. So if 2xKO were a band, I think it would be Polyphia. And not just because the character select music sounds like them, and not because both have names that are generic descriptors of their respective fields. Polyphia blends the technicality of progressive metal with the sounds of EDM, Jimi Hendrix, hip-hop, and even K-pop to make something complex yet accessible for modern times, just like how 2xKO keeps the intricacy of anime and Versus-style games while making it approachable for newcomers. Instead of abandoning what made their traditions great, they tweak or tone down just the aspects that scare people away. What is tweaked, of course, never comes without controversy. Polythea guitarist Tim Henson got in some heat for calling a classic guitar technique a boomer bend. It describes a very specific guitar bending lick commonly used in music from the 60s and 70s, the age of the baby boomer. And the 2xKO equivalent of this would be the removal of motion inputs, or I guess in this case, millennial inputs. But this concept goes all the way back to Rising Thunder, which was made by Radiant Entertainment, who were later acquired by Riot Games to make 2xKO. There's a pretty active dialogue, and has been for years, among fighting game players about accessibility and is it good, is it bad. And usually people talk about it as a zero-sum game, like you're going to make the game easier than it's going to be worse for good players. We try to think about it in terms of fun. Once you get into the fun of understanding what a fighting game really is, about the mind reading and the high stakes sort of fast paced poker of like, like that's addictive. We want to like bring that fun to as many people as possible by removing maybe the things that make fighting games kind of scary, but aren't core to like real fighting game experience. Another one is like, it's just more fun, I think, to do things with your friends. It took us a while to sort of embrace like teamwork, but once we did and we found ways to like Still have the carry aspect of like, oh, all the pressure is on me, but I can bring a friend along and we can like have teamwork moments. That's when the game started really to get fun. While still having like a real, hopefully endless mastery curve, we want this to be a game that you can play for literally thousands of hours and still discover new things. Special thanks to Ben, Hedy, and everyone at Bay Area Riot for all your support. This was Gerald from Corey Gaming. Thanks for watching. This video is sponsored by Hitbox, the fighting game controller that started the leverless revolution and became an archetype for them. By replacing the 8-way joystick with four ergonomically placed arcade buttons, there's much less travel distance and exertion required to make the same inputs. There are also new techniques that even make use of the right hand to do things that would be impossible on controllers with joysticks. This is the fastest Dragon Punch. There's such an advantage to using a hitbox that people have jokingly referred to it as the cheatbox. But the thing is, it's tournament legal, which is why top players like Daigo, Tokido, Super Akuma and Kawano are using hitboxes to compete and win majors. These days, pad and stick are pretty much on the same level, but above those is the hitbox. You have the advantages of both. You get the flat layout for your buttons like on stick. which is a lot better to access everything. The problem with stick though, it's very precise but slow. You have to move your whole wrist and even then, where's the diagonal on the stick? Where's the down? Where's the forward? And where's the down forward? But uh yeah, if you want to do a down forward, you just press two buttons here. The hitbox layout and design has become a standard because it's a culmination of many iterations of prototypes by its founders, who are two brothers who just wanted more consistent inputs in Marvel vs Capcom 2. When they brought their homemade prototypes to SoCal Regionals in 2010, it sparked enough interest for them to get interviewed about it, and suddenly there was a demand. The way we differ from, like, keysticks, they call them, where the difference is they got the up key right here. But you can't do any complicated movements. Like in Marvel, you can't do tri-jumps, you can't tiger knee anything. Yeah, thanks for the interview. We didn't expect anybody to really latch onto these. They kept refining the layout until it became the standard we recognize today. A lot of people... Don't know where all the leverless stuff came from, and it came from the garage 2010. Starting point was, I used to be a stenographer, so I took steno ink on my fingers, and I wanted it to be ergonomic and efficient, right? So got it to match as close as I could. Pinkies didn't work out so hot, but this started as up, and then I moved it over to here, personally on the wire, because it was so much more intuitive for me to think of as a jump button. So that's kind of where the next ones come along of me and Sean's next revision. This was the first right. thumb jump. So it's left down right, up, and then A, B, C, D. So for Tatsunoko, so you gotta get assist. This was Sean's version for SCR 2010. The Hulk box, right? Spray painted. He liked the right thumb jump as well. So this is more like a standard six button with the left down right. He wanted something big and girthy, kind of like a mastic. These were like the first tournament hit boxes that we actually competed in and started getting results. These are labor of love. You can see this one is zero zero three, right? I think two either died or we just ripped it apart and cannibalized it. That's most likely. So this is number four. And then finally it turned into the hitbox layout because Marvel 3 was coming out and we needed to finish it. And that was kind of blown up on YouTube. So we had a bunch of people wanting us to make them for them. Since we liked right thumb, but we knew left thumb was intuitive to a lot more people, we brought it together so you could use either thumb and it made total sense. But maybe you're an old-school player or just enjoy playing on joysticks. Hitbox also makes the cross-up which has a lever, but also another set of cardinal directions for the right hand. How is this tournament legal you might ask? Because pad is legal, and it too has multiple sets of usable cardinal directions. Adding buttons to controllers has always been a thing, but with the cross-up, you have it from the get-go. But maybe you want to add buttons to your existing controller, but do not want to drill holes. Hitbox's latest innovation is the combo extension, which is basically two buttons in one, but the extra button simply rests on top of the controller. You can get really creative with this and make your dream layout without doing irreversible mods. I put mine here so I can comfortably do forward dash cancel crouch block in 2xko. They also have buttons without the extension called combo, which are super customizable, and all their buttons come in three different sensitivities to match your playing style. You can even add your own custom artwork. And for all you Smash players out there, there's the Smashbox. If any of this interests you, check out hitboxarcade.com or check out one of their booths at fighting game tournaments. Thanks for watching and see you next video.

Well, they're spring rolls. Tekken and 2xKO are obviously different to fighting game players, but it's not surprising how these games could seem similar to the layperson. Look at how many have a character select screen, a side view angle of both players facing each other, and life bars depleting towards the center until someone is KO'd, win enough rounds, and win the match. How can these games be all that different if so many share these fundamental characteristics?

But the same can be said about a genre of music like rock. Wait a minute, this sounds like rock and roller roll. Rock music mostly has some combination of electric guitars, bass, drum kits, and around three to five members, but everyone knows punk rock is not the same as blues rock.

which is not the same as technical death metal. There are so many different types of rock music now, but if you go back in time, you can trace its roots down to the father of rock and roll, Chuck Berry. If you were to try and give rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry.

Many artists contributed to the birth of rock, but Chuck Berry is described as the one who came closest to putting all the essential pieces together, thus forming an archetype. So too with fighting games, if you go back far enough, you can find its archetype, Street Fighter II The World Warrior in 1991. Yes, it was inspired by many iconic fighting games before it, but they also served as prototypes that laid the groundwork for what Street Fighter II would become. Karate Champ in 1984 brought forward the 1v1 side view martial arts game, but its clunky double joystick gameplay did not hold up over time.

