Hopefully this guide makes watching and playing fighting games more accessible and interesting for you! Instead of talking about confusing mechanics, this is (hopefully) a guide on how fighting games work through an explanation of why they are interesting in the first place. Fighting games have cool characters and you have seen spicy fanart of them all your life, and that can and should be enough to like them: pro players have gone in for less. This doesn’t get us much closer to what’s happening when people play them, so maybe the better question is what makes fighting games so legitimately fun to watch in motion, genuinely competitive, an activity you could honestly call a sport? In other words, what’s really happening when two people sit down and start pressing buttons at each other?
The point of a fighting game is simple -- you trade blows with opponents in order to knock them out. A match consists of rounds (typically best of three) with victory coming by bringing the opponent’s health level to zero or by having more remaining health when the round clock expires (in games with timed rounds).
The characters engage in combat based on button presses and joystick inputs, often including complex combinations of buttons and gestures.
Note: (If you're learning to play fighting games for the first time, just pick up the one that piqued your interest. Don't worry about finding the perfect introductory game. All fighters have a tutorial section in the main menu that will help you learn the more specific rules of your game, but the fundamentals are similar from game to game.
Don’t focus on what to do, learn how to think
Each individual game has its own mountain of skills and mechanics, and precious little carries over from one to the next. SO because of this I will be explaining less of the mechanics, and more of the mentality. I will try to teach the basic concepts that make a fighting game. Once you look under the hood. Fighting games are not just about trying to hit each other — they’re about hitting each other in the right place.
No matter the game, players are always maneuvering to get into the best position to stick out an attack and smack the opponent. Old hands call this the “neutral” (because neither fighter has a clear advantage) or “poking” stage of the game. What a beginner needs to know isn’t how to execute a long combo, but how to land the first hit consistently.
To get a feel for this “neutral” I start by simply walking back and forth and pressing some buttons. Everything starts to fall into place once I get a feel for the character’s movement and pokes.
Then I tell them to try to hit each other. New players gradually learn to keep their opponents at the edge of their blade, even without much instruction. The players can clearly see they’re left wide open after missing a heavy swing. They’re able to find the fun of the game without needing to beat a tutorial or study a lengthy guide.
Soon, they’re trying to trick each other: baiting, feinting, dodging and counterpunching each other’s strikes. Playing with another human player is crucial; a computer can’t provide the same fallibility.
On the beginner level, they were probably mashing buttons without thinking at all. At this stage, it’s crucial to stay mindful of everything you do instead of just flailing. The neutral is something you can slowly figure out. So now that you know a little about neutral, let's talk about the specifics of decision making.
Deciding what to do
A common frame of reference that never gets quite the follow-up explanation it needs for fighting games is Rock, Paper, Scissors.
This is because much like in RPS, in fighting games there is a move you can do that will perfectly beat any other given move. In the classic example, true for almost any fighting game out there, is that a strike (that is, a punch, a kick, a fireball or 90% of the moves of the game) is beaten by blocking. If someone blocks, strikes do nothing or almost nothing. The solution to someone who keeps blocking is a throw—an extremely fast attack that requires being very close to your opponent and cannot be blocked. The counter to the throw, then, is to use a strike to stop your opponent from getting close or interrupting them if they’ve already gotten there. This is one of the basic exchanges in fighting games, though there are many more.
For example, moves that sweep and hit your feet (low attacks) have to be blocked crouching, and attacks that come from above, like a jumping character, have to be blocked standing, forcing blocking players to pay attention and shift to keep up.
This is not my favorite comparison, however, because it makes the central comparison of fighting an activity that is universally recognized as completely random and utterly boring.
There are a couple of reasons why fighting games are much more interesting than the childhood game you cheat at to get out of doing chores, and the first way in which it is fundamentally different is that in a fighting game, WHEN you pick your Rock, Paper or Scissors and WHERE you pick it matters as much as what you picked.
What if Rock only beats Scissors if you’re right next to your opponent? What if it could even lose to paper if you played it too early or too late?
People who have played or watched a fighting game for any amount of seconds will have noticed that despite talking about this throw/strike/block triangle in the previous paragraph, fighting game characters rarely have more than one throw, only one or two ways to block, and about seventy billion ways to hit someone.
Why are there a million pairs of Scissors?
Because each one is suited for a different spacing between players and a different speed, and when and where you are when you play them determines which move was the right one—as if there was a game of RPS within another game of RPS.
Fighting games are like poker??
But there’s one other very significant difference between RPS, where each option is completely equal, and fighting games, and this is where things actually start getting interesting.
