My Friend The Fighting Gamer: Why Fighting Games Don't Suck After All

It's been a while since I've written about games and gaming. Many of you who are newer followers won't even remember having seen a single post in this category.

But I do love me some games (so much so that I created an account to popularize gaming and nerd culture in general... However, that's on the sidelines until I have a slice of time to rethink a lot of things about it).

But I need to take a second to talk about the fact that I've just spent the past five hours (embarrassingly, perhaps longer) playing Guilty Gear X2 on emulator and enjoying the hell out of it.

This may not seem like a big deal to most of you, because most of you don't know that I absolutely, positively hate fighting games with a burning passion.

Or at least, I used to.

Like many 'pure' gamers I haughtily turned my nose up at fighting games (along with sports games, racing games, and MMOs - but that's for another time). When a few of my younger brothers and my cousins would play Street Fighter I would leave the room in dismay after only a few minutes, bored to tears. I wanted to explore interesting new worlds with deep stories like Final Fantasy and Zelda or at the very least be able to have fun with a lot of people like with Perfect Dark or Mario Kart.

For this reason the only acceptable fighting games, in my opinion, were from the Super Smash Bros series. This was the case all throughout my childhood and deep into my adolescence.

Then I met Erich.

Erich and I were fast friends in high school. He was one year under me, but had some of the greatest energy of any human being I'd ever met. He still does. Like me, he was an avid fan of video games, so a lot of our conversations were (and are still) about them.

Yes indeed, peas in a pod were me and Erich. There was just one teeny, tiny, itsy-bitsy problem: Erich was a hardcore fighting gamer.

Well, it wasn't a problem exactly, it was just inexplicable. It was like finding out a classically trained music prodigy listened to nothing but Nickelback and Creed in their spare time. He had such good tastes when it came to other things, like food and shows and...I dunno... Any other genre of game. So why? Why did he have to love fighting games?

Well, I shrugged it off as 'nobody's perfect.' Our other friend and I forgave him this unsightly error because he was an all around good guy.

But that didn't stop Erich from trying to sell us on fighting games. He tried for years getting us try a wide swath of different ones. I was already into Smash Bros, so we had that, but he made sure we gave everything from Injustice to Persona 4 Arena a shot. Each one failed to permanently capture my attention.

Then, one day while trying out demos of games on my Xbox360 I came across a little game by the name Skullgirls.

Skullgirls was completely different from any fighting game that is seen before. It didn't feature over-muscled heroes in some strange, dystopian future. Instead, it takes place in a 1920's/'30's alternate reality and the main cast is all female. I was drawn in immediately by this.

Moreover, I liked the art style and characterization. This got me to give the demo a try. That's when I began to realize the real barriers to learning fighting games.

Fighting Barriers

Unless you were already into fighting games in 1998, any hope you have of being top tier is nil.

Now wait just a second. I know a few of you will be foaming at the mouth screaming "that's not true!". Welp, whether it's true isn't the point. This is how most non-fighting gamers feel, and it stops most of us from ever giving fighting games a shot.

On top of this, coming in on the billionth entry to a series can be incredibly unforgiving to say the least. An enormous library of characters, endless configuration options, and a steep curve to learn even a single character proficiently really doesn't inspire much interest unless you're inherently drawn to the genre.

I wasn't. Until Skullgirls.

Skullgirls solves all of these problems by being the first entry in it's line. The original cast of playable characters was eight and the tutorial was in-depth and relatively easy to follow.

But still, there's something else that any would be fighting gamer needs: someone to play the game with. Preferably someone on their level or better.

Enter Erich. He was, unsurprisingly, super enthusiastic to hear that I was finally giving a fighting game a real try, and didn't waste time buying the game and mastering the basics himself. Now, as you might have guessed, Erich is a significantly better fighting gamer than me. So I suspect the times that I have beaten him he was probably holding back a little. However, I have become good enough at Skullgirls that he actually has to try a to win.

On one of my recent trips to visit him (he lives in another city, but we visit each other fairly regularly considering the distance) Erich and I finished a round of Skullgirls and he looked a little sad for a moment. He says something to the effect of: "Man, I wish I had someone to really play my favorite game with."

Erich's favorite fighting game is, without a doubt, Guilty Gear. I've known this for a long time. But now that his birthday is around the corner, I was considering what to give him. I decided to give him what he been asking for for years: honestly give not just any fighting game a shot, but for the first time giving Guilty Gear a go seriously.

And guess what?

It's fucking fantastic. I guess he knows his stuff after all. Before this, I saw fighting games as different versions and fancy skins over the same basic game of two people on a screen whacking each other with sticks or fists. But oh, are they so much more.

At first, I couldn't do even a basic special move on Guilty Gear, which got me to quit after about an hour of trying. But after mastering the barest basics of Skullgirls, I find that I'm able to see the depth of the game a little better. There's art here, real thought and love put into every character and ability.

And hey, if you're curious about my friend (or whether he exists) go check out his YouTube channel or latest video and give it a subscribe and a like. Still working on getting him on Steemit, but if people do this it'll go a long way towards getting him to take the platform seriously.

Edit: Alright, Erich is convinced that Steemit is legit, and asks that you forgive his lack of fighting game content as of this writing, because when Dragonball FighterZ drops late January (another game from developer Arc System Works, makers of Guilty Gear), it will most likely dominate his channel.

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Friday, December 15th, 2017

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