Fuckin’ woooooord. I’ve tried almost a dozen different fighting games, and the closest I got to enjoying one consistently was with TFH. The only ways I ever had any fun consistently was when I fought against my siblings, with balanced matches, and fighting CPUs in salt mines. With the content drought though, the fun dwindled. I get the feeling people who play fighting games really rather like having all their tools accessible at once. Me? It’s too bloody much, and I just want them to give me a loadout screen so I can artificially limit myself so I don’t need to think about everything at once.
I'm a floor 8 baiken, don't play actively but I like the game. Once I decided to go to the park and found a celestial ramlethal. I lost 50 times in a row. Most fun I've had in that game. After 20 losses, starting to win a few rounds, was a really cool feeling. I get really unmotivated to play fighting games because I don't feel like I'm improving. Still feel it to this day, but that day was amazing.
Wholeheartedly relatable. I think after 10th win in a row they start to downscale themselves sometimes... at least with me anyway like they don't even try anymore against me at that point and I think it's just... lowkey toxic
I'm a floor 2 baiken, i'm trying to learn fight games, and yesterday, I decided to play in the park and got absolutely destroyed by a celestial May But I won the last round, best feeling ever
The time I went to parks and this celestial faust(it wasn't his main) faced me like 20 times when I was floor 8 and finally got the win was amazing, and he was such a great teacher because he wasn't trying to just destroy me he would do certain things repeatedly so I could learn the counters to what he was doing and we didn't even say a word to each other he just knew how to help me improve.
So this video inadvertently explains why it's hard for some people to get into fighting games. Whenever I hear someone talk about fighting games, it's always about their personal journey. The way that they have learned and improved at the game and how there's no XP meter to tell you how good you are. It's all internal motivation. It's why some people (like me, who has both Austim and ADHD) have a hard time getting into these games. Video games are usually built around some kind of external motivation, even really challenging ones. This external validation comes in all kinds of ways. Sometimes it's an XP meter, sometimes it's new unlocks or a cool item you really want. Sometimes it's a high ranking for clearing a stage well enough. Sometimes it just being able to see more of the game and what comes next. Video games almost always have some kind of factor that rewards you to push forward with it... which is where fighting games fall short. Since fighting games are pretty much always driven by internal motivation, it feels more along the lines of a skill like drawing. There's tons to learn and it's something you can do basically forever... but the issue is that a lot of the time you won't notice that you're improving until you take a step back. Same goes with fighting games. It's hard to even know when you are getting better. What's worse is that the only external motivation for a lot of these games ais the ranking system... which leads to problems. This is why I feel that fighting games SHOULD try and adopt more external motivation for the players. Even something simple like an xp meter that unlocks cosmetics can go a long way. Not to mention actually trying to make good single player modes. Smash Bros has been doing this for YEARS and and there's plenty of people who have played it causually first then tried out competitive. TL:DR: Fighting games solely relying on the player to make their own fun out of it without any other way to show progression isn't necessarily a good thing. I hope more developers find ways to draw in players with external motivation.
to be fair, strive does have some light external motivators like your character level and collecting avatar cosmetics, just not anything super noteworthy.
It's a lot of fun when you finally get to that point where you understand why people are doing things and a lot of interactions become a series of RPS and trying to guess which option your opponent will do. The most fun I've ever had is when I get an opponent to throw whiff by running up and jumping immediately after conditioning them to expect grabs.
You are so lame... You can do that in almost every fucking fighting game. Legitimately, EVERY fighting game... THAT'S the fun you get out of "Guilty Gear"? No. I guess you don't since STRIVE plays 10% (if even that) like what Guilty Gear is.
I always tell my friends learn at your own pace, but I think learn what's cool is a better expression of what I have been trying to tell them. It is how I got started. The advice for beginners will always remain learn the fundamentals, however learning advanced things not only helps motivate, but often either requires learning fundamentals or leads to learning them later. For example learning a TOD in training mode helps you understand how your character builds combos. In addition if you want to use it in a real match you now have to learn the basics (unless you are playing with a friend group that doesn't know how to block,) but now they have the context of setting up for this cool combo you can do. So many ore people watch fighting games than play them, meaning a lot of people find them cool, but when asked give one of the many excuses as to why they can't play them. Perhaps if they just focused on the fun and learned at their own pace it would be easier for them.
Even though I usually have fun playing fighting game's in general what makes them abit more fun for me is when lore is involved say like when you and a bro chosen character's that are enemies in the lore of said game and they say some bada$$ lines before the fight starts that always gets me hyped
Same with me. One of the reasons why I love games like SF, KOF and MK is because of their interesting lore and cool characters. Crossover games such as MVC and Smash Bros also scratch this itch because these games are loaded with a variety of characters from different franchises that end up introducing me to new worlds that I become a fan of. If I want to stick around with a game for a long time and get better at it, I need those things to pull me in. Without those things I’m not going to be invested in a game for very long. This was the problem I had with VF5US. None of the characters really interested me so I didn’t stick around.
This puts things into words I've been feeling for a while. Since mid september I started entering beginner level tournaments for strive, I was doing very badly but outside of the fact my first tournament was against 2 characters I really struggle to play against (and although not to my knowledge then, against signfiicant threats, not the tops of the tournaments yet but they were certainly not newbies like me, I've happened to run into the testament that kicked me out of bracket and he's done the same several times and I've yet to take a game off him, but it's been more fun to see him since. I improved enough to get a top 8 position in one strict entry requirement tourney which had been a "I'll get there someday" aspiration for a while, it felt great, the problem came from how the next 3 weeks until I was forced to take a break I fell massively short of that and the results really got to me. It can be easy to focus on that and even when I was trying to look at my gameplay I could only focus on the same mistakes I kept making and things I knew I should be doing but weren't in the moment, I felt like my one good run was a fluke and going 0-2 in the final tournament to 2 testament players right before I had to leave my pc the day of the balance patch and saw the big buffs they got. I needed a break and videos like this to remind myself of the fun and destress. Remembering when I'd run into people regularly topping my brackets in tower and even if they bodied me, it was fun to get to see them in a more relaxed setting. There is still an anxiety of "all the people who were topping that I looked up to and wanted to be able to surpass have won and graduated, I'm only gonna be able to do well by the people above leaving, not me getting better, but I have to ignore that to actually improve.
I've spent a long time trying to just learn characters and find who to play, and I've just started to learn the fundamentals after 140 or so hours. I promise you after messing around and not knowing what you're doing for that long, chosing someone to play and learning the fundamentals is so rewarding!
Similar story here. I bought the game on launch, messed around with it off and on since then, and only this week did I decide to finally buckle down and really start to learn how to play Ramlethal. Been spending time doing missions and the training mode figuring things out, and I’m amazed at how much more comfortable I feel with the game as a whole
The most fun I have in fighting games is being a jack of all trades and a master of....one. My true main is the random button, but I'll have a character or two to fall back on if you wanna be competitive.
I remember when I started out in fighting games, I was playing Strive, but I often sucked, not winning that much and often getting by butt kicked. I met another Axl main on floor 10 and asked him to help me out, and all that ended up happening was me getting incredibly frustrated at my lack of ability to do something even as simple as command inputs. I ended up getting less into fighting games because I could see the fun, but I was so bad at the game that I stopped finding it fun. I saw fun only in the see-able challenge, when something is impossible for your current skill, I didn't feel a willingness to improve, I just thought "I'm never going to get that good. That's godlike ability". Enter Dragon Ball FighterZ. My friends all had it on switch because of a sale, and when I heard that there were autocombos, I thought mashing could make my life easier. And it did. I ended up playing Yamcha and mashing L, which annoyed my friends because it was working more than it should. But I was still getting bodied by my friends, but it felt less bad. On Guilty Gear, I didn't have any friends, crossplay wasn't out at that point and all my IRL friends refused to get the game because it was too much money, and that's when I realised that with friends who you have a connection with, the competitive element is less prevalent, and I was able to kick back and have fun. I realised I was not doing nearly as much damage as I did with Yamcha, so I asked my friends how they're able to perform so well, they told me they used actual combos, not autocombos, I spent my free time while my friends were asleep over in America in training mode, learning combos and B'n'Bs, figuring out what a jump cancel was. I was several years late to fighting games, it was like trying to play piano after spending most of your life playing guitar, I must admit I spent 2 full days without sleep trying to get better at FighterZ, I even turned off simple mode, and I figured out what a motion input was, and eventually, when all my friends got tired of FighterZ, I logged back into strive, and decided to play a character who wasn't a zoner, which I wasn't used to, so I chose Ky (I regret my decision a lot), and although I knew the basics, Ky just didn't speak to me as a character, I wasn't invested in him enough to learn properly. So I chose Axl again, modded in a Jotaro hat and Kirby recolour, and started playing Axl again. I got worried that my friend who played Super Broly, Z Broly and Gogeta 4 would body me with his Chipp when crossplay came out, but it turns out I've improved so much that I was able to fight him as an equal. I'm still not the best Axl, I'm only floor 8, but I've definitely matured and my mentality improved. So I thank all of the youtubers who make fighting game videos that helped me out, especially Lythero, Old Reliable, and of course, Gekko Squirrel. So thank you.
Amazing video. It always makes me sad to see how many people only care about getting good at fighting games because they think winning tournaments is what's fun about it, but if you're not having fun in the first place, you almost don't improve at all. Fighting games aren't work, they're games and yet players really struggle to see it that way, always just talking about "how to improve". In a way, this is a better "how to improve" video than any other one I've seen. (also im very flattered you put me in at the "players who beat you in 5 seconds" part)
No Fighting Games ARE work. Getting good at a fighting game requires the same discipline as getting good playing an instrument. No other genre of game have people recommending you to go into a practice mode to learn a combo or tech. Just like playing an instrument requires practicing tricky parts on your own so that when you perform as a group you are already well practiced. My band director used to say "Practice as if you are the worst, but perform as if you are the best". You can't be confident you can perform unless a practice session goes well, and practice sessions don't go well if you don't practice parts you're struggling with on your own time.
This is why KI (2013) is the best fighting game to come out. The Combo Assist feature and the Combo Breaker Systems allow new players to literally pick up a controller and play. All they need to do is spend 5 to 10 minutes getting their baring's and getting used to using the Combo Assist outside of a match and they are already having fun. Forward plus an input starts a combo. Pressing different inputs continues the combo, and forward plus heavy finishes the combo. The best part is that the amount of damage you do isn't significantly lower than someone doing manual combos. The other thing is a lack of a proper FUN single player mode. Soulcalibur 1 and 2 had this mode called Weapon Master which were different challenges that literally taught you how to play the game. Challenges from movement, to throws, to juggles, to unlockables and parries. Some challenges would have the player do barely any damage but a knockdown would have a very satisfying BOOM followed by the enemy being launched into the air and doing massive damage. It felt GOOD to clear these challenges that required you to play consciously. You aren't just thinking about how to get a hit confirm but you're thinking about what your game plan is to clear the challenge and those are the skills that transfer over into having fun playing the game. Fighting Games are slowly catching up to what KI (2013) established, but we're still a good distance away from it. We've gotten more and more fighters that aren't as execution heavy so players can start actually playing a fighting game. The biggest issue is that people think the "trial" modes are the way to learn and they get so absorbed into learning combos that they forget to learn mechanics, neutral, or even how to block. KI (2013)'s dojo is a very good dojo but it still feels like a glorified practice session unlike the Weapon Master from Soulcalibur. Side note: You should include the name of the fighting game on screen, that way if someone thinks what they see is cool they know how to look for it.