What if you could bet double or nothing on Rock? If there was a Rock that completely ruined Scissors but would be equally devastated in turn by Paper? Would that make things more interesting? The mathematically supported answer is yes.
Everything happening in this video is fighting games, but please watch that sequence at 9:29. Especially watch the part where Frankenberger acts like he has something by acting like he has nothing. thereby fooling his opponent and taking him for everything. In a game where you do nothing but shuffle cards around, where there is lots of math yet everything is ultimately up to chance, the most impressive thing that happens is when someone reads their opponent like a book, pushes them to make terrible decisions, punishes them for it, and wins. That, my friends, is fighting games, except instead of a “deck of cards” you have a martial artist, anime character, or space alien with a library of 30–100 predetermined moves, everything proceeds in real time, and you have to wiggle around a joystick and push buttons to make any of these things happen. But other than that, it is EXACTLY like poker, because it’s both statistics and psychology at the same time. It is a game about calculated risks where everything is happening at speeds just barely within the realm of human reactions, where the deciding factor between a good player and a great player is being able to understand, predict, and control an opponent.
Reads vs Reactions
When many explanations of why fighting games are interesting or impressive focus on something that I think is absolutely not the most impressive thing about fighting games at all, and this is The Ability To Press Buttons Very Fast. Pushing buttons in 1/60th of a second increments consistently is very hard, and doing it while someone is literally fighting to stop you is extremely hard, but fighting games pros are really cool geniuses sometimes and what they do is a lot more interesting and clever than pushing buttons.
The most interesting things that happen in fighting games are in a sweet spot of speed that is just barely within the realm of what a human can react to. Fighting games require impeccable reaction times, but the first and biggest misconception people often have is thinking everything that happens in a fighting game is reactable. This is the main reason I do not like focusing on thumb skills to explain what’s impressive about a fighting game. It is impressive to react quickly, but fighting game players on the regular do something that is even more impressive; the near-psychic feat of knowing what their opponent was going to do before they even started doing it.
Remember when I mentioned the concept of a “throw” earlier? It could be called anything depending on the game, but it’s a universal unblockable attack that breaks through guards. One way to beat a throw is with a strike, but another way to beat it is to do a throw yourself. There are situations where you might not be at the right distance or have enough time to stop a throw with a strike, and this is the other way to beat those situations. The timing for these, however, is universally tough. Often barely reactable by a human, but when you see someone escape a throw in a fighting game, you’re rarely seeing them react to the throw. You’re seeing them react to them to the likelihood of being thrown. Are you blocking? Is nothing your opponent doing getting through to you? Are you blocking preemptively, without thinking carefully about it? Is your opponent suddenly extremely close to you? You may be exhibiting all the warning signs of someone who is about to be thrown, and you should input LP+LK within the next 11 frames and call your doctor immediately.
This principle is actually very important, although it may seem unpredictable and scary—or even bad game design—that not everything can actually be reacted too. This would be bad in a single player game, because currently we can only make computers do things that are completely predictable or completely random. We cannot give them habits, or have them adapt and learn and change as matches go on, or become scared or confused or erratic in response to clever opponents (at least, not effectively and not yet). Single player games are about figuring out puzzles. Games between two humans are like two puzzles constantly changing shape to fool the other. This is why poker was on ESPN, because despite all the chance involved who you are playing and what they do have patterns you can recognize and exploit, or end up falling for.
Forcing competing players to react to the patterns of their opponent rather than respond to on-screen prompts alone rewards players with good decision making over players who have practiced reaction times alone. Incidentally, a potential pitfall of many competitive games new to fighting game development is a belief that everything should be and must be human reactable. This actually can create a situation in which a player can render a game completely stagnant by simply doing the right thing on command every single time, given enough practice. If there’s a perfect RPS solution for every decision, then the game comes down to who can press a button the fastest, and this is not really interesting to watch or play. Anyone who wishes to implement a parry system in a competitive game beware: if your window is too long and too generous, you may have just made the concept of attacking such a liability the most significant portion of your RPS triangle is now completely unusable.
It’s all well and good to say that fighting games are like poker, but what does that really mean in practice? Well, maybe you’ve seen or heard about this video; it’s the most famous thing to happen at Evo, and in the fighting game community in general.
