Compared to a lot of other popular genres of video games, fighting games are very unique in that they aren’t very welcoming to newcomers. Sure, once you get into the genre, you’ll find that you can bring your skills to a lot of different games and feel at home almost as soon as you starting learning a new game. But it’s the question of getting into it that proves most fascinating.
Two games that actually got me thinking a little bit of accessibility in fighting games are Tecmo’s 2005’s Dead or Alive 4, and Capcom’s 2010’s Super Street Fighter IV. At a base level, these two games couldn’t be any more different from one another, but they share the same problem – they are both quite difficult for newcomers to get into and enjoy.
Let’s begin with Dead or Alive 4. While the series is well known for having moments of ridiculous difficulty, the fourth instalment kicks it up several notches. It does help that there is a mode that allows the game to ‘drill’ the player throughout a characters moveset, the key problem here is that it falls prey to a design methodology that developer Team Ninja are well known for – making the game difficult, but if you learn how to play the game and learn the intricacies of the system, you’ll be fine.
Expect to see this happening. A LOT.
I say this because if you’re going into the game blind, you are going to be destroyed by the A.I. There’s no ‘easy’ mode, and you’ll need to know how to use the games counter mechanism, because the A.I knows how to use it, and will counter like crazy. Granted, the mechanic is pretty simple to understand, but the game doesn’t tell you at all about it – you have to go in to the ‘Sparring’ mode (which contains the aforementioned move drills); but even then – there is still a lot of the game’s basic concepts that isn’t exactly clear upon playing the game.
It’s sort of the same thing in Super Street Fighter IV. Admittedly, the game is a little more accessible thanks to multiple difficulty levels and a much slower pace of game and less moves to worry about; but even still, it’s not as friendly and open as it should be.
Again, it has a mode that drills you into playing each character – and goes a step further by even teaching the player some very useful combos. But that’s just it – for all the additional teaching that the game does, it doesn’t go that additional step further and allow for new players to learn key gameplay concepts.
While I chose Dead or Alive 4 and Super Street Fighter IV for these examples, you could apply them to a number of other fighting games – even recently, games like BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger or Tekken 6 have nothing in the way of teaching players about gameplay concepts. While you could pass this off as saying that because they’re such long running series, they don’t need to accommodate for new players, I don’t buy that argument. I really don’t.
Example here being Sega’s 2004 fighter Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution. The Virtua Fighter games are known to be one of the most deep and one of the more hardcore fighting series out there, and if anything, the one that would most benefit from a tutorial. And you know what? It has that. And it goes a little further than saying “here’s how to block, here’s how to attack”, explaining how to best play in certain scenarios, as well giving players the ability to be drilled through character movesets. In fact, it was such a great feature, that it’s omission in Virtua Fighter 5 was a huge disappointment!
Admittedly, this isn’t the training mode, but if you were in training – you’d know how to not get your arse kicked by Akira.
Though it does seem like other fighting games are slowly realizing that accessibility is a good thing – the sequel to the aforementioned Blazblue; Continuum Shift, is receiving a tutorial mode. And of course, there are always things like YouTube or FAQ’s if you want to learn and see the base concepts of a fighting game, but it’s that little in-game help that helps just the same.
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