I've been finding my fun by playing EVERY SINGLE FIGHTING GAME. There's so many good ones out. Punch Planet, Strive, Third Strike, SF6 (when the beta was live) Them's Fighting Herds, Killer Instinct, Granblue, Tekken 7. It's just FUN to play them even if my extremely scattered approach to them makes me bad at nearly all of them. Finding skills from one game to apply to another, discovering a concept in one that may improve me in another, and involving my community in these varied experiences keeps fighting games at the forefront of my thoughts at pretty much all times.
12:47 Regarding the "Distraction Game Modes": These are what we used to call "minigames". They were gradually becoming more and more common in the gaming space, then I think something happened with MMOs and Sandbox-style games like GTA becoming more common that undid that momentum. There several structural innovations happening in the space at the time, too. Some games used minigames as post-completion bonus rewards. Some of them had a "minigames" option in the main menu, which you could play instead of the campaign mode or the main competitive multiplayer mode [Pokemon 64]. Sometimes half the game was unlocking and progressing in a series of minigames [Super Monkey Ball 2]. Sometimes, the game itself was built _around_ dozens and dozens of different minigames [Mario Party]. There was even at least one attempt at a new subgenre of minigames. A kind that were so tiny and limited they only barely qualified as a game, and where the goal was to have literally as many of them thrown at the player at once like in the [Warioware] series.
I only find fighting games fun for the character discovery. Just looking at the cool stuff they can do, although temporarily, intrigues me to discover and lab more
7:27 I don’t know if you remember me, but me losing to you was part of the reason I’ve decided to stick with Strive. Don’t know if I’ll ever beat you, though.
Good video. The thing you touched on near the end is a point that videos like this really don't touch on as often as they should. the reality is that not everyone is interested in competitive gaming or intrinsic motivation, so fighting games just aren't for them and no amount of talking about hype combos or sharing journeys of personal discovery is going to change that. Having said that the point about focusing on what's fun for you could apply to any number of games casual or competitive and it's very worth keeping in mind.
I wanna tell a story of when I first started guilty gear strive. I started strive with 2 of my friends who have played the game for awhile. I decided to main jacko mainly because I like puppet fighters and how they play and my other 2 friends played potemkin and bridget. The bridget was pretty good and couldn't win against him but I knew he was very beatable but the pot main HOLY he was really good and perfected me so many times that I thought he was straight up unbeatable and I won't win against him ever in a match. Some days later I challenged him till I take 1 single game we went 89 matches till I took 1 game but taking that 1 game was the biggest fucking boost ever I had playing the game and made me want to learn my character more to actually take more games off him. The next day I challenged the bridget main to a best of 5 to see how much I've improved against them and it was some pretty close games but I won 3-2 and realized how well I've improved at the game after like 3 weeks.
i hecking love playing on floor 7, winning 3 matches in a row by a hair of health, then getting put into floor 8 where sol and milia mains have an entire mixup set to a keybind (not literally) and they can confirm 45% off a random jab !
I still remember this one day playing Melty Blood AACC, I played a guy for a straight hour, losing 21 sets in a row by the end i was sweating, lightheaded and both my hands (specially my right) were both numb and burning at the same time. while playing, it was one of the most tense and exhausting things i've ever done in a game, by the time i finally won, It was the best day I ever had playing a fighting game. (detailed experience below if interested) I had played against him a couple times a couple weeks before this one time, I was brand new to fighting games but had played MB for around 3 months by then, he was brand new the first time i met him, coming from playing i believe KOF. When we played again on that day, i was quite confident and I did win the first 2 sets, but since i dont know much, he had figured me out by then and proceeded to win every set after that, i could slip a round here and there, but I went from almost stomping him to being stomped on, and instead of tilting me, it pushed me to prove that the months of playing, the hours worth of counseling and learning from other players and just the progress I had made was worth it, and so i continued and struggled though it, getting so SO close to winning too many times for my hart to handle and made me almost go to the verge of tears (sounds like a lot- i dont know how i got this emotional either), but when I finally clutched out a set win I popped off like i was hungrybox, literally got on my knees screaming so much my neighbors probably hate me now, and felt like i ran a marathon, the other guy curiously enough closed the game (only way to get out of a match in MBAACC) and congratulated me on the discord server, and neither I nor him noticed that we played for 1 hours and 15 minutes STRAIGHT, both of us tryharding as much as we could (hell, he even apologized after noticing the marker was 3-21 by the end XD) I do have that whole thing recorded from beginning to end and its probably the only replay I will never delete even though its an hour long. Today we are still kinda the same between eachother, I have switch mains (kinda- just changed moons really) but we both are still really competitive against each other, I finally managed to pull off a perfect against him a couple days ago and even made a fucking edit of it that i cant stop re-watching. (and yes, i did lose the 2 rounds after that HARD, still no clue how i got a perfect against him)
League is something that you need to have a special mentality about. Losing in a league match feels terrible and sometimes feel out of your hand. HOWEVER, if you are in low elo (plat and below), then there is 100% room to improve. If you lost in those elo's theres 100% always something that you could have done that would have stopped that, so even when it looks like your teammates are throwing you cant only blame them but also yourself.
I didn't expect to see someone who I've watched in top ranked matches in a little fun fighting game video on a channel I like (Pinhead at 7:22). Way to go Gekko! (that should be a slogan)
I gave fighting games 3 different tries throughout my life. I concluded after the third time that fighting games were fun to watch, but not much fun to play. I fully understand that fun is subjective, so I don't pretend to speak for everyone when I say that. I find my fun in winning when I play any kind of game. In all honesty, I might hate losing more than I love winning. When I play video games I want to either enjoy a good story, a power fantasy, or a balanced mix of both (Which depends on the game/genre, obviously). With fighting games, I feel like I need to abandon all earthly attachments and dedicate myself to training half my life in the mountains just for a CHANCE to start enjoying the actual game. And that idea alone kills the fun for me. I tip my hat to the pros though, they know how to make it look like a damn good time.
I’ve played a good amount of fighting games and a lot of this applied to me when I was new to them I always felt like no matter how much I practiced I wasn’t improving so I would sit in training mode for hours practicing the same combos and not fighting online so even though my damage was good my blocking and all around movement sucked i didn’t know any of the matchups well so I lost a lot I only got better at this when getting out of my comfort zone and playing ranked where I was fighting people in the low ranks like me and going through as best I could getting slowly better
I've been playing fighting games since 2002 and had so much fun with them until around 2013. Around then, I started losing my fun because of a combination of me having less patience for objectively bad game design elements, FG devs failing to evolve those elements out of their games (or even leaning heavier into them in some cases), and the gameplay focus of said devs pushing what I enjoyed out of most newer releases as well as forcing my defensive out-boxer/fencer skillset to be less and less viable as the years go by. Honestly, after looking at it analytically for the last 7-ish years, the genre has changed more than I have and it seems most fighting games just aren't for me anymore, which makes it hard to find the fun and reignite the passion I once had. Putting nearly 400 hours into Monster Hunter Rise also made me painfully aware of what I've been lacking from the FG genre since 2012: A true feeling of my time being respected and being rewarded for playing how *I want*. Particularly because most modern fighters penalize me for my natural playstyles and force me to conform to more aggressive play or suffer until I quit and spend my time on more worthwhile genres. At least SF6 will offer a wide variety of fairly rewarding ways to play, which will do good at offsetting how the core mechanics make it a game I will not be able to enjoy playing in any serious/competitive capacity. But because the recent-ish games that ARE more for me, such as VF5US and SamSho 2019 are never the most populated and/or have subpar netcode, it seems that I'm simply not allowed to find MY fun in fighting games anymore and I'm forced to grow increasingly distant from this genre that I sunk so much time and energy into for a decade of my life. That being my reward for my passion, I can't help but feel a bit bitter about it, which further forces the divide.
I had made a different comment but decided this was a better way to phrase it. "Stop thinking about it". When most of us picked up Pokemon as kids, we just.. played. Probably very few of us were thinking about competitive teams or stats. Nowadays it seems like games lean heavily into either the "Stardew Valley Lofi Beats to Farm to" or the "If you aren't trying to get into EVO don't even bother buying this game" markets. Personally I get in my own head way too much and end up here instead of playing Strive (it doesn't help it's my first fighting game after realizing what they actually are), and it's hard to separate the competitive concepts from the game itself. So to give advice to myself and anyone else who wants to find the fun but can't figure it out. Just go play. You aren't good, you aren't bad, fuck whatever a Roman Cancel is, just pick somebody that looks neat and play online for a bit. Also I have the same username in Discord so if anybody else is hesitant to try learning the game alone feel free to reach out c:
(6:20) Idk why but this part reminded me instantly of something I had forgot for a long time which is probably the reason I don't play fighting games but watch so many videos about them. All my friends play fgs and they told me that I should try one (any one would work). I preceded to make the wrong choice by choosing Brawlhalla (bc free + low investment), but even for the people in the group that did play Brawlhalla + friends I made through the game after like two years or so made fun of me once I made it to gold and pretty much promised me that if it took me that long to get to n00b level there was no hope. Immediately dropped the game, just like you did with League. Thanks for the video, although I would like to ask if anyone knows how to know if a group of ppl is good to learn a game with, because I usually have to solo it and get discouraged when learning with other ppl.
I haven't played Brawlhalla in a long time and only took the game seriously in its first season (I got to Plat). What helped me learn was watching tournaments, learning new tech, and swapping to different characters. I started as a Hattori main but realized while my spear play was great my sword play was lacking, at this time I was stuck in Silver. I swapped to Brynn to learn how to properly space with an axe, as I noticed I was struggling against that weapon, while still having my spear as my fallback. With that knowledge I hit gold. Hitting another wall I switched to Koji, dropping the spear for the bow which I was able to quickly pick up thanks to my practice with the axe. The bow is my best weapon and even though my swordplay still needed work I was able to climb to Plat. In gold I learned when and how to weapon throw to increase pressure and how to have patience thanks to Koji's amazing bow sigs. Later on they finally gave me a spear bow legend but I don't have friends who play the game (nor are interested in me teaching them how to play) so I've dropped the game. Best thing you can do is to find a top level player that plays your character and compare your gameplay to theirs. Are they using tech that you aren't? Are they using strings you aren't? What does their spacing look like and how often do they use their character's sigs and why? If you don't have friends to compare yourself to, that's the best thing you can do for yourself is to set goals based off of results that work. Hope that helps and good luck with your journey.