YR Kung Fu had health bars and multiple characters, but it was sadly single player only, and even with all the lasting innovation Street Fighter 1 had, it still did not let you select a character. These games were popular and sold well, but none would get close to the impact and success of Street Fighter 2, which would go on to sell over 22 million copies across platforms. It just had the right combination of design and gameplay that became the basis for so many fighting games going forward.

forward, including major titles being made today. So what exactly are these design and gameplay elements that made Street Fighter II so successful that it transformed the arcade culture from one of getting personal high scores into one of beating a human opponent? Well, for starters, obviously, a versus mode.

Having the objective be to mess up another human player is what largely distinguished the fighting game genre from the single player and co-op beat-em-up genres. It's why people were confused when Sifu got nominated for Best Fighting Game at the Game Awards. What the holy dumb sh-Excuse me?

If there were a classification tree for fighting games post-Street Fighter 2, the fundamental characteristic at the top should be a versus mode. From here, we branch off into two categories, archetypal and hybrid, or if you prefer, traditional and non-traditional, or, I don't know, classic and modern. Like many games before it, Street Fighter 2 was a 2D fighting game with a side perspective where both characters are always facing each other. This means that the character movement is described as moving backwards and forwards as opposed to merely left and right.

Because it's a 2D game, you cannot evade attacks by moving to the third dimension any more than the original Pac-Man could jump over ghosts. This is why these NPCs can be so chill when a fight is happening right in front of them. They know they'll never get hit. Modern versions of these games might have 3D models and environments, but if the gameplay still takes place in those two dimensions, you still have a 2D fighting game, though some will call them 2.5D.

But while you cannot evade by moving into the third dimension, you can evade by going up really high. So characters jumped higher than their own height, making the combat look like Cirque du Soleil. Making use of the 8-way joystick of the era, up was neutral jump, up forward was forward jump, and up back was back jump.

Each of the three-way jumps are at fixed heights, trajectories, and distances per character. Hold forward to walk forward, hold back to walk backwards, and hold down to crouch. Simple enough, but the directionals also control the blocking. You hold back to block, which is the same input to walk backwards, and hold down back to crouch block.

If you've noticed, all the jumping and blocking are done on the 8-way joystick. This is because the creator of Street Fighter 1, Takashi Nishiyama, wanted a six-button game in an era where two or three was the norm. He would argue that a six-button game wouldn't be too complicated if all the buttons did the same thing.

Attack. Nishiyama got his way and Street Fighter would have no No jump button and no block button for over three decades and counting. But there was an unintentional consequence of a hold back the block system which has become a major part of the archetypal 2D fighting game to this day.

The problem or feature of hold back the block is that the input for back changes depending on if your opponent is to your right or your left. If your opponent is to your right, you hold left to block. If they're to your left, you hold right to block. Simple enough, but which way should you hold here to block?

Left or right? It's hard to know which direction is back if you don't know if your opponent will be to your right or your left. In this case, you must hold right to block because the opponent ends up to your left when the attack connects.

Tricky, but that's what makes it so good. An attack that suddenly requires you to switch blocking direction to defend is called a cross-up. So the first guy I ever saw do cross-ups, his name was Tony Tsui. I was doing cross-ups myself, but didn't even know I was doing it.

I just do that for whatever reason. If I jumped into somebody really deep, all of a sudden the guy couldn't block. A big part of fighting games is to make your opponent defend incorrectly by mixing them up, which is unsurprisingly called a mix-up, but more specifically in this case, a left-right mix-up.

I always want to see this stuff on ESPN. Let's get rid of... The spelling bee already.

I don't care about kids memorizing words out of a dictionary. There's no resets in the dictionary. There's no cross-ups in spelling. But it's hard to cross someone up when they're a moving target. Luckily, Street Fighter 2 also introduced knockdowns, which rendered a player immobile but invulnerable until they got up again.

With the opponent on the ground, you can get in position to plan your mix-up. If it hits like this... There's a small window where you can score another free hit afterwards before the game will let your opponent block.

This glitch is what we now know as a combo. From here, you can do a special attack before your attack animation finishes and get a third free hit. Game is starting to look busted now.

Look at this janky animation transition. Starting another move before the previous one finishes its animation is called canceling, a staple feature of the 2D fighting game archetype and extremely impossible in real life. Street Fighter 2 lead designer Akira Nishitani said, We thought this was quite interesting, and it didn't seem to cause any bugs, so we decided it could be a feature to expand the gameplay.

So, another genre-defining accident. This whole glitch-filled attack sequence where you planned your left-right mix-up feels like you were setting your opponent up, which is exactly why they're called setups. But the left-right mix-up would not have worked if the game did not have hold back the block and used the block button instead.

This is what Mortal Kombat did in 1992. Mortal Kombat! When blocking is done with a button instead of a direction, there is no left or right blocking to worry about, meaning no left-right mix-up game to be had. Whether Scorpion throws his spear or does his side-switching teleport punch, the answer is the same, block button.

This would actually be a nightmare to deal with if you had to hold back to block, because you'd have to walk backwards to block spear, and forwards to block teleport punch. But funny enough, this nightmare came true when Scorpion became a guest character in Injustice, NetherRealm Studios'first hold-back-to-block fighting game. How can you say that this move has been toned down? Look at it!

It's ridiculous. Breaks the rules of the game. This became a great example of a guest character bringing over their abilities into a host world only to harass its people with never-before-seen technology.

Basically, what I call the Predator Effect. Calls for tournament fans and nerfs would reach game director Ed Boon on social media where he acknowledged the issue and promised changes. A glance at the 15-page thread on the Mortal Kombat forum testyourmight.com shows how divided people were when they found out Injustice would be a hold-back-the-block game.

Mortal Kombat is unique for being a major OG 2D fighting game that is not hold-back-the-block. Its rock music equivalent would be Elvis, a major OG rock artist who stood out from the others by doing his own thing, and taking the performative aspects to the next level. But even without a left-right mix-up game, you can still have the high-low mix-up game, the question of whether you should stand block or crouch block, also known as blocking high or low.

The rule established by Street Fighter 2 was that blocking high will defend against high attacks and jumping attacks, but lose to low attacks, which makes intuitive sense. Look how vulnerable those ankles are. And blocking low will defend against both low attacks and high attacks, but will lose to jumping attacks. Not as intuitive, but that's the rule still used today.

But high-low mixups in Street Fighter 2 weren't so scary because crouch block covered all attacks on the ground, and jumping attacks were easy to react to with stand block because everyone jumped so damn high. But there was a downside. ...side of crouch blocking, which was that you couldn't move.

