Beating Character Crisis In Fighting Games
Or “How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Character ”
In most games where you can select a character to play as, you often gravitate towards one specific character and spend a majority of your time with that specific character. For the non-gamers out there, this is referred to as a “main”, a shortening of “main character”; it’s the character you mainly play as, as I’m sure you could gather. When it comes to fighting games, I personally don’t choose my main character based on how good they are or where they fall in the tier list, I simply want someone that looks cool or a character I identify with. The make-or-break factor of whether or not I will buy and play a fighting game is whether or not there’s a character in it that really draws my attention, either by way of overwhelmingly cool aesthetic or by identity. While this can definitely be a controversial thing, especially when it comes to ‘kinnies’ basically harassing game developers on their personal social media accounts to ad their dipshit character to the game, that’s really the only reason people like this get a bad reputation. And personally, it’s something that can come out of your own real life feelings; my queer ass often gravitates towards female characters as well as the rare non-binary or at least androgynous ones (see: Tekken’s Leo and The King Of Fighters’ King). This exact feeling of wanting to identify with a character in contrast with picking whoever is the “best in the game right now” is what can often lead to what is colloquially referred to as “character crisis”.
Character crisis is essentially when you don’t have a main at any given time. I’ve dropped a lot of games that I either was gifted or discount-purchased on a whim mostly because of character crisis. Take for instance a game like 2020’s underdelivered Granblue Fantasy Versus, where I immediately knew I wanted to play the big…hearted, soft-spoken Narmaya. The problem however, is that on top of Granblue Fantasy Versus having notoriously terrible netcode (basically the way a game’s server connects you to other players whilst online) and input buffer (the amount of time and order in which a game both reads and prioritizes the order in which you press buttons), Narmaya also happened to be a terrible character for a beginner to the game. While I’m no fighting game veteran, I’d like to think I’m fairly competent and can pick up most fighting games with ease (with the exception of Dragon Ball FighterZ because wow that’s a different game), however despite Granblue drawing some nice comparisons to the eternally classic formula of the Street Fighter series, Narmaya happened to have a caveat that is still not solved, and it’s something that SoulCalibur VI managed to solve with its second season (could be wrong about when it was implemented, don’t quote me here).
To put it short (because I wrote four paragraphs describing this phenomenon that has nothing to do with character crisis), Narmaya essentially is two characters in one. Every character in Granblue has a button dedicated to their “unique moves”. A character like Cagliostro uses hers for a projectile attack. Narmaya conversely uses her unique move to switch between two stances, which replaces every single attack she has depending on which one you’re in; it’s the equivalent of being able to switch between two characters at will. The problem is that you can’t tell which “stance” you’re in without looking at the sequence of colors that her tiny special move indicators have underneath her health bar all the way on the top of the screen, far away from the action. A simple icon unique to Narmaya up there would be much simpler to tell. SoulCalibur VI solved this problem quite well after a little while. Tira (my current main, ironically) functions rather similar to Narmaya.
Rather than being able to switch at will, Tira has certain attacks that trigger a mere chance of changing her stance. These are referred to as “jolly stance” and “gloomy stance” (as much as I hate the comparison, think of her like…ughhhhhh, think of her like Harley Quinn I guess ughhhhhh). When an attack changes your stances as Tira, there’s a flash of light around her — purple if you’re going into gloomy, and yellow if you’re going into jolly, and you always start as jolly. For a while, this, and the way in which she stood still were the only ways to tell exactly which stance you’re in, and because SoulCalibur is a very combo string-focused game, the inputs to do a combo in jolly stance will not work in gloomy and most definitely open you up to an enemy attack when you fumble like that. Bandai Namco, the game’s developer, solved this problem by adding a face a good bit below the health bar; it’s a yellow Greek comedy mask if you’re jolly, and a purple Greek drama mask if you’re gloomy. Granblue still does not have this. I dropped Narmaya and felt there was nobody else I’d enjoy at the time, after finding out that another kind of cool looking character, Djeeta, was essentially an inferior copy of the main character, Gran. This September, I decided to give the newest character, the shitlord alchemist Cagliostro, a try. I’ve seen art of her before from the main Granblue Fantasy mobile game and absolutely adored what a smug little shit she was. As I fully came to realize while trying to learn Cagliostro’s combos however that it wasn’t the characters I’ve been disliking, it was the game itself and the way it reads inputs, as well as its horrible netcode. I dropped Granblue Fantasy Versus altogether.