@@CivilChev ...ok so this comment by me is necessarily useless, bc I'm kind of just annoyed by something that probably wasn't intentional, so I am the problem here, and I'm sorry in advance, but this person kinda just explained how their friends called them bad at the game and the interpersonal relationship aspect of that drove them away even though they were improving. What you responded to would be well suited to something like "I'm not improving", but what they said is... not that. It's honestly liable to come off to that person as "lol yeah you are garbage, here, let me talk about myself and hope that fixes something". Of course, that wasn't what you meant and again I'm out of pocket for saying this but yeah.
This video’s remind me I have the most fun when I had moments that had me go, what do I need to improve on. This happened in both SF4 & Xrd. In SF4 (before Ultra), I recall running into a Rose player by the tag, Kenji_24 that played her so effectively, I genuinely thought Rose was stronger than people perceived. I was playing Fei Long at the time & thought I needed to improve my defense, so I picked up Sagat. When I eventually faced him again, I became aware of Rose’s reflect again thinking, why isn’t anyone playing Rose? I saved the replays & picked up Rose in order to learn Kenji’s style, which led to me learning spacing & footsies. After Ultra dropped, I unfortunately never ran into Kenji, but learning Rose & seeing her Soul Satellite ultra helped me learn SF & have fun. For Xrd, I only recall learning Sin & getting absolutely toyed with by someone that just knew how to play around Sin. Instead of being mad, it made me realize idk jack about GG neutral, again making me think, what am I doing wrong. Same situation occurred when looking at the roster & seeing no one was really playing Faust. The initial plan was to learn neutral from Faust, then go back to Sin. When I saw what I could do with his items, my brain and the fun for the game exploded and I still have fun to this day getting item situations in my favor. This is me kind of saying a character with good buttons and a kit with a lot of utility, and I’ll probably fall in love with the character. It’s honestly helped me know if a game would be fun for me and learn when to drop a game if it doesn’t even if I WANT to learn it. I’m thankfully having a lot of fun with Chun li in SF6, but here’s hoping JP will have that sauce and make my brain tingle like how Faust & Rose do
Okay okay so hate on me as you want but there are two examples of Fighting games that I wanna bring up. One I find easy and fun and one I find fun but difficult. My hero one’s justice is incredibly simple to play and I actually enjoy it, getting combos is easy and fun and Jojo’s all star battle R doesn’t really do that, I’m still struggling to trigger Scary Monsters on Diego in ASBR. They need to find a middle ground between having easy and complex inputs like Before style shigaraki in one’s justice with his Death Penalty move, but also make the game rewarding without making it too simple
its like GO, after learning to play to improve fast you are to play fast so you make mistakes so you can learn from them. losing is just the best way to learn.
I usually play action more than fighting games usually Not having to go through several loops of setup to even feel like I’m playing a game properly 80% of the time Being an absolute unstoppable power house At worst I feel boredom when it comes to an action game, at worst with a fighting game I feel frustration, and absolute hatred.
honestly, i find a lot of fun in games comes from landing something insane in friendlies or getting hit by a mate doing something insane and just having a good laugh. like i remember one time i landed this combo that i'd been tryna do for a few months now in an actual match against a mate and it was one of the most insane moments of my life cus i wasn't even planning it, my muscle memory from the lab just kicked in and i hit it
I thought this was a how to make baiken funa at first but then bro went deep in the League section and I learned so many things from this i hope more people see this video
My opinion fighting games need progression that isn’t just get good - Give me color challenges like COD - Reward Dumb hard challenges so I can prove I did with skin or cosmetics - Prestige with cool logo like COD - Fashion if we can customize if the game has it
Seeing how I always had a friends to play with and that we even created small weekly local scene held at youth center few years ago (we really need to step up on that marketing bruh...), fighting games have never been not fun to me. One of the best things are friendly shit-talk, sudden wack situations that make everyone laugh/surprised/etc. Or the fact that you and one of your friend and/or his character is your rival/enemy for example and that every player has their own identity (for example, one of my friends always plays the big bois).
I love how you can notice improving in fighting games, unfortunatly there isnt a single soul on australia servers so im stuck to cpu and finding in person events
I remember how i thought loop combos in dbfz were the coolest thing ever and were kinda the first thing i learned in fighting Games. It was immensely rewarding
Fighting games have been my personal focus for the past month. Truthfully, I haven't had fun playing them at all. I get so frustrated at the idea of me making a mistake or playing them suboptimally, whether it be using the wrong move in neutral, not following something up with the optimal string, or getting mixed up. The way I see it, things are only possible because the character has good enough tools, and they only make mistakes because I don't play them right. Paradoxically, I don't even like winning. I don't like "beating" people, I don't like the idea that "I got away with it" if I capitalized on a mistake the opponent had, I don't like the thought that I only won because my character's toolset was good enough, and any game I make a mistake leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Sure, I feel a little relieved and less disappointed in myself when I win and it's not that I hate losing in itself, but I hate losses because it shows me how badly I messed up. I don't feel satisfaction from improving. For as long as I don't know how to a play a character flawlessly with confidence, I'm just doing things wrong. I have a hard time taking baby steps with this because in each match, you have to put everything together and utilize a bunch of your character's tools and if you don't react in time to those situations, you drop your turn or lose that interaction completely. I also don't want to learn bad habits by sticking to suboptimal combos or neutral strategies. Because I don't take pride from using specific characters, I am trying to learn a bunch of different characters in a handful of games so I can feel like a "good player," whatever that means to me at this point. Of course, I am stupid and have only been playing for a month so even just remembering each character's attacks for each button, the technical differences between games, and not to mention each of the instruction booklet's worth of a character's follow ups. As you could probably guess, I am not even good at a single character and I spend so much time in training modes and only have played a few matches that left me fuming. I have been so upset with myself that I don't even like seeing people anymore, or rather I don't want to be seen because I feel like I'd be such a letdown. I don't hate fighting games, even though I haven't had fun with them yet, I hate myself for being so incompetent.
I've never been Any good at fighting games, and I've only played a few, them being soul calibur 5 ( or is the latest one 6 I can't remember) super smash bros ( from N64 a the way to ultimate) injustice 2, and pokemon Pokken tournament, and while I'm not capable of doing combos, or even basic inputs to perform a move, I always had fun because of how cool they look and the characters themselves draw me in, just the banter in a Intro or outro between characters makes me enjoy the game, I never care about which character is the best in a game competitively, I ussaly go for who's the coolest or most fun to play
Found out now that the best ISP in my country has consistant ping spikes no matter what. I bought a cable. I pay for fastest speeds I can. I've bought an expensive PC. All for naught. Some countries just can't have fighting games, or any online games that need consistant internet. Hearthstone is all I can play. Maybe chess. And I was fully commited to being a Zato main too. All that training for nothing...
The idea of not cling to number of wins or losses is great, but sometimes it's just not work. I like to play fighting games, even though they are super hard to learn. There are some good matches or even some stupid but really hilarious matches. But most of the time it's really bad. In Strive I usually hang on 6-8 floors depending on a few factors. Sometimes I have a good day with good matches, sometimes it's really bad. One day I started at floor 8 and got my ass beaten so hard, that I tanked at level 3. Or like a stiuation in DNF Duel at the launch, when I played it daily, and got like 40-80 losses. Sometimes in a row. You can try not to look at the numbers, or not minding the win/loss ratio, but when you can't win a single round in dozens of matches in a row, it's such a discouraging expirience. I want to learn at this games, but on my own I can't do much. Like I play with Biken in Strive with 2 or 3 basic combos because I just can't remember others. And I tried to play with other people in discord servers, but after a few matches they just leave and don't want to play with me anymore. So yeah, concentrating on fun is cool, but sometimes there is no room for fun at all.
For me it’s when both me and my opponent doble KO each other which means that both me and the opponent are equally skilled at said fighting game or when both of us are using the same characters and just start clashing into each other and see who gets the upper hand fist
I'm in here before watching the whole video but I've been waiting for a video like this. I've been struggling with motivation to play alot and improve. I'd say I'm pretty decent player and I attend tournaments but I really want to find more motivation to just really grind and improve at the game. So I already like this video 😅 Edit: ok after watching the video NOW IM MOTIVATED!!!
Fighting games become fun once players grasp how to play. Until you understand yours and your opponent's options, you can't properly engage in the mind games of the game. Learning and such is great and can be fun, but it's not "the game". Like with drawing, the study of techniques is engaging and enriching, but it's not the same feeling as completing a piece using the techniques you learned. (Redline alt here 😶🌫️)
I want to get better at fighting games. I played the guilty gear strive cross-platform test beta and full in love. I only wish I could of played online and for longer. When it comes out on Xbox gamepass, I will try to get good at my boy Potemkin. But for now, I'm going to try to get better at games like killer instinct and jojo asbr. And I hope by watching people like you, I'll be able to find more enjoyment in these games. And actually get good. Because I really want to play these games. But I always feel nervous going in to a 1v1. Like if I don't play at full strenght and be the best, I'm wasting someone's time. But the same happened with dead by daylight. And after awhile. I lost that feeling. And I love that game. So I will do the same with fighting games. (Even if I don't play them all the time imma watch your shit it's funny)
this is an intersting point. i agree somewhat. fighting games are a much different then other games. usually, the more you play a game, the less fun a game is. fighters are the opposite, the beginning is really boring after the novelty wears off. it only gets fun after spending lotsn of time in it. the fun is worked for after losing a lot, thats just kinda how they are. i dont think that can be changed.
That's because fighters are like learning an instrument. No one wants to learn scales or hand techniques but learning them makes it easier to start doing the fun stuff. The more you practice your instrument the better you become and the more you can do with it. Fighting Games like instruments almost never have diminishing returns compared to other games and that's thanks to the universal skills you can carry over from one game to the next, just as picking up a second instrument is much easier than your first.
@@CivilChev you forgot the part where you were only allowed to play the piano by competing against a different piano player who beats you over and over and over
@@CivilChev you can, but that's not the method presented (or some would say endorsed) by the game itself, in most cases. And as everyone is so excited to point out, losing is the best opportunity you can get to improve so if you actually want to win (improve at your instrument) you should go back to piano hell where you came from. Seriously, idk how we managed to come up with a system of game that is ridiculously skill intensive yet inherently punishes people who want to win.
Personally, I'm worried that in order to know the fun, then you have to look deeper into the genre to find it due to a lack of commercial specifying on the genre to grab people's attention.
I think one thing that fighting games should do is to not carry ranked points across characters so that you can try more of them without worrying about losing fake online points. I'm not sure how this would be effectively implemented in team fighters though
Street fighter 6 does this, which is great for messing around with characters. As for team fighters you could probably do matchmaking with the strongest character you have selected. This would also encourage trying completely new combinations I imagine
i think above learning and get better i just love fighting in fighting games, we just press buttons, no tryhard, no big combo learning, just buttons and instant fun. If it's a problem i don't know how to fix it lmao
I just want a fighting game where it strips things down in a way that keep the complexity, but pushes it to the back when you’re fighting so you can just… _stop thinking so damn hard._ I want a fighting game with two basic buttons, two specials, and a super. And instead of having to remember all of your supers at once, you can swap them out between rounds. You get a moment to think, swap, and use different parts of your kit, but once the fight starts you can go into autopilot and stop thinking about the fifty bajillion things your character can theoretically accomplish.