So a spacing game was played where you'd try to tag your walking opponent with a quick and long low attack while avoiding or blocking theirs. One of the earliest examples of footsies, the strategic combat focused on movement and attack ranges. But even still, crouch blocking was really effective, so they had to add a couple things that could beat blocking, namely throws and chip damage from blocked special attacks. But as you can see, Street Fighter had a this beats that but that beats this kind of rock, paper, scissors gameplay, but with every choice contingent on timing and spacing. Tomo taught me a method called the TDR.

Timing, distance, and reactions. But a way to bypass this spacing game on the ground is to do a jumping attack. But the downside is that you cannot block in the air, making it risky.

A big part of the game was to make people impatiently jump at you so you can strike them out of the air. Also known as an anti-air. What an anti-air!

This is how the game of fireballs and uppercuts became central to its gameplay. Street Fighter II's combat schematic became the foundation of the 2D fighting game and has been used in countless titles. But like with anything, the archetype would evolve, and in the early days, much of it was thanks to SNK, who poached the makers of Street Fighter I, Takashi Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumoto.

While Capcom focused on refining Street Fighter 2 gameplay with all its bazillion updates, SNK was working on new fighting game franchises and innovating like crazy. Matsumoto's Art of Fighting in 1992 would introduce meter, super moves, taunting, and dashing where you tap forward or back twice for quick bursts of movement. Street Fighter would add all these mechanics to its core gameplay much later.

In 93, weapon-based fighting game Samurai Shodown introduced running. Tap forward twice and hold, something Mortal Kombat would again add a button for. Backdash and run would become standard in many fighting games going forward, but not all innovations stuck around. Nishiyama's Fatal Fury was the most experimental at the time, with its kind of 3D two-lane battle system, pulled down forward to crouch walk, and a 2v1 co-op mode that made the good guys look like bullies.

Nevertheless, with so many fighting game characters under their belt, SNK made a crossover game called The King of Fighters 94. This introduced a team battle system where each player picks a team of three characters and the order in which they appear. When a character's life bar is depleted, the next character on the team takes over. The player who can eliminate all three of their opponent's characters wins the game. As their new flagship fighting game, SNK would continue to add features in each iteration.

KOF 94 introduced spot dodging, a way to dodge in place for a moment to avoid attacks. A kind of a pseudo-dodge into the third dimension. In KOF 95, they experimented with the option to do a longer three-way jump, and Fatal Fury 3 experimented with the short hop.

By KOF 96, you could do a running short hop called a hyper hop, which allowed for some sneaky high-low left-right mix-ups. Combine this with rolling, an invasion mechanic that goes through fireballs and people, and you've essentially got the control scheme for what we know as King of Fighters gameplay. Tons of new movement and jumping options added to the 2D archetype. I think what makes KOF unique in the current era of fighting games is that its movement options are kind of like a happy medium between what you would find in old Street Fighter and also in anime air dashes and whatnot like there's a run option which increases the speed of regular interactions, several different kinds of jumps that all have strengths and weaknesses, and classically also just really good buttons. In contrast, modern Street Fighter at the core still uses controls from Street Fighter 2, but with forward and back dashing added from 3 onwards.

Yes, Street Fighter games have had mechanics like long jump, parries, custom combos, and focus attack, but these act more like guest mechanics that change from game to game, which is why each Street Fighter iteration is so different yet so familiar at the same time. But the thing that binds Street Fighter, KOF, and other SNK games together is the rule that you cannot block in the air. This keeps players closer to the ground, which is why there should be a subcategory for grounded fighting games. A great example of a grounded fighting game is Capcom vs. SNK 2, which lets you choose which mechanics you want your character to have through its groove system. It merges and compresses basically a decade of fighting game history into one game and tries to create all these different...

mechanics or permutations of mechanics from each game's original series to make those characters feel like they could be at home. You can play with SNK style systems like with a spot dodge or with rolling with short hop. You can play with charge style meter or the stock style meter. You get a rage gauge and kick group that's kind of like ...am shows, but with Just Defend that makes it feel a little bit like Garo, Mark, or the Wolves.

But you can also play Capcom characters in those SNK systems, and you can kind of mix and match to really get something that feels like it's what you want. Patrick, number one USA player at this moment. After Super Street Fighter II Turbo was released in 1994, Capcom finally started to flex their own innovations with Darkstalkers, their first post-SF2 fighting game. It would introduce a third type of blocking, hold back the block in the air. But there was a caveat.

Air blocking could only block jumping attacks, not attacks from the ground, which includes uppercuts. This kind of partial air blocking was found in Street Fighter Alpha, and more recently, the Granblue Versus series. In terms of offense, Darkstalkers... implemented a primitive form of chain combos, where a loosely dialed in series of buttons would magically do a combo, a departure from the stricter link-based combo timings of Street Fighter and KOF-like games.

It was around this time when combos were being recognized by both the players and the developers, and Combo Mania had hit a peak with the release of Killer Instinct, a game with a unique combo system that allowed you to do some that exceeded 10, 20 or even 30 hits during a match. But with great combos comes great one-sided gameplay, so they also incorporated a way to stop your opponent's combo in the middle of it, the combo breaker. But preferences for a combo breaker system can vary, and typically SNK and Capcom fighting games tend not to have them.

But while Capcom says no to combo breakers, they were completely okay with adding dashing. Darkstalkers was the first Capcom game to add dashing. for the entire cast. But these were no ordinary dashes, and they varied from character to character. Some would hop, slide, or even fly like Morrigan.

But Lord Raptor would go one step further and break the laws of physics by performing the first dash in the air. We'd also see cartoon physics in World Heroes, where the two ninjas performed the first fighting game double jump in 1992. But how absurd would it be if everyone could air dash and double jump? What if everyone could also do chain combos? What if people could block anything in the air without caveats?

It wouldn't be absurd, it would just be anime. Guilty Gear in 1998 would have air dash, double jumps, and true air blocking for everyone, opening up way more interactions in the air, and truly distinguishing itself from its grounded counterparts. This new type of 2D holdback-to-block game was called anime, or sometimes air dasher. As a side note, the anime fighting game type mostly refers to the gameplay, not just the aesthetics.

Some anime-looking games are known to have more grounded gameplay. I'm looking at you, Granblue, and DNF Duel. Anyways, in Guilty Gear X2 onwards, they added a clever combo breaker system called Burst, which became a defining mechanic of the series. It's clever because you can only do it when your gauge is full, which means there are times a player can do their combo uninterrupted, times when they can enjoy the counterplay of breaking the combo, or times when they can't. times when they counter the counterplay by baiting Burst and starting another combo, this time uninterruptible.

