Games

[TurbulentBlue]

I am asking for help or at least evulation.

Virtually the only fighting game I enjoy is Smash Brothers. I have probably 60 hours of non-Smash fighting games in my entire life. I am trying to get into them because it's an entire genre I've denied myself. This is difficult because of a huge learning curve and the frustration of fucking up haikokins and shurokiens half the time, which makes it so that it is too risky to try to use them.

What are some simplistic fighters I can use to bridge my way from Captain Falcon to Ryu?

[mees]

You just have to practice. Street Fighter is a pretty good place to start.

[adrenalinq]

Not all fighting games are about playing more. For example Tekken is a very hardcore game based on learning all combos by one character and learning to play against any other characters. Best way to master this game is to play more.

But Soul Calibur is another story. Characters styles are very different so you really have to learn to play every single character on near-aster level. And then master one-two chars.

The best way to learn basics of fighting games is TNMT: Tournament Fighters on NES. Only two buttons used, simple supers, very basic game mechanic, switchable speed, great balance. If you are able to play it on maximum difficulty on single credit you are ready to play almost any fighting game.

[Cpt. Coin-op]

adrenalinq's suggestion is pretty good (I actually did manage to beat it a couple of times on max difficulty with Raphael), and Street Fighter II doesn't have a steep learning curve. That game alone is the reason I know my quarter-circles and fireballs.

[Duke of the Bump]

Try Soul Calibur. It's one of the few fighting games that's just as fun for new players as it is for experienced ones (as long as you don't combine the two). The original on the Dreamcast is the best, but one of the sequels is bound to be available for a console you have.

Start on easy and work your way up. Getting good at the game is a lot of fun.

[Cpt. Coin-op]

Looking back at my post, I think it's probably a good idea that I relay my history of fighter knowledge, since I was in a situation similar to yours.

After I picked up SFII for the SNES (I was still young at the time, I'd say seven years old), the arcade scene just died in Houston. I'm sorry to say it, but the closest arcade that has any fighting games is about an hour's drive downtown (in good traffic) through three toll booths. Yikes.

So I was pretty dried up on fighting games, as I had nobody to game with and nothing besides SFII. My interest waned until I first played SSB with some friends, and even though I never considered the Smash series to be "true" fighting games, I went ahead and played them because nobody else in my social circle would play anything else.

About three years ago, I saw a group of people playing what looked like a pretty slick "anime fighter" (Melty Blood Re-ACT). It caught my interest, but I didn't give it much thought until later, when I saw a match vid of Act Cadenza on YouTube and remembered "Holy shit, I've seen that before."

I now mainly play Act Cadenza (and am struggling to improve my VSion) and, to a lesser extent, Touhou Suimusou: Immaterial and Missing Power.

From those, I learned about the competitive fighting scene and my only thought was, "I have been missing so damn much". And here I am now, on the most intelligent gaming forum I can think of (and just learned about a month ago, sad to say).

That's my fighter story in a nutshell.

[icycalm]

I have a question for quash, and anyone else who thinks they might be able to answer it, or at least contribute something towards its answer: which is the most complex 2/2.5D fighter yet?

I am in the process of writing my own Blazblue review, and this question came up during my deliberations. I have not the faintest clue as to its answer, hence this post.


Edit: Also, what a stupid OP. How did people "bridge their way to Ryu" in 1991? They just played the fucking game. You want something simpler than SF2: The World Warrior? Play SF1 for fuck's sakes, if SF2 scares you (lol), play Karate Champ, I don't know. How stupid do you have to be to think that ANY fighting game is too complex to pick up and press a couple buttons in it?

[quash]

I would say Guilty Gear XX as a series takes the crown, with Accent Core +R specifically being the most complex.

My reasoning is this: for all the options the game affords you, it takes a lot of experience to figure out when to do what, more so than pretty much any other fighting game. It's very easy to choose the wrong option for any given situation, sometimes even at higher levels of play.

There are other games with a comparable amount of systems and subsystems, but none of them have the kind of inherent balance between them that GGXX does. The other airdash fighters tend to run in to dead ends in places where GGXX doesn't, particularly when it comes to air movement and defense, as the former is usually quite strong and the latter tends to be relatively simple (Melty Blood, Arcana Heart, and BlazBlue all exemplify this, to different extents).

Of course, this isn't to say that being good at one complex fighting game makes you automatically good at others. You still have to figure out the specific nuances of each individual game and apply your knowledge in different ways. I just haven't seen any other game that reaches the level of AC+R's sheer amount of fleshed out scenarios.

[icycalm]

Second-highest, outside the GG series?

[icycalm]

Also, am I correct in assuming that all the lesser-known one-off recent fighters like Under Night, Vanguard Princess and the like are considerably less complex than the well-known games and generally mechanically inferior to them?

[icycalm]

Actually, Under Night is not a one-off, it has had a couple of updates, but you get my meaning. I mean games that don't get popular enough to become long-term franchises. There are dozens of them, perhaps hundreds, and I am wondering why.

[icycalm]

My rationale, based on your answer, is that for a game to become very complex it needs lots of updates to get there (which of course doesn't mean that every game with lots of updates is very complex), as AC+R has had. Ergo, games with few to no updates can't be very complex.

Is this theory generally valid, and if so are there any exceptions you are aware of?

[quash]

I think you are correct in your assertions. Most of the time, the first game in a series tends to be more of a proof of concept than a game designed well enough to hold its own against its more matured competition. The amount of possible exceptions I can think of don't come anywhere near the amount needed to be proof to the contrary.

As for the second most complex, that is not easy to answer offhand. I am tempted to give it to Arcana Heart 3, though I haven't played the newest Melty Blood or BlazBlue enough to say with certainty.