@@CivilChev as far as I’ve heard, KI is dead-dead. Like… there’s still pros playing it, and the odd newbie, but the healthy community has mostly just vanished. If it hasn’t then, maybe? I play on PC and it costs money there so…
@@CurlyHairedRogue If you're purely relying on online play then yeah, I can't recommend KI but if you have friends I can't recommend it enough. For a current game I couldn't tell you as I don't play any online, at the moment. If it doesn't have to be a traditional fighter you should try some of the platform fighters like Multiverses or Brawlhalla.
@@CivilChev played Brawlhalla. Liked it, but it eventually got old. I started playing Rivals of Æther, which was *really* damn good. Though in terms of traditional fighters, I’ve yet to find one that actually caters to a casual audience better than TFH or Fantasy Strike. Besides that, everything else expects _way_ too much effort from a newbie for me to get my friends into it.
@@CurlyHairedRogue SFVI looks to be the next casual friendly Fighting Game. Project L will have simple inputs but it being a tag fighter makes it significantly harder to recommend to someone wanting a simple game.
For me, finding fun in a game is finding the most bullshit strategyand making it work, i started just using standing p and 2p to deap dmg im guilty gear, focusing on neutral and just poking alot, learning how that strategy works has both gotten me into guilty gear and is slowly teaching me about neutral
My biggest issue with this video is it comes off as a fighting game player telling non-fighting game players to have a paradigm shift into the fighting game player mindset. It's incredibly difficult to switch your approach mentally. I've read some other comments and every one I read is from someone that already plays and has a conducive mindset to growing as a player. It's a pattern I see in a lot of videos similar to this. Although, you did say something that isn't usually said. At the end, when you mention that "there's a good chance these games just aren't for you", in relation to the game feeling like a job. It's incredibly rare when I hear, in a video, someone say that it. It seems like an idea people avoid bringing up. For me personally they feel like a job from minute 1. It takes too much work for me to take a game off the worst player.
I think this is a good take, the bit where he talks about a 50/50 and how that made it fun isn't really a good analogy for a new player. A new player would need to learn why hitting a throw feels good, probably because you outplayed your opponent. The fun is specific to a subset of people that can take their friend picking the worst character in a FG and getting beaten a million times, but still coming back for more. Some people take losses extremely hard and those people should probably not play FG's. You'll lose, and a lot, and sometimes to stuff somewhat out of your control. You have to be able to have fun losing.
WHOOOOOOOO YOU LOVE TO SEE IT WHEN THE SENSE IS COMMON LET'S GOOOO Sorry had to get that out. Yeah, I watch these videos at this point for the same reason I think people watch bad TV shows; to pick apart what they do wrong. Which is cynical and vaguely assholish ik but they are one of the reasons the bottom 20% of the fgc playerbase rotates out people to drain hope from every 3 months. The point is, this video was 100% better than any other I've ever seen at admitting fighting games are for a very specific subset of person. It's no surprise videos tend to be bad at this, because the people making them necessarily play and enjoy fighting games (keyword: already naturally felt inclined to use the "tricks" they present in the video, which they picked up from other places beforehand, thereby making the part of their personality). In effect, it ends up being in this case 17 minutes of "you would have more fun... if you were more like me". For someone like me, who of course watches the whole thing thinking "yeah but that's not most people," I end up with this unstoppable exchange of non-salient strings of reasoning that just clash with the way I see anything in life, which is why I don't enjoy playing fighting games unelss it's labbing combos. To quote the video and myself, this is what it looks like: "Well, you can find your own challenges to conquer, and have that be your motivation" Me: "Winning." "Maybe there's a tournament that requires a specific placement," Me: "So Winning." "Maybe there's a specific item that you have to grind for because it looks really cool" Me: "Grinding, which is inherently towards... winning... unless I'm just letting go of the controller for time's sake" "By giving yourself clearly defined goals *that don't directly have to do with winning* -" Me: "Oh. Losing." Like see this just doesn't work for me. It also doesn't work for a lot of people I know, those ones being better at not doing things they don't find fun. That's why I still grind combos I will never use in a match. The point being, people often present the genre as something that necessarily grows on you with time, which it just doesn't for everyone, which I think does people active harm. It's like if people make 20 minute video essays on why you should try ghost peppers bc the person who made the video "really likes them" and if "you enjoy the feeling of capsaicin" you will like it- which yeah of course if I enjoy improving in fighting games I will enjoy them- hell if this video's being recommended and that is the case, I probably already have- but when you solvate that with the necessary 75% of the video's content on "fixing" the "issues" (cognitive constitution) of the people who aren't having fun, you're a. not accomplishing anything for them, and b. leading most people who watch the video and have 20$ to spare to get their ass whooped for 2 hours and ruin their day (+ 20$) pointlessly. And b could be more easily avoided, if we did what you highlighted, which is specify exactly how much *these games are not for everybody*
@@absoul112 The mindset is important 100%, I would say just about necessary, but that's talking about conscious control over what you can and can't sit through. Unconscious control is not having fun even though you can see improvement- so someone like me, because I want to win, and that's not something you can really change. Improvement isn't really a motivation, it's a necessary step towards winning, so the middle point, where people who are playing for improvement are losing and improving, they're happy, I'm not. That's the kind of unchangeable thing I think the original comment is intending to say the video fails address.
My issue is I've always wanted to get into fighting games other than Smash. But no irl friends or even online friends of mine want to play those games at all. So it's hard for me to find someone to play against. So I just end up grinding in training mode and against CPU opponents before going online and just not having fun at all. I live in a more rural area too so there's no local FGC that I could go to to make new friends and attend locals. This cycle of mine has been going for a very long time and it just keeps happening. New fighting game comes out that looks cool. I play for a bit. Find no one to play with so I get frustrated that my only option is ranked and end up dropping it.
i think it's funny something when i was a kid, fighting games are not as "complex" as it is nowadays. hell, combos are all diferent from today! take, for example, fatal fury or real bout, the first ones i mean i think only Terry had a combo like pressing dial buttons to make a combo, the other characters you had to do some shenanigans to make a combo, like... dunno! a flying kick, followed by some special move or something, Terry you hit HP, he hit 2 times, then burn knockle or whatever! and because of lack of complexicity, the damage from simple blows take a lot of damage! and i didn't have a good time learning the game because... dunno, maybe the handycap for the damage is too high, you needed to think fast or it will be a dark souls experience of OTK! something like that! nowadays, you have a lot of possibilities for combos and extenssions... while before, you needed to take care for not take a hit that drain your HP, you have tot ake care of mind games or extensive sets of combos or even infinite combos! well, i'm not trying to point anything bad about fighting games, or anything, just sharing a bit of self experience
“Never study because you have a test…study because you’re interested.” I’ve definitely been in the “test” mentality, especially with tournaments. Pretty much the only reason I got into fighting games competitively was because I wanted to win tournaments and be recognized for my skill, not because I actually like the game. I wanted to put some value on myself as a gamer since games are where I put all my time. Though now I’ve become completely burned-out from all fighting games period; too much work for something I don’t give a singular sh** about 💀
I want 2023 to be the year I get better at fighting games to the point where I can understand what people are talking about in these games. But I take a half hour breaks in the Skullgirls tutorial cause my hands and mind don't want to commit anything to memory. I just don't feel confident enough yet to sit in lab learning combos I'll suffer through pain to learn or get told by people I face that they are sub-optimal later on.
Honestly, you probably shouldn’t learn the most optimal combos first. Just knowing combos is part of learning fighting games, so if all you do is spend time on combos and go into a match, yeah you might know how to do the combo but you won’t know where or how you can get the combo started. Learning basics is always first and foremost. Need a firm base to hold up what you add to it and to fall back on in case something doesn’t work out
Oh and don’t worry, eventually stuff you’ve been practicing will click. There’s no hard line of when that will happen, but you will notice when it does. Best of luck to your journey this year 👍
I stopped playing GTA online because I realized that as good as it looks it's just not fun. They literally make missions not fun to incentivize you not playing them and buying Shark cards instead. I will not play a game that's designed to not be fun
i have a friend who likes fighting games but he's not into putting that work , we argue every time. he wants to be the best without labbing , wants to have nice combos but arent that long etc. i don't know what to tell him
Of course it's okay. I mainly play offline against AI in arcade mode. I only dabble in online every now and then for variety. You can enjoy FG's however you want.
I'm a old school player. I stop taking them serious when the arcades died. Its something about putting a coin up, facing someone like we're in the Kumite. You can't take souls without eye contact. That's what makes them FUN.
See this is what I'm trynna do. I didn't agree with the whole "you can't focus on winning or losing" thing bc "drive to improve" by itself makes no sense to me unless it's a subsidiary of "drive to win", and frankly no, nobody would ever lab on a dummy for hours and go "yeah I got it" bc you don't care about a soulless shell, so to an extent everyone wants to win. But the idea of becoming a master in demolishing individual people, like some sort of hitman, and honing your individual adaptations based upon hours and hours of experience with the same small pool of people that is actually alluring- probably because it extracts the sheer gruntwork required to get wins from most people you only meet once online.
The only thing the FGC on social media *CAN'T* do
Fuckin’ woooooord.
I’ve tried almost a dozen different fighting games, and the closest I got to enjoying one consistently was with TFH.
The only ways I ever had any fun consistently was when I fought against my siblings, with balanced matches, and fighting CPUs in salt mines. With the content drought though, the fun dwindled.
I get the feeling people who play fighting games really rather like having all their tools accessible at once. Me? It’s too bloody much, and I just want them to give me a loadout screen so I can artificially limit myself so I don’t need to think about everything at once.
They find the fun in complaining about the game they love 😂
?
Play a real Guilty Gear game?
Assuming you haven't played it, I think you'd like STRIVE
I'm a floor 8 baiken, don't play actively but I like the game. Once I decided to go to the park and found a celestial ramlethal. I lost 50 times in a row. Most fun I've had in that game. After 20 losses, starting to win a few rounds, was a really cool feeling. I get really unmotivated to play fighting games because I don't feel like I'm improving. Still feel it to this day, but that day was amazing.
Wholeheartedly relatable.
I think after 10th win in a row they start to downscale themselves sometimes... at least with me anyway like they don't even try anymore against me at that point and I think it's just... lowkey toxic
I'm a floor 2 baiken, i'm trying to learn fight games, and yesterday, I decided to play in the park and got absolutely destroyed by a celestial May
But I won the last round, best feeling ever
The time I went to parks and this celestial faust(it wasn't his main) faced me like 20 times when I was floor 8 and finally got the win was amazing, and he was such a great teacher because he wasn't trying to just destroy me he would do certain things repeatedly so I could learn the counters to what he was doing and we didn't even say a word to each other he just knew how to help me improve.
@@Sunkhristwouldn’t use a cannon to hunt a rabbit
So this video inadvertently explains why it's hard for some people to get into fighting games. Whenever I hear someone talk about fighting games, it's always about their personal journey. The way that they have learned and improved at the game and how there's no XP meter to tell you how good you are. It's all internal motivation. It's why some people (like me, who has both Austim and ADHD) have a hard time getting into these games.