These big brain mechanics are common in anime games, and it's where you can find the most creative and nerdiest systems akin to what you'd find in a collectible card game. In Under Night Inbirth, this grind grid gauge measures who has the most grid blocks by the time this ring-shaped meter is full, which then puts that player into a vorpal state which increases damage by 10% and gives them access to chain shift. Would you like to learn more? learn more, here's 27 tutorials and a PhD when you're done. How about a game with such long, unbreakable combos that players have time to take selfies while they're getting hit?

Anime games take the 2D archetype and bring it up to 11, visually, mechanically, and musically. If Street Fighter 2 is Chuck Berry, anime games might be progressive metal. You know, they used to tell us our songs were way too long.

We used weird time signatures, and there were too many guitar solos. In fact, this song is in 17-8, so... try to tap your foot to it. But we just won a Grammy, so I'm glad we didn't listen. But Capcom had been building up to their own anime-like game, or more precisely, a superhero comic-like game.

Right after Darkstalkers, Capcom released X-Men Children of the Atom, which introduced their take on universal super jumps. Instead of making a longer fixed jump arc like in King of Fighters, super jumps in X-Men went really high. Like, so high they had to draw twice as much stage background vertically. They even made an indicator for the other player that was off the screen below.

But it wasn't just the jump height that was unique. Super jumps also let you drift your character left and right in the air for the first time, kind of like you do in platformers. You could also do multiple attacks in one jump, and characters like Storm had an 8-way air dash and set- could literally fly. Combine this with the fact that you can block anything in the air, you wonder why even be on the ground. You'll just be susceptible to high-low mixups anyways.

In the air, there is no standing or crouching state, so there are no high-low mixups. mixups to worry about. Holding up back to jump and airblock because you're too chicken to deal with a high-low mixup on the ground is called chicken blocking.

But this made air combat so good that they also improved ground mobility with dashes that you could cancel into other commands. You could even dash and cancel into another dash, which is known as wave dashing, allowing players to move extremely quickly on the ground. But with movement, blocking, and multiple attacks all available while super jumping, you ultimately got a lot more battles in the air, like... a superhero comic book.

This type of fighting game alone would be enough to distinguish itself from other genres, but this series of games was just getting started. They're just flying! They're just flying! Oh!

In 1996, Capcom would release X-Men vs Street Fighter, which would become one of the first tag team fighting games, not to be confused with the existing team battle system in KOF which only switches characters when one gets eliminated. Black fighter lets you switch between two characters in the game, and the game itself your selected characters with a command, and depending on the game, you can even fight simultaneously with some limitations. But what really changed everything was Marvel vs. Capcom 2, which lets you call out your teammate to briefly assist you in the fight, also simply known as calling an assist. Again, SNK had a primitive version of this back in KOF 94, where you could call in a teammate only if you were stunned or in a hold. But in Marvel, you could call an assist almost any time you're able to attack, allowing for some oppressive offense and combos.

Like, how do you block when your opponent hits you jumping while their assist hits you low at the same time? If perfectly synced, it's theoretically an unblockable. To give the defender a chance against this kind of oppressive offense, there was a mechanic that pushed your opponent away while blocking called push block. But the downside of having multiple characters on screen at once is that you can also get them all killed at once.

When two characters of the same team are caught in a deadly combo, it's ironically called a happy birthday. Oh my goodness. Happy birthday! And in the rare case it's three characters, it's called a Merry Christmas, giving new meaning to the joy of giving. Oh my goodness, that was a Merry Christmas.

I ain't seen a Merry Christmas in years. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 would establish itself as an archetype. for 2D tag fighters, which became known as a versus game.

But this tag system is also seen in games like Skullgirls, BlazBlue Crosstag Battle, and Dragon Ball Fighters, which are varying blends of versus and anime. If you look at the three subcategories of... of the 2D hold-back-to-block games, you can notice there's a gradation that goes from �You sure you want to jump?

� all the way to �Why the hell are you not jumping? � The archetypal 2D fighting game evolved to go more upwards. Makes sense because you certainly can't go into the background.

But what if you could? Rewind back to 1993 and you have Virtua Fighter, the first 3D 3D fighting game with actual polygons and a 3D camera. At first glance, it looks like a 2D fighting game just with 3D graphics, but this is no 2.5D game. is now empty because it now has become part of the playing field. In terms of fighting games, and gaming in general, it was revolutionary.

There's an old GameFAQs guide from 1994 that describes it best. Take a look at this. I found this on the internet.

Different is good. With the release of their first ever fighting game, Sega has broken new ground by designing the only current martial arts game whose draw isn't violence or the ever-popular magic moves, but whose draw is realism, fluidity of motion, and genuine martial arts techniques. But this focus on realism and genuine martial arts also affected the gameplay. Walk speeds were more realistic, attacks had way more frames of animation, and high jumping became much less effective, to the point where 3D fighting games eventually phased them out. This basically eliminated the left-right mix-up game, and like Mortal Kombat, 3D fighting games focused on the high-low mix-up.

There it is! It's Martial- He's your Tekken 7 champion! The high-low blocking rules are similar to 2D games, except that highs are now always duckable, and jumping attacks are now called mids.

They changed the name because in 3D games, most attacks that beat crouch blocking could now be done from the ground. Moves like gut punches, knees, and hop kicks became typical indicators of mid attacks, and Virtua Fighter suddenly made it extremely dangerous to crouch block because you cannot react to most mid attacks like you can with Cirque du Soleil jumping attacks. In later 3D fighting games, these mids could launch you and lead to a juggle combo easily doing 40% or more damage.

Whether they knew it or not, the mid would become a game changer. Over time, more and more 2D fighting games started to have mid attacks of their own called overheads with a visual cue of an attack hitting downwards or hopping attack, but they generally aren't as scary as mids in 3D games. Because crouch blocking became so risky, It became overall safer to stand block, which is the opposite of 2D hold back the block games.

But the high-low mixups get even harder to block because Virtua Fighter allowed you to press certain sequences of buttons which would activate a flurry of attacks that can be a mix of high, low, and yes, mid attacks. These are called attack strings and recognizing these patterns can help you defend against them, but with so many strings and variations you're bound to get hit by something. This is the high-low mix-up game of the archetypal 3D fighter, and in a way, there are a lot of parallels to modern Mortal Kombat, which also has attack streams with mids and a juggle-centric combo system.

But Mortal Kombat is a 2D game. What was it that made Virtua Fighter play like a 3D game, not just look like it? In 2D fighting games, you cannot hit a knockdown opponent by default. The attack just goes through them.

This was likely preferable to being able to always hit them, which would lack any meaningful counterplay, unless you had some kind of shrimping mechanic or let everyone move like Aki. But in a 3D game like Virtua Fighter, they allow you to hit downed opponents because the counterplay is simple and elegant. Side roll into the background or foreground. This paved the way for the sophisticated get-up games 3D games are known for, and over time, 2D games started to add more get-up options to have more counterplay against setups. But the lateral movement in Virtua Fighter could only be done when knocked down.

