Fighting Game Notation
Fighting games are hard. The genre requires top level reaction time, decision making, and precise execution — and historically the learning curve of a given fighting game is something more like a wall. Tutorials were almost nonexistent as recently as Capcom’s previous flagship fighting game, Street Fighter IV (although recent games such as Skullgirls and Guilty Gear Xrd have attempted to tackle that issue with very in-depth, fully featured tutorial modes), teaching only the very basics of “which button does what?” and “what special moves does this character have?”
It’s been a question in the back of my mind for a while: How do you bridge the knowledge gap of the beginner and the expert? The way to become a better player will still be to play against stronger opponents, and to learn from your losses, but often simply playing does nothing to improve your understanding of a game’s underlying mechanics. I thought about learning a character’s basic moves, and learning character combos, and how training your muscle memory to execute elaborate combos does nothing for understanding a game’s systems either. It’s hard to succinctly explain “soft” concepts like reading your opponents, conditioning their behavior, or mind games, but “hard” concepts like the hidden mechanics behind advanced techniques can be clearly visualized.
So that’s what I did — here are a few of my favorite advanced techniques explained visually:
Hopefully I’ve been successful in communicating some of the depth that can be found in the classic 2D fighter. A big part of why I love these games is the level of complexity that can be found, and I hope that seeing some of these ideas broken down visually will help make the argument that increasing the accessibility of the genre can be a matter of education, and not simplification.
This article was written by Super Jump contributor, Adriel Yu. Please check out his work and follow him on Medium.