Video games are usually built around some kind of external motivation, even really challenging ones. This external validation comes in all kinds of ways. Sometimes it's an XP meter, sometimes it's new unlocks or a cool item you really want. Sometimes it's a high ranking for clearing a stage well enough. Sometimes it just being able to see more of the game and what comes next. Video games almost always have some kind of factor that rewards you to push forward with it... which is where fighting games fall short.
Since fighting games are pretty much always driven by internal motivation, it feels more along the lines of a skill like drawing. There's tons to learn and it's something you can do basically forever... but the issue is that a lot of the time you won't notice that you're improving until you take a step back. Same goes with fighting games. It's hard to even know when you are getting better. What's worse is that the only external motivation for a lot of these games ais the ranking system... which leads to problems.
This is why I feel that fighting games SHOULD try and adopt more external motivation for the players. Even something simple like an xp meter that unlocks cosmetics can go a long way. Not to mention actually trying to make good single player modes. Smash Bros has been doing this for YEARS and and there's plenty of people who have played it causually first then tried out competitive.
TL:DR: Fighting games solely relying on the player to make their own fun out of it without any other way to show progression isn't necessarily a good thing. I hope more developers find ways to draw in players with external motivation.
to be fair, strive does have some light external motivators like your character level and collecting avatar cosmetics, just not anything super noteworthy.
It's a lot of fun when you finally get to that point where you understand why people are doing things and a lot of interactions become a series of RPS and trying to guess which option your opponent will do. The most fun I've ever had is when I get an opponent to throw whiff by running up and jumping immediately after conditioning them to expect grabs.
You are so lame... You can do that in almost every fucking fighting game. Legitimately, EVERY fighting game... THAT'S the fun you get out of "Guilty Gear"? No. I guess you don't since STRIVE plays 10% (if even that) like what Guilty Gear is.
I always tell my friends learn at your own pace, but I think learn what's cool is a better expression of what I have been trying to tell them. It is how I got started. The advice for beginners will always remain learn the fundamentals, however learning advanced things not only helps motivate, but often either requires learning fundamentals or leads to learning them later. For example learning a TOD in training mode helps you understand how your character builds combos. In addition if you want to use it in a real match you now have to learn the basics (unless you are playing with a friend group that doesn't know how to block,) but now they have the context of setting up for this cool combo you can do. So many ore people watch fighting games than play them, meaning a lot of people find them cool, but when asked give one of the many excuses as to why they can't play them. Perhaps if they just focused on the fun and learned at their own pace it would be easier for them.
Even though I usually have fun playing fighting game's in general what makes them abit more fun for me is when lore is involved say like when you and a bro chosen character's that are enemies in the lore of said game and they say some bada$$ lines before the fight starts that always gets me hyped
Same with me. One of the reasons why I love games like SF, KOF and MK is because of their interesting lore and cool characters. Crossover games such as MVC and Smash Bros also scratch this itch because these games are loaded with a variety of characters from different franchises that end up introducing me to new worlds that I become a fan of. If I want to stick around with a game for a long time and get better at it, I need those things to pull me in. Without those things I’m not going to be invested in a game for very long. This was the problem I had with VF5US. None of the characters really interested me so I didn’t stick around.
wake up babe new gekkosquirrel video just dropped
This puts things into words I've been feeling for a while. Since mid september I started entering beginner level tournaments for strive, I was doing very badly but outside of the fact my first tournament was against 2 characters I really struggle to play against (and although not to my knowledge then, against signfiicant threats, not the tops of the tournaments yet but they were certainly not newbies like me, I've happened to run into the testament that kicked me out of bracket and he's done the same several times and I've yet to take a game off him, but it's been more fun to see him since. I improved enough to get a top 8 position in one strict entry requirement tourney which had been a "I'll get there someday" aspiration for a while, it felt great, the problem came from how the next 3 weeks until I was forced to take a break I fell massively short of that and the results really got to me. It can be easy to focus on that and even when I was trying to look at my gameplay I could only focus on the same mistakes I kept making and things I knew I should be doing but weren't in the moment, I felt like my one good run was a fluke and going 0-2 in the final tournament to 2 testament players right before I had to leave my pc the day of the balance patch and saw the big buffs they got. I needed a break and videos like this to remind myself of the fun and destress. Remembering when I'd run into people regularly topping my brackets in tower and even if they bodied me, it was fun to get to see them in a more relaxed setting. There is still an anxiety of "all the people who were topping that I looked up to and wanted to be able to surpass have won and graduated, I'm only gonna be able to do well by the people above leaving, not me getting better, but I have to ignore that to actually improve.
I've spent a long time trying to just learn characters and find who to play, and I've just started to learn the fundamentals after 140 or so hours. I promise you after messing around and not knowing what you're doing for that long, chosing someone to play and learning the fundamentals is so rewarding!
Similar story here. I bought the game on launch, messed around with it off and on since then, and only this week did I decide to finally buckle down and really start to learn how to play Ramlethal. Been spending time doing missions and the training mode figuring things out, and I’m amazed at how much more comfortable I feel with the game as a whole
The most fun I have in fighting games is being a jack of all trades and a master of....one.
My true main is the random button, but I'll have a character or two to fall back on if you wanna be competitive.
I remember when I started out in fighting games, I was playing Strive, but I often sucked, not winning that much and often getting by butt kicked. I met another Axl main on floor 10 and asked him to help me out, and all that ended up happening was me getting incredibly frustrated at my lack of ability to do something even as simple as command inputs. I ended up getting less into fighting games because I could see the fun, but I was so bad at the game that I stopped finding it fun. I saw fun only in the see-able challenge, when something is impossible for your current skill, I didn't feel a willingness to improve, I just thought "I'm never going to get that good. That's godlike ability".
Enter Dragon Ball FighterZ. My friends all had it on switch because of a sale, and when I heard that there were autocombos, I thought mashing could make my life easier. And it did. I ended up playing Yamcha and mashing L, which annoyed my friends because it was working more than it should. But I was still getting bodied by my friends, but it felt less bad. On Guilty Gear, I didn't have any friends, crossplay wasn't out at that point and all my IRL friends refused to get the game because it was too much money, and that's when I realised that with friends who you have a connection with, the competitive element is less prevalent, and I was able to kick back and have fun. I realised I was not doing nearly as much damage as I did with Yamcha, so I asked my friends how they're able to perform so well, they told me they used actual combos, not autocombos, I spent my free time while my friends were asleep over in America in training mode, learning combos and B'n'Bs, figuring out what a jump cancel was. I was several years late to fighting games, it was like trying to play piano after spending most of your life playing guitar, I must admit I spent 2 full days without sleep trying to get better at FighterZ, I even turned off simple mode, and I figured out what a motion input was, and eventually, when all my friends got tired of FighterZ, I logged back into strive, and decided to play a character who wasn't a zoner, which I wasn't used to, so I chose Ky (I regret my decision a lot), and although I knew the basics, Ky just didn't speak to me as a character, I wasn't invested in him enough to learn properly. So I chose Axl again, modded in a Jotaro hat and Kirby recolour, and started playing Axl again. I got worried that my friend who played Super Broly, Z Broly and Gogeta 4 would body me with his Chipp when crossplay came out, but it turns out I've improved so much that I was able to fight him as an equal.
I'm still not the best Axl, I'm only floor 8, but I've definitely matured and my mentality improved. So I thank all of the youtubers who make fighting game videos that helped me out, especially Lythero, Old Reliable, and of course, Gekko Squirrel. So thank you.
The real moral of this video is that league is the greatest trick the devil ever pulled on humanity.
Amazing video. It always makes me sad to see how many people only care about getting good at fighting games because they think winning tournaments is what's fun about it, but if you're not having fun in the first place, you almost don't improve at all. Fighting games aren't work, they're games and yet players really struggle to see it that way, always just talking about "how to improve". In a way, this is a better "how to improve" video than any other one I've seen.
(also im very flattered you put me in at the "players who beat you in 5 seconds" part)
No Fighting Games ARE work. Getting good at a fighting game requires the same discipline as getting good playing an instrument. No other genre of game have people recommending you to go into a practice mode to learn a combo or tech. Just like playing an instrument requires practicing tricky parts on your own so that when you perform as a group you are already well practiced. My band director used to say "Practice as if you are the worst, but perform as if you are the best". You can't be confident you can perform unless a practice session goes well, and practice sessions don't go well if you don't practice parts you're struggling with on your own time.
a personal challenge set by a friend of mine is to be able to beat me in at least 50% of the matches we play, and hes getting there!
This is why KI (2013) is the best fighting game to come out. The Combo Assist feature and the Combo Breaker Systems allow new players to literally pick up a controller and play. All they need to do is spend 5 to 10 minutes getting their baring's and getting used to using the Combo Assist outside of a match and they are already having fun. Forward plus an input starts a combo. Pressing different inputs continues the combo, and forward plus heavy finishes the combo. The best part is that the amount of damage you do isn't significantly lower than someone doing manual combos.
The other thing is a lack of a proper FUN single player mode. Soulcalibur 1 and 2 had this mode called Weapon Master which were different challenges that literally taught you how to play the game. Challenges from movement, to throws, to juggles, to unlockables and parries. Some challenges would have the player do barely any damage but a knockdown would have a very satisfying BOOM followed by the enemy being launched into the air and doing massive damage. It felt GOOD to clear these challenges that required you to play consciously. You aren't just thinking about how to get a hit confirm but you're thinking about what your game plan is to clear the challenge and those are the skills that transfer over into having fun playing the game.
Fighting Games are slowly catching up to what KI (2013) established, but we're still a good distance away from it. We've gotten more and more fighters that aren't as execution heavy so players can start actually playing a fighting game. The biggest issue is that people think the "trial" modes are the way to learn and they get so absorbed into learning combos that they forget to learn mechanics, neutral, or even how to block. KI (2013)'s dojo is a very good dojo but it still feels like a glorified practice session unlike the Weapon Master from Soulcalibur.
Side note: You should include the name of the fighting game on screen, that way if someone thinks what they see is cool they know how to look for it.
I've been finding my fun by playing EVERY SINGLE FIGHTING GAME. There's so many good ones out. Punch Planet, Strive, Third Strike, SF6 (when the beta was live) Them's Fighting Herds, Killer Instinct, Granblue, Tekken 7. It's just FUN to play them even if my extremely scattered approach to them makes me bad at nearly all of them. Finding skills from one game to apply to another, discovering a concept in one that may improve me in another, and involving my community in these varied experiences keeps fighting games at the forefront of my thoughts at pretty much all times.