If you’re like me and choose a character based on identity, personality, or looks rather than how good they are in the game’s meta, one game that makes this choice really easy for people like us is Dragon Ball FighterZ. Now I won’t go into why I think this game is a steaming pile of doggy doodoo, but it should be abundantly clear by the title that it’s a game based on Akira Toriyama’s eternal Dragon Ball series, encompassing characters from every entry in the series, all the way from the original, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball Super, and even a few characters from the oft maligned Dragon Ball GT. If you’ve ever watched Dragon Ball, you likely have a few favorite characters already, making the game’s requirement of choosing three characters for your team a fairly easy one. For me, when I was still trying to convince myself it was a game worth my time, I played my favorites from the anime — Videl, Kid Buu, and Captain Ginyu. I also messed around a bit with the game’s one original character, Android 21, as well as Frieza, Cell, Android 18, and even a bit of Kefla when she released as DLC.
My brother and I played a lot of fighting games as kids, though neither of us were ever really good and he’s stopped them altogether, while I was finally able to get my head around them recently and get competitive. Of the games we played, SoulCalibur, Street Fighter, and Marvel vs. Capcom were the main ones we’d button mash each other for hours on. In SoulCalibur III, I’d usually play Tira or Setsuka. In Marvel vs. Capcom 2, I remember playing a team of Mega Man, Venom, and the spunky tomboy Sakura Kasugano from the Street Fighter series; not sure how viable that team actually would be in a competitive setting. Of course, when he brought home Street Fighter IV for the Xbox 360 in 2009, I was quick to pick up Sakura and she’s still my main in Street Fighter V to this day, and likely will stay my main for the inevitable but apparently delayed Street Fighter VI, given that she’s in the base roster.
When I picked up the Dead Or Alive series back with Dead Or Alive 5 way back in 2012, I saw the smiley and bouncy personality of series veteran Leifang as something I related to. When the newcomer Nyotengu joined the fight as a DLC character in 2013’s expansion Dead Or Alive 5 Ultimate, I was captivated by her effortless demeanor of “both cool and seductive”. Those characters were easy choices for me. I never had a character crisis with Dead Or Alive, a series that despite its shady business practices of late, offers a fairly unique and complex take on the fundamentals of SEGA’s sorely-missed Virtua Fighter series, the original formula for 3D fighting games. On top of that, the Dead Or Alive series — particularly DOA6 — offers features that other “better” fighting games either don’t have or make you pay for — things like the all too important frame data, one of the best and most in-depth tutorials on the market, and a completely free demo on all platforms that gives you access to four of the series’ most popular characters and the entirety of the game sans the story modes; everything else like the online modes, free training mode, tutorials, and single-player arcade and versus modes. When Dead Or Alive 6 came out in early 2019, I immediately picked up Leifang and Nyotengu to see what had changed from DOA5 and got right back into it, quickly working my way up to the top of the ranks. (Aside: when I put the game down a few months back, I was the #8 Nyotengu player on the PC rank board, and it’s pretty clear to tell that #1–3 used some kind of hack to get to where they are, leaving a massive and unrealistic gap between #3 and #4. This could have changed since last June.)
Dead Or Alive 6 is an excellent game, and at the price of free, it’s beyond worth more attention and respect, especially due to its luxuries that other games don’t have. For comparison, the other two most popular 3D fighters on the market right now don’t have frame data in their base states: SoulCalibur VI does not have official frame data at all and requires the use of a third-party app to learn frame data, which is almost a requirement for serious competitive play. From the same publisher, Tekken 7 offers frame data in the form of a $3 DLC purchase. I know that “it’s only 3 dollars, bro” but if we’re going to criticize the marketing practices of Dead Or Alive, a game that offers free frame data, and then ignore the marketing practices of the games we claim are “holier than thou”, we’re entering some hypocritical and unjust territories that shouldn’t align with any sane person’s core values (hehe).