And sidestepping in a 3D game wouldn't appear until Tekken 2, but only one character had it. Okay, so Tekken 2 was a 3D game obviously, but it didn't actually have 3D movement. The only person who could actually do a sidestep was Kazuya. It's called the misstep and all you do is do forward neutral and it's like that.

It'll move in and out. You can't really control the direction of it. It'll just randomly either go right or left.

But he was the first one to do it. Side dodging as a universal mechanic was introduced in Battle Arena Toshinden in 1995 with this rolling move. In 96, sidestepping appeared in Virtua Fighter 3 using a new dodge button.

In 97, Tekken 3 got tap up or down to sidestep and has had it since. In 98, Soul Calibur introduced its distinctive 8-way run system where you can move freely in 8 directions on the ground. Even with lateral movement, the characters would still automatically face each other.

and the camera would lock on to the side perspective, though sometimes the cameraman needed to be fired. The ability to move laterally gave players two new ways to avoid attacks, sidestep left and sidestep right. In a way, this kind of replaced the role of jumping high to avoid attacks in 2D games, which is evidenced by 3D games phasing out its moon jumping. Jumping in 3D games evolved into realistic jump heights with the purpose of going over low attacks, but not mids or highs, further expanding its high-low gameplay.

But in one of the most controversial examples of the predator effect in Tekken 7, guest character Akuma uses his 2D Street Fighter jump to go over Jin's otherwise safe mid attack and do a 95% damage combo. I can't believe what we're seeing here, look at the life bomb! That was the first time where people really started talking about Akuma before like the Pakistanis came around you know.

And I think that moment in itself just shows just how dumb Akuma was if we're being honest. Having access to Tools like jump, which unfortunately crushes highs, mids and lows, I think that's just not fair at all. And again, it breaks the rules, the fundamental rules of Tekken. I'm Vincent, Super Akuma, they call me. I'll let you guess what character I play.

Akuma is built around having great lows and not so good mids, right? He's obviously got good mids, but it's the lows that are the real problem, so you have to duck more. In 2D games... Most of your time blocking is crouching and you only get up for overheads.

But in Tekken it's the opposite, where you're standing and it's the lows where you make the read or react and duck. You should not lose for simply holding back and I think that's the problem with Akuma. If you just hold back, you're going to die.

And there's no other character like that, besides the 2Ds of course. And that's not Tekken in my eyes. I think he would be less hated, probably still hated, but less hated if he was just a brand new...

Tekken character. The fact that he's a guest, you know, people are kind of xenophobic in that way, I guess. Because right now they feel like they're justified.

You know, oh, he's got nothing to do in Tekken. I mean, yeah, but it's been six years, get over it. I think I've just gotten used to it at this point. I've been told many times by people, oh, all you've got to do is backdash Mr. Zakuma.

I think that's great. I should backdash to the wall where I get killed for holding back. Great advice, guys. Thank you very much.

Oh no, Spag! Watch out for this! Oh my god! It's the block!

Joker! While the 3D fighting game has become its own subgenre, it's difficult to make further subcategories. because there are not nearly as many 3D games as there are 2D games, and the major 3D franchises are distinct enough to just be their own thing.

In a way, Virtua Fighter can be likened to Buddy Holly, whose everyman persona brought a realism to rock and roll, while also pioneering new recording techniques like double-tracking to give a more three-dimensional sound. By the late 90s, the market was saturated with fighting games that were based on both the 2D and 3D archetypes, so naturally there would be games that combined aspects of both. In 1997, Capcom released Rival Schools, which had the familiar feel to it.

gameplay of 2D games like high jumping, magic moves, and special attack cancels, but it also allowed you to sidestep into the background like in a 3D game. But these games were not very common, and even Fighting Layer, which started its series with with this kind of gameplay ended up shifting over to a more conventional 2.5D fighting game, though it looks like they're going back. There isn't a particular term for games that play like 2D fighting games while utilizing a 3D plane, so for now I'll just call them 5D fighting games because 2 plus 3 equals 5? I don't know, maybe it'll become a thing when Tekken Cross Street Fighter comes out. We had Tekken Cross...

But there also isn't a term for a fighting game where you can jump downwards. There's a game called Antinomy of Common Flowers based on the Touhou universe that allows you to do a three-way jump upwards or downwards with the middle of the screen being the quote-unquote ground that somehow is the center of gravity with the characters floating in the air. This means you can do an instant down-back-jump forward-air-cross-up.

Just imagine a 5D version of this game. At the other end, there are also ultra-minimal them a list fighting games like Divekick that only uses two buttons and has no blocking. All these games take an assortment of aspects of all the categories to concoct something unique while still being based on the archetype. These games are to fighting games what platypuses are to mammals, and so we have the archetypal Other category.

If you've made it this far, congrats. This covers all the fighting game types based on the archetype, but there's still another half of the fighting game tree where things get really interesting. One day game designer Masahiro Sakurai was at an arcade destroying someone in King of Fighters, but when he found out the players on the other side were a couple who had no idea what they were doing, he felt terrible. It inspired him to make an accessible fighting game called Super Smash Bros. released in 1999. This game was also a 2D game with a side perspective, but it deviated so much from the original fighting game archetype that people wondered if it could even be called a fighting game.

The most obvious difference is the percentage system and stocks instead of life bars and rounds. The goal is to knock your opponent off the edge of the screen to eliminate their stocks, and hitting them increases their percentage which increases how far they get knocked back. But the combat itself also takes a very different approach.

Remember all that talk about cross-ups, left-right and high-low mix-ups, scary mids, overheads, and chicken blocking? In Smash, none of that exists because there is no auto-facing and the game's controls are indifferent to what side you're on. You just move left and right instead of forwards and backwards, which allows you to attack away from your opponent, which would be impossible in a 2D hold-back-to-block game. Smash also replaced the high-low blocking game with this intuitive shielding system. Holding the shield button will activate a protective bubble that covers your entire body until it shrinks.

The exposed parts of the body are then vulnerable. This is much more intuitive than explaining to someone why this is a high attack. You also don't have to explain motion inputs because Smash did away with them in favor of a special attack button that does different things depending on what direction you're holding. If you've noticed, the way Smash works is like the many side-scrolling platformers you've played before. But also like platformers, the control you have over running and jumping is unlike anything in the archetypal games, even Marvel.

In addition to double jumping, drifting, and short hopping, You can choose to fall faster by tapping down. You can also control the trajectory of your character when getting knocked around, which is known as directional influence....holding on, DI-ing in so he doesn't get pushed off. And all this is done with a 360 degree analog stick, which is more directions than eight....blasting off at a protractor measured angle.