Try KOF next
TFH mentioned!!!!!!!
dang, I feel validated knowing there's someone else out there who finds joy in variety like i do
12:47 Regarding the "Distraction Game Modes": These are what we used to call "minigames". They were gradually becoming more and more common in the gaming space, then I think something happened with MMOs and Sandbox-style games like GTA becoming more common that undid that momentum. There several structural innovations happening in the space at the time, too. Some games used minigames as post-completion bonus rewards. Some of them had a "minigames" option in the main menu, which you could play instead of the campaign mode or the main competitive multiplayer mode [Pokemon 64]. Sometimes half the game was unlocking and progressing in a series of minigames [Super Monkey Ball 2]. Sometimes, the game itself was built _around_ dozens and dozens of different minigames [Mario Party]. There was even at least one attempt at a new subgenre of minigames. A kind that were so tiny and limited they only barely qualified as a game, and where the goal was to have literally as many of them thrown at the player at once like in the [Warioware] series.
I only find fighting games fun for the character discovery. Just looking at the cool stuff they can do, although temporarily, intrigues me to discover and lab more
you've never understood true fun until you anji parry super someone twice in a row cause "why on Earth would you parry twice in a row"
I can't believe you met the real Sol Badguy from Guilty Gear (video game series)!!!
7:27 I don’t know if you remember me, but me losing to you was part of the reason I’ve decided to stick with Strive. Don’t know if I’ll ever beat you, though.
Good video. The thing you touched on near the end is a point that videos like this really don't touch on as often as they should. the reality is that not everyone is interested in competitive gaming or intrinsic motivation, so fighting games just aren't for them and no amount of talking about hype combos or sharing journeys of personal discovery is going to change that.
Having said that the point about focusing on what's fun for you could apply to any number of games casual or competitive and it's very worth keeping in mind.
Great video, as a ex leauge of legends player myself, recently found joy in FG and GGS, as a Baiken ONLY player myself, i salute you my friend 🍻
I wanna tell a story of when I first started guilty gear strive. I started strive with 2 of my friends who have played the game for awhile. I decided to main jacko mainly because I like puppet fighters and how they play and my other 2 friends played potemkin and bridget. The bridget was pretty good and couldn't win against him but I knew he was very beatable but the pot main HOLY he was really good and perfected me so many times that I thought he was straight up unbeatable and I won't win against him ever in a match. Some days later I challenged him till I take 1 single game we went 89 matches till I took 1 game but taking that 1 game was the biggest fucking boost ever I had playing the game and made me want to learn my character more to actually take more games off him. The next day I challenged the bridget main to a best of 5 to see how much I've improved against them and it was some pretty close games but I won 3-2 and realized how well I've improved at the game after like 3 weeks.
two minutes and sixteen seconds in
i might pick fighting games back up again, you already have a good point
i hecking love playing on floor 7, winning 3 matches in a row by a hair of health, then getting put into floor 8 where sol and milia mains have an entire mixup set to a keybind (not literally) and they can confirm 45% off a random jab !
I still remember this one day playing Melty Blood AACC, I played a guy for a straight hour, losing 21 sets in a row by the end i was sweating, lightheaded and both my hands (specially my right) were both numb and burning at the same time. while playing, it was one of the most tense and exhausting things i've ever done in a game, by the time i finally won, It was the best day I ever had playing a fighting game. (detailed experience below if interested)
I had played against him a couple times a couple weeks before this one time, I was brand new to fighting games but had played MB for around 3 months by then, he was brand new the first time i met him, coming from playing i believe KOF. When we played again on that day, i was quite confident and I did win the first 2 sets, but since i dont know much, he had figured me out by then and proceeded to win every set after that, i could slip a round here and there, but I went from almost stomping him to being stomped on, and instead of tilting me, it pushed me to prove that the months of playing, the hours worth of counseling and learning from other players and just the progress I had made was worth it, and so i continued and struggled though it, getting so SO close to winning too many times for my hart to handle and made me almost go to the verge of tears (sounds like a lot- i dont know how i got this emotional either), but when I finally clutched out a set win I popped off like i was hungrybox, literally got on my knees screaming so much my neighbors probably hate me now, and felt like i ran a marathon, the other guy curiously enough closed the game (only way to get out of a match in MBAACC) and congratulated me on the discord server, and neither I nor him noticed that we played for 1 hours and 15 minutes STRAIGHT, both of us tryharding as much as we could (hell, he even apologized after noticing the marker was 3-21 by the end XD)
I do have that whole thing recorded from beginning to end and its probably the only replay I will never delete even though its an hour long. Today we are still kinda the same between eachother, I have switch mains (kinda- just changed moons really) but we both are still really competitive against each other, I finally managed to pull off a perfect against him a couple days ago and even made a fucking edit of it that i cant stop re-watching. (and yes, i did lose the 2 rounds after that HARD, still no clue how i got a perfect against him)
League is something that you need to have a special mentality about. Losing in a league match feels terrible and sometimes feel out of your hand. HOWEVER, if you are in low elo (plat and below), then there is 100% room to improve. If you lost in those elo's theres 100% always something that you could have done that would have stopped that, so even when it looks like your teammates are throwing you cant only blame them but also yourself.
I mainly just find joy in punching people, landing counter hits, yeeting people, and hoarding meter, apparently
I didn't expect to see someone who I've watched in top ranked matches in a little fun fighting game video on a channel I like (Pinhead at 7:22). Way to go Gekko! (that should be a slogan)
finding the fun is definately the hardest part of this game... Whilst every other game is almost inherently fun.
I gave fighting games 3 different tries throughout my life. I concluded after the third time that fighting games were fun to watch, but not much fun to play. I fully understand that fun is subjective, so I don't pretend to speak for everyone when I say that. I find my fun in winning when I play any kind of game. In all honesty, I might hate losing more than I love winning. When I play video games I want to either enjoy a good story, a power fantasy, or a balanced mix of both (Which depends on the game/genre, obviously). With fighting games, I feel like I need to abandon all earthly attachments and dedicate myself to training half my life in the mountains just for a CHANCE to start enjoying the actual game. And that idea alone kills the fun for me. I tip my hat to the pros though, they know how to make it look like a damn good time.
Perfect way to start the new year.
I’m not gonna lie, the RATING UPDATE banner is the only thing in Guilty Gear that can actually make me mad. I should really disable the pop ups lol
I’ve played a good amount of fighting games and a lot of this applied to me when I was new to them I always felt like no matter how much I practiced I wasn’t improving so I would sit in training mode for hours practicing the same combos and not fighting online so even though my damage was good my blocking and all around movement sucked i didn’t know any of the matchups well so I lost a lot I only got better at this when getting out of my comfort zone and playing ranked where I was fighting people in the low ranks like me and going through as best I could getting slowly better
I've been playing fighting games since 2002 and had so much fun with them until around 2013.
Around then, I started losing my fun because of a combination of me having less patience for objectively bad game design elements, FG devs failing to evolve those elements out of their games (or even leaning heavier into them in some cases), and the gameplay focus of said devs pushing what I enjoyed out of most newer releases as well as forcing my defensive out-boxer/fencer skillset to be less and less viable as the years go by.
Honestly, after looking at it analytically for the last 7-ish years, the genre has changed more than I have and it seems most fighting games just aren't for me anymore, which makes it hard to find the fun and reignite the passion I once had.
Putting nearly 400 hours into Monster Hunter Rise also made me painfully aware of what I've been lacking from the FG genre since 2012: A true feeling of my time being respected and being rewarded for playing how *I want*. Particularly because most modern fighters penalize me for my natural playstyles and force me to conform to more aggressive play or suffer until I quit and spend my time on more worthwhile genres.
At least SF6 will offer a wide variety of fairly rewarding ways to play, which will do good at offsetting how the core mechanics make it a game I will not be able to enjoy playing in any serious/competitive capacity.
But because the recent-ish games that ARE more for me, such as VF5US and SamSho 2019 are never the most populated and/or have subpar netcode, it seems that I'm simply not allowed to find MY fun in fighting games anymore and I'm forced to grow increasingly distant from this genre that I sunk so much time and energy into for a decade of my life. That being my reward for my passion, I can't help but feel a bit bitter about it, which further forces the divide.
I had made a different comment but decided this was a better way to phrase it.
"Stop thinking about it".
When most of us picked up Pokemon as kids, we just.. played. Probably very few of us were thinking about competitive teams or stats. Nowadays it seems like games lean heavily into either the "Stardew Valley Lofi Beats to Farm to" or the "If you aren't trying to get into EVO don't even bother buying this game" markets.
Personally I get in my own head way too much and end up here instead of playing Strive (it doesn't help it's my first fighting game after realizing what they actually are), and it's hard to separate the competitive concepts from the game itself.
So to give advice to myself and anyone else who wants to find the fun but can't figure it out. Just go play. You aren't good, you aren't bad, fuck whatever a Roman Cancel is, just pick somebody that looks neat and play online for a bit.
Also I have the same username in Discord so if anybody else is hesitant to try learning the game alone feel free to reach out c:
The fun train as a new GGST player: Flashing colors -> LORE!? -> "Fuck it, we ballin" mentality
(6:20) Idk why but this part reminded me instantly of something I had forgot for a long time which is probably the reason I don't play fighting games but watch so many videos about them. All my friends play fgs and they told me that I should try one (any one would work). I preceded to make the wrong choice by choosing Brawlhalla (bc free + low investment), but even for the people in the group that did play Brawlhalla + friends I made through the game after like two years or so made fun of me once I made it to gold and pretty much promised me that if it took me that long to get to n00b level there was no hope. Immediately dropped the game, just like you did with League.
Thanks for the video, although I would like to ask if anyone knows how to know if a group of ppl is good to learn a game with, because I usually have to solo it and get discouraged when learning with other ppl.
I haven't played Brawlhalla in a long time and only took the game seriously in its first season (I got to Plat). What helped me learn was watching tournaments, learning new tech, and swapping to different characters. I started as a Hattori main but realized while my spear play was great my sword play was lacking, at this time I was stuck in Silver. I swapped to Brynn to learn how to properly space with an axe, as I noticed I was struggling against that weapon, while still having my spear as my fallback. With that knowledge I hit gold. Hitting another wall I switched to Koji, dropping the spear for the bow which I was able to quickly pick up thanks to my practice with the axe. The bow is my best weapon and even though my swordplay still needed work I was able to climb to Plat. In gold I learned when and how to weapon throw to increase pressure and how to have patience thanks to Koji's amazing bow sigs.
Later on they finally gave me a spear bow legend but I don't have friends who play the game (nor are interested in me teaching them how to play) so I've dropped the game. Best thing you can do is to find a top level player that plays your character and compare your gameplay to theirs. Are they using tech that you aren't? Are they using strings you aren't? What does their spacing look like and how often do they use their character's sigs and why? If you don't have friends to compare yourself to, that's the best thing you can do for yourself is to set goals based off of results that work.
Hope that helps and good luck with your journey.
@@CivilChev ...ok so this comment by me is necessarily useless, bc I'm kind of just annoyed by something that probably wasn't intentional, so I am the problem here, and I'm sorry in advance, but this person kinda just explained how their friends called them bad at the game and the interpersonal relationship aspect of that drove them away even though they were improving. What you responded to would be well suited to something like "I'm not improving", but what they said is... not that. It's honestly liable to come off to that person as "lol yeah you are garbage, here, let me talk about myself and hope that fixes something". Of course, that wasn't what you meant and again I'm out of pocket for saying this but yeah.