Even in this grainy footage, with no context and barely audible commentary, you can tell what’s happening is really cool. Part of that is the effects communicate that what is happening is really impressive. And it is: it’s physically impressive, in that it required Daigo (playing Ken, the blonde) to execute multiple 10 frame (1/6th of a second) inputs on a joystick to stop Justin Wong’s Chun-Li from knocking him out. But Daigo did not get to this point because he was good at just wiggling a stick around. Watch the match again, and you’ll see that both players are parrying each other left and right (you can tell by that flash and clashing sound, usually in response to Daigo’s fireballs). This is a thing that they knew how to do and could do on command, and while it certainly was not easy to do that against the super move that Justin Wong’s Chun-Li did, it was a predetermined sequence that Daigo needed to see coming to understand and respond to so quickly.
What’s impressive is not the parry itself (I mean it is, but everything that happens before it. Daigo remained patient, and pushed Justin Wong into making a big bet that could win or cost him the match. Daigo also maneuvered the physical space between them so that he would have enough time to react to each hit of Chun-Li’s super art. If he didn’t see it coming outright, he at the very least made special care to prepare for the possibility, so when it happened, Daigo had the preparation to react. Without it, he might not have reacted quickly enough. The parry itself is like betting double or nothing on blocking, and Daigo had no choice but to take it, but it was the bet he was ready to call. Many things in fighting games are human reactable, but even those require good human intuition to take full advantage of.
This very video is what got many current fighting game players into fighting games in the first place. It stands as one of if not the most hype moment in fighting game history.
Disrespect
We've made a guide on how to understand fighting games entirely with abstract examples and no practical knowledge. But you tune in to some random game this weekend, you don’t exactly need to know what “plus on block” or “dp on wakeup” means. You need to understand who is taking risks, who is playing consistently, and who is calling bets. Since understanding the risk and reward and prediction involved in fighting games is abstract, here is a very specific example: the most common emotion in fighting games, disrespect.
Have you ever lost Rock, Paper, Scissors because your opponent did the exact same thing three times in a row? You’re thinking, okay, she did it once, and that was a fluke, she did it twice, and yeah I was flustered from the first one, but it would be crazy to do it a third time. There’s no way she’d do it a third time! Take a look at this: https://youtu.be/o2oOz6_WKHU
Anyways, this perfectly illustrates the concept of disrespect in fighting games as practiced technique. When a player is trying to break through defense, they try as many different options as they can in as confusing an order as possible, which is why the community term for this is a ‘mixup’. What kind of mixup is doing the same thing three times in row? Wouldn’t you have to be some kind of idiot to fall for the same trick that many times in a row? But if your opponent is expecting something different every single time, isn’t doing the same thing more than once a mixup they would never expect? By the way, did you know that Apple had to create a complicated algorithm for the iTunes random play feature, because the truly random skip they used to have would sometimes play similar tracks directly in a row, and to humans it just didn’t feel random, even though it truly was?
Being disrespectful is more than just expecting your opponent will keep falling for the same thing. We have talked a lot about betting on statistics, probability, and reading the situation. To do this properly, you are also betting that your opponent will do the best thing in any given situation. This means holding your ground if the situation is clearly disadvantageous to you, and ceding to your opponent. If your opponent is holding all the cards, and you make an aggressive move anyway, you aren’t betting on probability, statistics, or even psychology. You are betting your opponent is too dumb, scared, confused, or incompetent—at least in this moment—to do the right thing. A respectful move would be to expect your opponent to be ready for the same trick a second time. A disrespectful move would be to expect them to fall for it three times in a row.
If you watch some games this weekend at Evo, you might not recognize everything the commentators say in any given game, but you’ll hear them talk about about whether the players are respecting or disrespecting each other in all of them. There are fancy wild special moves with long animations and flashy names in every game, but a universal property of fighting games is that the biggest and strongest attacks cost the most resources and often carry the most risk of one kind or another. A move may cost a limited resource like super meter, or it may cost the player positioning, time, or damage. If missing a powerful attack leaves a player vulnerable for a long period of time, their opponent will take full advantage and collect everything their opponent dropped for free. This is called a punish, and you can understand why just from the name. These are the concepts that are universal.
Fighting games are cool :o
Paying attention to fighting games means understanding not just what each player can do, but what they have on the table. If one player has more life than the other, are they winning?
What if their opponent has resources the other doesn’t, like special meter?
What if one player is trapped in a corner and blocking?
What if one player will be eliminated from the tournament if they lose this match?
What’s on the line changes how people feel, how they act, and what they do.
Fighting games have even more intricate interactions and emotions and mechanics, but this should help you at the very least understand how to watch fighting games. Hopefully you better understand what makes fighting games Amazing. I highly recommend taking a look at some tournaments for different fighting games. Pick up a game you find cool or interesting, and go have fun!