This level of control is why actions per minute enters the conversation in Smash at the highest levels, especially in Melee. It's no wonder Sp- Smash players call hold back to block games traditional. But as different as Smash is from the 2D and 3D fighting game archetypes, Smash has mechanics inspired by those games, like short hop attacks, roll, which makes you briefly invincible, and spot dodge, which are all mechanics found in King of Fighters.

The most similar game in terms of movement is probably KOF, where you have a lot of different types of hops, like you have the short hop, full jump, dash, hyper hop, and a jump in can be minus or... Plus, depending on exactly when you time it, stuff like that. Armada has no shield. Armada has no shield! That's it!

Leffen! Leffen is our EVO 2018 Super Smash Brothers Melee Champion. Hi, I'm Leffen. I'm a fighting game slash Smash player, if you think those are different. But I'm mostly known for Smash and more recently, through Dragon Ball and Guilty Gear Strive, I've been known more as a fighting game player as well.

This is two different EVO titles in two different fighting games. Like we talk about Rare or Fight, I err. I think a lot of traditional fighting game players think that Smash has very different mechanics and stuff like that. The step from a Street Fighter or a Guilty Gear or Tekken to Smash is probably not nearly as big as they think.

They can sometimes have pretty similar decision making. A lot of the hit-lag-block-stun, a lot of the grab versus blocking, whiff punishing and movement and all that stuff, it really exists in Smash, it just has different forms. And I think that's the same thing for like...

You know, I've smashed a few traditional fighting games. A lot of them were like, oh my god, you're blocking forever. Is there any real counterplay?

Maybe you don't shield as much for as long sequences, but it's not that different from someone who gets edge-carded for 30 seconds and then barely makes it back. That said though, I think it does take a long time to get used to the other if you're used to one. Now over two decades old, there are many platform fighting games made by indie developers and large studios alike, and major tournaments like Genesis that specialize in these games. Without a doubt, the platform fighter deserves its own subcategory under hybrid. The rock equivalent here would be the Beastie Boys, who combined hip-hop with rock music, inspiring a new sound that would explode in the 90s to the consternation of purists.

So platform fighting games are a thing, but what about fighting game platformers? Before Smash, there was a game called Mortal Kombat Mythologies Sub-Zero, a side-scrolling platformer game that took place in the Mortal Kombat universe. It was a cool idea, but they forced the archetypal 2D fighting game controls in a side-scrolling platformer game which ended up being a hilarious mess. They kept the three-way jump, motion inputs, and backwards and forwards walking, but because it's a platformer, you sometimes have to walk in the other direction to get somewhere.

Their solution? A turn around button. The fighting game platformer never took off, and Mortal Kombat Mythologies became its own thing.

But that's not always bad. All sorts of unlikely genres have crossed over into fighting game territory with great results. Bust a Groove is a 1v1 rhythm game where you can attack your opponent and they can attempt to dodge.

Puzzle games have versus modes where you can give your opponent garbage. Tennis games can have supers and so can Pong. You can PvP in MOBA or action RPGs. And of course, there's Maiden and Spell, a 1v1 bullet hell game. These games might not have any martial arts combat, but they have other elements of the archetype that give those games their fighting gaminess, and the most fighting gamey thing of all is the 1v1 zero-sum versus mode.

Because each of these hybrid games are so unique without the constellation of varieties that platform fighters have, they belong in the hybrid other category. But I argue there's also a genre crossover game where you are undeniably in a martial arts fight, more so than in any of the games I mentioned. These games focus so much on realism, they don't play much like the archetypal fighting games at all, and have things like one-hit kills in the case of Bushido Blade, and even doctors who can stop fights in EA UFC.

Yes, there's a doctor mechanic. The crossover genre here is simulator. And if you doubt there should be a distinction between a typical fighting game and a fighting simulator, consider the difference between Gran Turismo, a game that has turned players into actual professional race car drivers, and Mario Kart, a racing game where you can turn into a bullet. The difference is that fighting sims are not nearly as common, so off to the other category they go. But there is one more fighting game hybrid type that deserves its own subcategory, the arena fighter.

One of the biggest things in common archetypal fighting games have with Smash is that these games all use a side view perspective. So what happens if you don't? In 1993, Sega released a game called Dark Edge, which was an early attempt at an 8-way movement 3D fighting game with 2D sprites, but the camera did not rotate with the players. This caused all sorts of problems, one of which was players'bodies obscuring the opponent. They hilariously kept hold back to block which meant if you're in the background You could hold up to block and do half circle downward special moves Good luck doing an upside down SNK motion from each direction The fact that you could reposition and attack upwards and downwards complete with matching sprites was novel But the eight wave free ground movement had been around forever in the form of wrestling games and co-op beat-em-up games in the 80s Later SNK took this control scheme added left-right auto-facing, and made the fighting game Aggressors of Dark Combat, which even flexes its free ground movement before the fight starts.

It's starting to feel like there's nothing SNK hasn't thought of. But you still can't attack upwards and downwards, so it wasn't until 3D Engines with Polygons when this could be done convincingly. And so we got Air Guys, a polygonal fighting game with free ground movement, and Final Fantasy VII characters. The camera is higher this time to prevent characters obscuring each other, and the characters can face any direction.

To auto-face, you must hold down the guard button, which locks onto your opponent, kind of like a 3D Zelda game. But they ambitiously kept the high-low blocking system, where you could block low by either holding guard and being still, or block high by either holding guard while moving, or standing still without holding guard. Did you get all that? While seriously unique and sophisticated, It's hard not to feel like they shoehorned this archetypal 3D fighting game system into an arena perspective.

Just imagine if Zelda had highs, lows, and mids. Like Hold Back the Block in Dark Edge, it just didn't catch on. But a year later, Capcom simplified things with the game Power Stone, which had no blocking and no locking on. But it didn't need blocking because the free ground movement with jumping gave many ways to dodge, and without auto-facing, people had to aim their attacks.

These games have a sort of isometric perspective where the camera has a limited range of movement and rotation. It's like playing a fighting game in a diorama. What's a diorama? But arena fighters like Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm have a camera that moves much more freely and rotates around the arena.

Players have free ground movement and attacking makes you automatically face your opponent. But while a free roaming camera lets you see your favorite characters in all sorts of cool angles, It also means the whims of the cameraman will determine who will have the more favorable perspective and which direction on your controller will go forward. It seems unpredictable, but I'm sure someone out there has found the best strategies to make the camera work in their favor. But the arena fighter Dragon Ball Budokai Tenkaichi solves this issue by giving both players their own third-person over-the-shoulder perspective.

But of course, this requires both players to have their own screens or play split-screen. But we've now come a long way from the original archetype and are getting into the perspectives of other well-established genres like third-person shooters. Both third-person shooters and third-person fighting games have missiles or missile-like attacks, but only the third-person shooter focuses on firearms.