This video’s remind me I have the most fun when I had moments that had me go, what do I need to improve on. This happened in both SF4 & Xrd.
In SF4 (before Ultra), I recall running into a Rose player by the tag, Kenji_24 that played her so effectively, I genuinely thought Rose was stronger than people perceived. I was playing Fei Long at the time & thought I needed to improve my defense, so I picked up Sagat. When I eventually faced him again, I became aware of Rose’s reflect again thinking, why isn’t anyone playing Rose? I saved the replays & picked up Rose in order to learn Kenji’s style, which led to me learning spacing & footsies. After Ultra dropped, I unfortunately never ran into Kenji, but learning Rose & seeing her Soul Satellite ultra helped me learn SF & have fun.
For Xrd, I only recall learning Sin & getting absolutely toyed with by someone that just knew how to play around Sin. Instead of being mad, it made me realize idk jack about GG neutral, again making me think, what am I doing wrong. Same situation occurred when looking at the roster & seeing no one was really playing Faust. The initial plan was to learn neutral from Faust, then go back to Sin. When I saw what I could do with his items, my brain and the fun for the game exploded and I still have fun to this day getting item situations in my favor.
This is me kind of saying a character with good buttons and a kit with a lot of utility, and I’ll probably fall in love with the character. It’s honestly helped me know if a game would be fun for me and learn when to drop a game if it doesn’t even if I WANT to learn it. I’m thankfully having a lot of fun with Chun li in SF6, but here’s hoping JP will have that sauce and make my brain tingle like how Faust & Rose do
Okay okay so hate on me as you want but there are two examples of Fighting games that I wanna bring up. One I find easy and fun and one I find fun but difficult. My hero one’s justice is incredibly simple to play and I actually enjoy it, getting combos is easy and fun and Jojo’s all star battle R doesn’t really do that, I’m still struggling to trigger Scary Monsters on Diego in ASBR. They need to find a middle ground between having easy and complex inputs like Before style shigaraki in one’s justice with his Death Penalty move, but also make the game rewarding without making it too simple
its like GO, after learning to play to improve fast you are to play fast so you make mistakes so you can learn from them.
losing is just the best way to learn.
This was a great video touching not only on fighting games itself, but other games and modes as well.
Meanwhile as I go 6 and 75 in skullgirls after playing for 3 years...
Relateable moment
I usually play action more than fighting games usually
Not having to go through several loops of setup to even feel like I’m playing a game properly 80% of the time
Being an absolute unstoppable power house
At worst I feel boredom when it comes to an action game, at worst with a fighting game I feel frustration, and absolute hatred.
honestly, i find a lot of fun in games comes from landing something insane in friendlies or getting hit by a mate doing something insane and just having a good laugh. like i remember one time i landed this combo that i'd been tryna do for a few months now in an actual match against a mate and it was one of the most insane moments of my life cus i wasn't even planning it, my muscle memory from the lab just kicked in and i hit it
I thought this was a how to make baiken funa at first but then bro went deep in the League section and I learned so many things from this i hope more people see this video
My opinion fighting games need progression that isn’t just get good
- Give me color challenges like COD
- Reward Dumb hard challenges so I can prove I did with skin or cosmetics
- Prestige with cool logo like COD
- Fashion if we can customize if the game has it
Seeing how I always had a friends to play with and that we even created small weekly local scene held at youth center few years ago (we really need to step up on that marketing bruh...), fighting games have never been not fun to me.
One of the best things are friendly shit-talk, sudden wack situations that make everyone laugh/surprised/etc. Or the fact that you and one of your friend and/or his character is your rival/enemy for example and that every player has their own identity (for example, one of my friends always plays the big bois).
I love how you can notice improving in fighting games, unfortunatly there isnt a single soul on australia servers so im stuck to cpu and finding in person events
Great video Gekko! There's a lot of lovely advice for beginners in here!
I remember how i thought loop combos in dbfz were the coolest thing ever and were kinda the first thing i learned in fighting Games. It was immensely rewarding
Nice video dude. The only fighting game that I play is chess on my phone.
Fighting games have been my personal focus for the past month. Truthfully, I haven't had fun playing them at all.
I get so frustrated at the idea of me making a mistake or playing them suboptimally, whether it be using the wrong move in neutral, not following something up with the optimal string, or getting mixed up. The way I see it, things are only possible because the character has good enough tools, and they only make mistakes because I don't play them right.
Paradoxically, I don't even like winning. I don't like "beating" people, I don't like the idea that "I got away with it" if I capitalized on a mistake the opponent had, I don't like the thought that I only won because my character's toolset was good enough, and any game I make a mistake leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Sure, I feel a little relieved and less disappointed in myself when I win and it's not that I hate losing in itself, but I hate losses because it shows me how badly I messed up.
I don't feel satisfaction from improving. For as long as I don't know how to a play a character flawlessly with confidence, I'm just doing things wrong. I have a hard time taking baby steps with this because in each match, you have to put everything together and utilize a bunch of your character's tools and if you don't react in time to those situations, you drop your turn or lose that interaction completely. I also don't want to learn bad habits by sticking to suboptimal combos or neutral strategies.
Because I don't take pride from using specific characters, I am trying to learn a bunch of different characters in a handful of games so I can feel like a "good player," whatever that means to me at this point. Of course, I am stupid and have only been playing for a month so even just remembering each character's attacks for each button, the technical differences between games, and not to mention each of the instruction booklet's worth of a character's follow ups. As you could probably guess, I am not even good at a single character and I spend so much time in training modes and only have played a few matches that left me fuming.
I have been so upset with myself that I don't even like seeing people anymore, or rather I don't want to be seen because I feel like I'd be such a letdown. I don't hate fighting games, even though I haven't had fun with them yet, I hate myself for being so incompetent.
I've never been Any good at fighting games, and I've only played a few, them being soul calibur 5 ( or is the latest one 6 I can't remember) super smash bros ( from N64 a the way to ultimate) injustice 2, and pokemon Pokken tournament, and while I'm not capable of doing combos, or even basic inputs to perform a move, I always had fun because of how cool they look and the characters themselves draw me in, just the banter in a Intro or outro between characters makes me enjoy the game, I never care about which character is the best in a game competitively, I ussaly go for who's the coolest or most fun to play
Found out now that the best ISP in my country has consistant ping spikes no matter what. I bought a cable. I pay for fastest speeds I can. I've bought an expensive PC. All for naught. Some countries just can't have fighting games, or any online games that need consistant internet.
Hearthstone is all I can play. Maybe chess. And I was fully commited to being a Zato main too. All that training for nothing...
The idea of not cling to number of wins or losses is great, but sometimes it's just not work. I like to play fighting games, even though they are super hard to learn. There are some good matches or even some stupid but really hilarious matches. But most of the time it's really bad. In Strive I usually hang on 6-8 floors depending on a few factors. Sometimes I have a good day with good matches, sometimes it's really bad. One day I started at floor 8 and got my ass beaten so hard, that I tanked at level 3. Or like a stiuation in DNF Duel at the launch, when I played it daily, and got like 40-80 losses. Sometimes in a row. You can try not to look at the numbers, or not minding the win/loss ratio, but when you can't win a single round in dozens of matches in a row, it's such a discouraging expirience. I want to learn at this games, but on my own I can't do much. Like I play with Biken in Strive with 2 or 3 basic combos because I just can't remember others. And I tried to play with other people in discord servers, but after a few matches they just leave and don't want to play with me anymore. So yeah, concentrating on fun is cool, but sometimes there is no room for fun at all.
I love you bro this showed me how to have fun or just be chill
For me it’s when both me and my opponent doble KO each other which means that both me and the opponent are equally skilled at said fighting game or when both of us are using the same characters and just start clashing into each other and see who gets the upper hand fist
I'm in here before watching the whole video but I've been waiting for a video like this. I've been struggling with motivation to play alot and improve. I'd say I'm pretty decent player and I attend tournaments but I really want to find more motivation to just really grind and improve at the game. So I already like this video 😅
Edit: ok after watching the video NOW IM MOTIVATED!!!
You assume i have friends to play with much less friends in the first place
Fighting games become fun once players grasp how to play.
Until you understand yours and your opponent's options, you can't properly engage in the mind games of the game.
Learning and such is great and can be fun, but it's not "the game".
Like with drawing, the study of techniques is engaging and enriching, but it's not the same feeling as completing a piece using the techniques you learned.
(Redline alt here 😶🌫️)
thing that holding me back on playing fg was hit confirm
Bruce Lee said it best. "Don't think. Feel!"
THE GOLD SAUCER GRIND NEVER STOPS
I want to get better at fighting games. I played the guilty gear strive cross-platform test beta and full in love. I only wish I could of played online and for longer. When it comes out on Xbox gamepass, I will try to get good at my boy Potemkin. But for now, I'm going to try to get better at games like killer instinct and jojo asbr. And I hope by watching people like you, I'll be able to find more enjoyment in these games. And actually get good. Because I really want to play these games. But I always feel nervous going in to a 1v1. Like if I don't play at full strenght and be the best, I'm wasting someone's time. But the same happened with dead by daylight. And after awhile. I lost that feeling. And I love that game. So I will do the same with fighting games. (Even if I don't play them all the time imma watch your shit it's funny)
this is an intersting point. i agree somewhat. fighting games are a much different then other games. usually, the more you play a game, the less fun a game is. fighters are the opposite, the beginning is really boring after the novelty wears off. it only gets fun after spending lotsn of time in it. the fun is worked for after losing a lot, thats just kinda how they are. i dont think that can be changed.
That's because fighters are like learning an instrument. No one wants to learn scales or hand techniques but learning them makes it easier to start doing the fun stuff. The more you practice your instrument the better you become and the more you can do with it. Fighting Games like instruments almost never have diminishing returns compared to other games and that's thanks to the universal skills you can carry over from one game to the next, just as picking up a second instrument is much easier than your first.
This is true. Sadly, nobody ever explains that to the people who look at the cool Uni combo and proceed to die to... Waldstien projectile spam.
@@CivilChev you forgot the part where you were only allowed to play the piano by competing against a different piano player who beats you over and over and over
@@Caleb-zl4wk Who's to say you can't find other people that play instruments and play together?
@@CivilChev you can, but that's not the method presented (or some would say endorsed) by the game itself, in most cases. And as everyone is so excited to point out, losing is the best opportunity you can get to improve so if you actually want to win (improve at your instrument) you should go back to piano hell where you came from. Seriously, idk how we managed to come up with a system of game that is ridiculously skill intensive yet inherently punishes people who want to win.
"If it's not fun why bother?" lol tell that to Neil Druckmann
Personally, I'm worried that in order to know the fun, then you have to look deeper into the genre to find it due to a lack of commercial specifying on the genre to grab people's attention.
I think one thing that fighting games should do is to not carry ranked points across characters so that you can try more of them without worrying about losing fake online points. I'm not sure how this would be effectively implemented in team fighters though
Street fighter 6 does this, which is great for messing around with characters. As for team fighters you could probably do matchmaking with the strongest character you have selected. This would also encourage trying completely new combinations I imagine
i think above learning and get better i just love fighting in fighting games, we just press buttons, no tryhard, no big combo learning, just buttons and instant fun. If it's a problem i don't know how to fix it lmao
8:31 someone to use the new easy block button at end screen!....oh improvment?
I just want a fighting game where it strips things down in a way that keep the complexity, but pushes it to the back when you’re fighting so you can just… _stop thinking so damn hard._
I want a fighting game with two basic buttons, two specials, and a super. And instead of having to remember all of your supers at once, you can swap them out between rounds. You get a moment to think, swap, and use different parts of your kit, but once the fight starts you can go into autopilot and stop thinking about the fifty bajillion things your character can theoretically accomplish.
Have you tried playing KI (2013) with Combo Assist on?
@@CivilChev as far as I’ve heard, KI is dead-dead. Like… there’s still pros playing it, and the odd newbie, but the healthy community has mostly just vanished.
If it hasn’t then, maybe? I play on PC and it costs money there so…
@@CurlyHairedRogue If you're purely relying on online play then yeah, I can't recommend KI but if you have friends I can't recommend it enough.
For a current game I couldn't tell you as I don't play any online, at the moment. If it doesn't have to be a traditional fighter you should try some of the platform fighters like Multiverses or Brawlhalla.
@@CivilChev played Brawlhalla. Liked it, but it eventually got old. I started playing Rivals of Æther, which was *really* damn good. Though in terms of traditional fighters, I’ve yet to find one that actually caters to a casual audience better than TFH or Fantasy Strike. Besides that, everything else expects _way_ too much effort from a newbie for me to get my friends into it.
@@CurlyHairedRogue SFVI looks to be the next casual friendly Fighting Game. Project L will have simple inputs but it being a tag fighter makes it significantly harder to recommend to someone wanting a simple game.
For me, finding fun in a game is finding the most bullshit strategyand making it work, i started just using standing p and 2p to deap dmg im guilty gear, focusing on neutral and just poking alot, learning how that strategy works has both gotten me into guilty gear and is slowly teaching me about neutral
I have 1 word to sum this to me
"Mugen"
Babe wake up a new gekkosquirrel video dropped
it’s hard to ignore the win/loss ratio when almost every game displays it before every match
My biggest issue with this video is it comes off as a fighting game player telling non-fighting game players to have a paradigm shift into the fighting game player mindset. It's incredibly difficult to switch your approach mentally. I've read some other comments and every one I read is from someone that already plays and has a conducive mindset to growing as a player. It's a pattern I see in a lot of videos similar to this.
Although, you did say something that isn't usually said. At the end, when you mention that "there's a good chance these games just aren't for you", in relation to the game feeling like a job. It's incredibly rare when I hear, in a video, someone say that it. It seems like an idea people avoid bringing up. For me personally they feel like a job from minute 1. It takes too much work for me to take a game off the worst player.
I think this is a good take, the bit where he talks about a 50/50 and how that made it fun isn't really a good analogy for a new player. A new player would need to learn why hitting a throw feels good, probably because you outplayed your opponent.
The fun is specific to a subset of people that can take their friend picking the worst character in a FG and getting beaten a million times, but still coming back for more. Some people take losses extremely hard and those people should probably not play FG's. You'll lose, and a lot, and sometimes to stuff somewhat out of your control. You have to be able to have fun losing.
WHOOOOOOOO YOU LOVE TO SEE IT WHEN THE SENSE IS COMMON LET'S GOOOO
Sorry had to get that out. Yeah, I watch these videos at this point for the same reason I think people watch bad TV shows; to pick apart what they do wrong. Which is cynical and vaguely assholish ik but they are one of the reasons the bottom 20% of the fgc playerbase rotates out people to drain hope from every 3 months. The point is, this video was 100% better than any other I've ever seen at admitting fighting games are for a very specific subset of person. It's no surprise videos tend to be bad at this, because the people making them necessarily play and enjoy fighting games (keyword: already naturally felt inclined to use the "tricks" they present in the video, which they picked up from other places beforehand, thereby making the part of their personality). In effect, it ends up being in this case 17 minutes of "you would have more fun... if you were more like me". For someone like me, who of course watches the whole thing thinking "yeah but that's not most people," I end up with this unstoppable exchange of non-salient strings of reasoning that just clash with the way I see anything in life, which is why I don't enjoy playing fighting games unelss it's labbing combos. To quote the video and myself, this is what it looks like:
"Well, you can find your own challenges to conquer, and have that be your motivation"
Me: "Winning."
"Maybe there's a tournament that requires a specific placement,"
Me: "So Winning."
"Maybe there's a specific item that you have to grind for because it looks really cool"
Me: "Grinding, which is inherently towards... winning... unless I'm just letting go of the controller for time's sake"
"By giving yourself clearly defined goals *that don't directly have to do with winning* -"
Me: "Oh. Losing."
Like see this just doesn't work for me. It also doesn't work for a lot of people I know, those ones being better at not doing things they don't find fun. That's why I still grind combos I will never use in a match. The point being, people often present the genre as something that necessarily grows on you with time, which it just doesn't for everyone, which I think does people active harm. It's like if people make 20 minute video essays on why you should try ghost peppers bc the person who made the video "really likes them" and if "you enjoy the feeling of capsaicin" you will like it- which yeah of course if I enjoy improving in fighting games I will enjoy them- hell if this video's being recommended and that is the case, I probably already have- but when you solvate that with the necessary 75% of the video's content on "fixing" the "issues" (cognitive constitution) of the people who aren't having fun, you're a. not accomplishing anything for them, and b. leading most people who watch the video and have 20$ to spare to get their ass whooped for 2 hours and ruin their day (+ 20$) pointlessly. And b could be more easily avoided, if we did what you highlighted, which is specify exactly how much *these games are not for everybody*
I'd say the mindset helps when learning most competitive games.
@@absoul112 The mindset is important 100%, I would say just about necessary, but that's talking about conscious control over what you can and can't sit through. Unconscious control is not having fun even though you can see improvement- so someone like me, because I want to win, and that's not something you can really change. Improvement isn't really a motivation, it's a necessary step towards winning, so the middle point, where people who are playing for improvement are losing and improving, they're happy, I'm not. That's the kind of unchangeable thing I think the original comment is intending to say the video fails address.
7:50 fire emblem awakening music! yay!
My issue is I've always wanted to get into fighting games other than Smash. But no irl friends or even online friends of mine want to play those games at all. So it's hard for me to find someone to play against.
So I just end up grinding in training mode and against CPU opponents before going online and just not having fun at all. I live in a more rural area too so there's no local FGC that I could go to to make new friends and attend locals.
This cycle of mine has been going for a very long time and it just keeps happening. New fighting game comes out that looks cool. I play for a bit. Find no one to play with so I get frustrated that my only option is ranked and end up dropping it.
I'm not even sure what I find fun in fighting games, at this point I've done it so much I can no longer identify it, they're just fun for me now.
Outplaying your opponent are usually what people find fun after a while
I'm an altoholic. So having a big roster sucks because it's rough for me to find a favorite to pour time and energy into.
i think it's funny something
when i was a kid, fighting games are not as "complex" as it is nowadays. hell, combos are all diferent from today! take, for example, fatal fury or real bout, the first ones i mean
i think only Terry had a combo like pressing dial buttons to make a combo, the other characters you had to do some shenanigans to make a combo, like... dunno! a flying kick, followed by some special move or something, Terry you hit HP, he hit 2 times, then burn knockle or whatever! and because of lack of complexicity, the damage from simple blows take a lot of damage! and i didn't have a good time learning the game because... dunno, maybe the handycap for the damage is too high, you needed to think fast or it will be a dark souls experience of OTK! something like that!
nowadays, you have a lot of possibilities for combos and extenssions... while before, you needed to take care for not take a hit that drain your HP, you have tot ake care of mind games or extensive sets of combos or even infinite combos!
well, i'm not trying to point anything bad about fighting games, or anything, just sharing a bit of self experience
I like the chad professor Sol.
This makes me wanna make a video on the fgc😭
7:22 Ayo, it's fucking Pinhead
“Never study because you have a test…study because you’re interested.” I’ve definitely been in the “test” mentality, especially with tournaments. Pretty much the only reason I got into fighting games competitively was because I wanted to win tournaments and be recognized for my skill, not because I actually like the game. I wanted to put some value on myself as a gamer since games are where I put all my time. Though now I’ve become completely burned-out from all fighting games period; too much work for something I don’t give a singular sh** about 💀
He just like me fr...lmao
7:13 I don't know if I agree with that; at least not the way I think of casual play.
Fun is not a good word for what I look for in a fighting game. Satisfaction is, I think, is a better word.
The only fun you need in fighting games is pressing buttons 🦍
Fun?
HEAVENLY! POTEMKIN! BUSTERRRRRRRRR!
And here I figured out that there is nothing I want to learn. I dont like playing fighting games, they just look cool.
I love the fire emblem music
I want 2023 to be the year I get better at fighting games to the point where I can understand what people are talking about in these games. But I take a half hour breaks in the Skullgirls tutorial cause my hands and mind don't want to commit anything to memory. I just don't feel confident enough yet to sit in lab learning combos I'll suffer through pain to learn or get told by people I face that they are sub-optimal later on.
Honestly, you probably shouldn’t learn the most optimal combos first. Just knowing combos is part of learning fighting games, so if all you do is spend time on combos and go into a match, yeah you might know how to do the combo but you won’t know where or how you can get the combo started. Learning basics is always first and foremost. Need a firm base to hold up what you add to it and to fall back on in case something doesn’t work out
Oh and don’t worry, eventually stuff you’ve been practicing will click. There’s no hard line of when that will happen, but you will notice when it does. Best of luck to your journey this year 👍
Baiken POG
I stopped playing GTA online because I realized that as good as it looks it's just not fun. They literally make missions not fun to incentivize you not playing them and buying Shark cards instead. I will not play a game that's designed to not be fun
i have a friend who likes fighting games but he's not into putting that work , we argue every time.
he wants to be the best without labbing , wants to have nice combos but arent that long etc. i don't know what to tell him
...well he's having fun.
2:56
1:43 so me having fun by just playing against the AI on the very hard difficulty is okay?
Yes, always.
hell yeah dude
Of course it's okay. I mainly play offline against AI in arcade mode. I only dabble in online every now and then for variety. You can enjoy FG's however you want.
I'm a old school player. I stop taking them serious when the arcades died. Its something about putting a coin up, facing someone like we're in the Kumite. You can't take souls without eye contact. That's what makes them FUN.
Wrong
See this is what I'm trynna do. I didn't agree with the whole "you can't focus on winning or losing" thing bc "drive to improve" by itself makes no sense to me unless it's a subsidiary of "drive to win", and frankly no, nobody would ever lab on a dummy for hours and go "yeah I got it" bc you don't care about a soulless shell, so to an extent everyone wants to win. But the idea of becoming a master in demolishing individual people, like some sort of hitman, and honing your individual adaptations based upon hours and hours of experience with the same small pool of people that is actually alluring- probably because it extracts the sheer gruntwork required to get wins from most people you only meet once online.