Firearms are antithetical to martial arts combat for obvious reasons. These weapons have practically unlimited reach and speed, fire instantly, And bullets are unblockable and undodgeable unless you're in the matrix. Firearms make distance and speed irrelevant, so much so that pistols in shooting games often function more like barcode scanners than actual guns firing bullets.

This is called hit scan, and you can see this in action if you go frame by frame on a Valorant match. The kill indicator appears the moment the player clicks the mouse, even before the animation of the enemy getting shot. Firearms work in tactical shooters because aiming is a fundamental skill in them.

But in fighting games, aim has never been the dominant skill because these games already do most of the aiming for you. Third person fighting games like Gundam Versus and For Honor have lock on systems and in the case of ARMS, the players are always facing each other. And if you think about it, fighting games taking place in two dimensions is a form of auto aim because there is no third dimension in which to miss your attacks. A fighting game where you pit two players in an arena with guns that automatically aim at each other would not be much of a game at all. Even beam attacks and pistols in Marvel vs. Capcom games have significant startup animations and travel time.

are not even close to instantaneous. But in the genre to genre case of the predator effect, Guilty Gear Strive introduced Happy Chaos who brought with him an actual hit scanning pistol that fires instantly and aims automatically. Seriously.

With the pistol drawn, you can fire at any range. fire while running and jumping, and even while punching and kicking. But the caveats are, you need Concentration Meter to use it, you need to reload, you cannot block with the pistol drawn while your opponent can block the bullets, and the reticule needs time to lock on.

But if you hit your opponent with a water balloon, the reticule will lock on quicker until they get dry again. This was definitely a bold character design that is totally anime, but just appreciate what it took to make the gun balanced. It was controversial because you cannot react to an attack that happens instantly, keeping your distance is futile when an attack has unlimited range. There's not much to time when the goal is to shoot first.

It upsets Tomohiro's fighting game notion of TDR, Timing, Distance, and Reactions. Know what moves will counter-attack from a given distance. Once you got the timing and distance down, you can concentrate on the arm.

Reaction. This is why fighting games tend to stick to projectiles and martial arts, and it's why so many of these games use the side perspective. It's simply the best angle to gauge the speed and range of the huge variety of moves that each character has, making it the go-to perspective of competitive play. This is not to say the perspectives used by arena fighters are not suited for competition, it's just that it makes the gameplay take a huge departure from both the archetypal games and platform fighters.

Anyone who has played both side-scroller and 3D Mario games knows how different they can be. But regardless, Arena fighters are fighting games if not just for the fact that they are more that than anything else. And ultimately, they literally brought fresh new perspectives to an old genre, either by using one camera angle or by giving each player their own angle. And just like that, this completes the fighting game tree.

An interesting thing to note about this tree is that Dragon Ball has a game from every category except one. But just to be complete, what about the first person fighting game? There are novelty modes in fighting games that have tried this, but you'll soon realize one, you can't see your own character, which is sad.

And moves like rolling or spinning kicks will probably just make you throw up, unless your body can rotate without your head, like Exorcist Ryu. The closest thing is maybe chivalry, which allows you to play in both third and first person modes, but here's the thing, there is no lock-on system. So is this a first person fighting game with swords? or a first-person shooter without guns.

At this point, we're hitting the limits of what we can confidently call a fighting game, so we'll just leave this to the scientists. This might all seem like an ultra-nerdy exercise in making genre classifications for something already so niche, but it particularly matters in fighting games because the sheer number of games and game types create a diverse culture not so different from rock music. Like a music festival, The Biggest Tournaments hosts a variety of fighting games with multiple stages, And people choose what they want to watch and play. Many people like to play multiple games, but some might only deeply care about one.

Some people only like the old games of a series, and some feel the latest is greatest. There are communities within communities that have strong feelings about game mechanics, franchises, and yes, popularity. In 2002, Nickelback got rocks thrown at them for playing at a metal festival by a few audience members that did not take kindly to their type of music.

I have no idea what we were doing there, and it was just a horrible, horrible mistake. In their defense, if I went to a metal festival, I wouldn't want to see Nickelback either. This isn't to say Guilty Gear fans are going to start throwing rocks at Smash players, but it's good to know a little bit about the audience you're speaking to. That was one that our manager got spanked for heavy hard. He was like, what were we doing here, dude?

Why the f*** were we playing in Portugal with a bunch of metal bands? And he's just like, sorry, I didn't know. It's like, well, you need to know. So if spring rolls are not burritos and 2xKO is not a Tekken-like, what is 2xKO actually like? There's no question it lands somewhere between the versus and anime archetypes, which means it's an archetypal 2D hold back to block game with left-right and high-low mixups.

In addition to the standard three-way jump, each character can do a super jump like in KOF. Except the game lets you slightly drift in the air like in Versus games. You can block anything in the air and some characters have jump modifiers like Ahri's air dash and Ekko's forward hop.

The game also allows both dashing and running, but like in Versus games you can wave dash making for extremely fast and expressive ground movement. But the biggest Versus element in 2xK0 is that it's a tag fighter where you must select two characters. Like the title of the game suggests, the goal is to KO both characters of the opposing team.

The tag system blends versus game rules with those of Tekken tag games. Like in versus games, your partner can be used as an assist by holding a direction and tapping the tag button, which can help you or hurt you if you get happy birthday'd. But like in Tekken tag games, switching characters does not bring them in attacking, and you can also do a tag launcher that switches characters so they can take over your combo. 2xKO also lets you switch to the character that is assisting you in what's called Handshake Tag, something we've seen in the anime fighter BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle.

But if you choose the Freestyle Fuse, you can switch back again to the other character, allowing for some serious bullying. This allows for some oppressive high-low and left-right mix-up potential, and Sean made sure to show me by challenging me to games of Bet You Can't Block This. Whoa!

What? What? What?

So, you gotta guess. But there are defensive options too. When blocking, you can dash forward to do a marvel-like push block, but there's a new mechanic where you can also dash backwards to do an escape called retreating guard. But this one can be beaten by lows, so don't be predictable. There's also a parry if you'd like a higher risk, higher reward option.

As for combo breakers, there is a burst-like mechanic called dynamic save, that lets you break out of combos and switch characters. And for getting knocked down, you have multiple get-up options, including an attack with brief invulnerability, but be careful as it can be punished if blocked. But the most novel feature is the duo mode where one team can be controlled by two players, making 2v2 matches possible for a total of four players. We've seen Street Fighter X Tekken do something like this, but only the point character could summon their partner. This led to the infamous moment during Evo 2012 when Mike Ross wasn't allowed to play for an entire round.

Wow, that's incredible! Mike Ross did not get to play! 2xKO will let the player off screen play by letting them assist and dynamic save, and with handshake tag and tag launchers, there will be many more ways of switching between players.

But this will also demand a new level of coordination that fighting game players have not had to do. As you can see, This is not a simple game. Anime and Versa-style games almost never are.

But what it does try to do is make learning and playing it as accessible as possible. The button layout has light, medium, and heavy attacks, which can be pressed in sequence to perform a chain combo, which can be cancelled into a special attack, which is done by pressing a special attack button, just like we've seen in Smash. And yes, there are auto combos like in Dragon Ball FighterZ, if you choose the pulse fuse. But instead of just mashing one attack button to do a combo, you can mash on your own combination to do different combos. But the most accessible thing of all is that it will be free to play, making it much easier to convince your friends to get into it.

And the rollback netcode will make the netplay as smooth as possible. So if 2xKO were a band, I think it would be Polyphia. And not just because the character select music sounds like them, and not because both have names that are generic descriptors of their respective fields. Polyphia blends the technicality of progressive metal with the sounds of EDM, Jimi Hendrix, hip-hop, and even K-pop to make something complex yet accessible for modern times, just like how 2xKO keeps the intricacy of anime and Versus-style games while making it approachable for newcomers. Instead of abandoning what made their traditions great, they tweak or tone down just the aspects that scare people away.

What is tweaked, of course, never comes without controversy. Polythea guitarist Tim Henson got in some heat for calling a classic guitar technique a boomer bend. It describes a very specific guitar bending lick commonly used in music from the 60s and 70s, the age of the baby boomer.

And the 2xKO equivalent of this would be the removal of motion inputs, or I guess in this case, millennial inputs. But this concept goes all the way back to Rising Thunder, which was made by Radiant Entertainment, who were later acquired by Riot Games to make 2xKO. There's a pretty active dialogue, and has been for years, among fighting game players about accessibility and is it good, is it bad.

And usually people talk about it as a zero-sum game, like you're going to make the game easier than it's going to be worse for good players. We try to think about it in terms of fun. Once you get into the fun of understanding what a fighting game really is, about the mind reading and the high stakes sort of fast paced poker of like, like that's addictive.

We want to like bring that fun to as many people as possible by removing maybe the things that make fighting games kind of scary, but aren't core to like real fighting game experience. Another one is like, it's just more fun, I think, to do things with your friends. It took us a while to sort of embrace like teamwork, but once we did and we found ways to like Still have the carry aspect of like, oh, all the pressure is on me, but I can bring a friend along and we can like have teamwork moments.

That's when the game started really to get fun. While still having like a real, hopefully endless mastery curve, we want this to be a game that you can play for literally thousands of hours and still discover new things. Special thanks to Ben, Hedy, and everyone at Bay Area Riot for all your support. This was Gerald from Corey Gaming. Thanks for watching.

This video is sponsored by Hitbox, the fighting game controller that started the leverless revolution and became an archetype for them. By replacing the 8-way joystick with four ergonomically placed arcade buttons, there's much less travel distance and exertion required to make the same inputs. There are also new techniques that even make use of the right hand to do things that would be impossible on controllers with joysticks. This is the fastest Dragon Punch.

There's such an advantage to using a hitbox that people have jokingly referred to it as the cheatbox. But the thing is, it's tournament legal, which is why top players like Daigo, Tokido, Super Akuma and Kawano are using hitboxes to compete and win majors. These days, pad and stick are pretty much on the same level, but above those is the hitbox. You have the advantages of both.

You get the flat layout for your buttons like on stick. which is a lot better to access everything. The problem with stick though, it's very precise but slow.

You have to move your whole wrist and even then, where's the diagonal on the stick? Where's the down? Where's the forward?

And where's the down forward? But uh yeah, if you want to do a down forward, you just press two buttons here. The hitbox layout and design has become a standard because it's a culmination of many iterations of prototypes by its founders, who are two brothers who just wanted more consistent inputs in Marvel vs Capcom 2. When they brought their homemade prototypes to SoCal Regionals in 2010, it sparked enough interest for them to get interviewed about it, and suddenly there was a demand. The way we differ from, like, keysticks, they call them, where the difference is they got the up key right here. But you can't do any complicated movements.

Like in Marvel, you can't do tri-jumps, you can't tiger knee anything. Yeah, thanks for the interview. We didn't expect anybody to really latch onto these.

They kept refining the layout until it became the standard we recognize today. A lot of people... Don't know where all the leverless stuff came from, and it came from the garage 2010. Starting point was, I used to be a stenographer, so I took steno ink on my fingers, and I wanted it to be ergonomic and efficient, right?

So got it to match as close as I could. Pinkies didn't work out so hot, but this started as up, and then I moved it over to here, personally on the wire, because it was so much more intuitive for me to think of as a jump button. So that's kind of where the next ones come along of me and Sean's next revision. This was the first right. thumb jump.

So it's left down right, up, and then A, B, C, D. So for Tatsunoko, so you gotta get assist. This was Sean's version for SCR 2010. The Hulk box, right? Spray painted. He liked the right thumb jump as well.

So this is more like a standard six button with the left down right. He wanted something big and girthy, kind of like a mastic. These were like the first tournament hit boxes that we actually competed in and started getting results. These are labor of love. You can see this one is zero zero three, right?

I think two either died or we just ripped it apart and cannibalized it. That's most likely. So this is number four.

And then finally it turned into the hitbox layout because Marvel 3 was coming out and we needed to finish it. And that was kind of blown up on YouTube. So we had a bunch of people wanting us to make them for them.

Since we liked right thumb, but we knew left thumb was intuitive to a lot more people, we brought it together so you could use either thumb and it made total sense. But maybe you're an old-school player or just enjoy playing on joysticks. Hitbox also makes the cross-up which has a lever, but also another set of cardinal directions for the right hand.

How is this tournament legal you might ask? Because pad is legal, and it too has multiple sets of usable cardinal directions. Adding buttons to controllers has always been a thing, but with the cross-up, you have it from the get-go.

But maybe you want to add buttons to your existing controller, but do not want to drill holes. Hitbox's latest innovation is the combo extension, which is basically two buttons in one, but the extra button simply rests on top of the controller. You can get really creative with this and make your dream layout without doing irreversible mods.

I put mine here so I can comfortably do forward dash cancel crouch block in 2xko. They also have buttons without the extension called combo, which are super customizable, and all their buttons come in three different sensitivities to match your playing style. You can even add your own custom artwork.

And for all you Smash players out there, there's the Smashbox. If any of this interests you, check out hitboxarcade.com or check out one of their booths at fighting game tournaments. Thanks for watching and see you next video.

Transcript for:Evolution and Mechanics of Fighting Games

Transcript for:
Evolution and Mechanics of Fighting Games