So I had no issue with finding characters I liked in Dead Or Alive. I did however spend months and months in character crisis this past summer with 2018’s SoulCalibur VI. I often find myself gravitating towards female characters in most games on the merit of identity, though that’s not always the case — I’m pretty fond of Samurai Shodown’s Kyoshiro, though my headcanon is that he’s a bit of a Theater Gay, or I guess “Kabuki Gay” might be more the more accurate way to put it. So that already excludes a lot of characters I would otherwise have interest in playing like Cervantes, Samurai Shodown guest star Haohmaru, or series icon Nightmare. I liked Tira when she debuted in 2005’s SoulCalibur III and found myself pre-ordering SoulCalibur VI so I could unlock Tira when the game released (yes, she was a pre-order bonus, a mainstay character for the series was a pre-order bonus, and y’all want to talk about Dead Or Alive’s business ethics?). I played her for a little while before putting the game down altogether in favor of some other single-played game that I can’t recall. Maybe Assassin’s Creed or Red Dead? Beside the point.
When I came back to SoulCalibur VI months later with a newfound interest in playing more competitively thanks to my confidence-boosting winning streak in the recently released Dead Or Alive 6, I went right in with Tira and got my ass beat. By this point, several DLC characters had already been released and I had a bit of money to spare from a stressful yet hilarious job at Starbucks, so I decided to give Amy a try as I wasn’t a fan of Tira’s RNG system. I quickly found myself clouded by tunnel vision, feeling like the beginning of every fight was a chore and a cage to do specific combos to raise her “rose perception” which increases her stamina and damage output and unlocks a few more complex combos. Coming from Dead Or Alive and Virtua Fighter, I preferred more flexibility in my combo routes, so I decided to give Cassandra a try. I got pretty alright at her, however I wasn’t a huge fan of her as a character. Another one in the bag. In mid-2020 I decided to put the game down again in favor of getting back into Dead Or Alive 6 more competitively, this time representing the fighting team I joined earlier on in the year.
Some time and a few online tournaments passed, and the team convinced me to come back to SoulCalibur. This time, I gave Taki a shot. I loved Natsu’s character design (any gyarus reading this, my Twitter DMs are open) in SoulCalibur V so I figured Taki, the character she ‘replaced’ in that game would be a solid time investment. I got pretty okay at Taki, but I still felt this burning for a more niche character that I had been wanting since SoulCalibur VI had gotten announced at The Game Awards in 2017 on top of the fact that Taki is a character that requires high execution for little payoff, on top of the fact that my fundamentals in this particular game weren’t the greatest at the time, and still aren’t — SoulCalibur plays very differently from every other fighting game on the market and has some unique fundamentals. So I went back to Tira, but the itch for this other character I had been wanting still burned. Finally, in the summer of 2020, Setsuka was announced and quickly released. While I wouldn’t say I had a “main” when SoulCalibur III came out in 2005 (I was 10 years old, okay, I was just pressing buttons), I certainly played Tira, Setsuka, and even a bit of Seong Mi-na more than any other characters. So I was excited to see the character I liked come back and immediately went into the lab with her, falling in love with her new playstyle and gimmick…mostly.
See, the problem with Setsuka for me in SoulCalibur VI is less a problem with her, and more of a problem with both myself and with the game’s online network. I’m not great at fighting games, I’ll be the first to admit that, but I do have an understanding of them and passion for them and that’s enough to analyze them, I think. Setsuka’s issue in SoulCalibur VI is that some of her most essential attacks have two ways to perform them, one simple, and the other more complex. Her simple input does a bit less damage but uses up the all important super meter (known as Soul Gauge) that you use to do your ultimate attack, something that can make-or-break the current set. Her complex input however does extra damage and doesn’t touch the Soul Gauge at all; it might even give you Soul Gauge, I don’t really remember or care anymore. The problem is that the game doesn’t have the greatest netcode and you’ll often find yourself matched up with players who the game says you have a great 5-bar connection with but maybe those are 5 bars of wi-fi rather than ethernet, so they end up having choppy and sometimes unplayable lag that feels more like 2-bars than what 5 should feel like. This can cause the game to drop your inputs and overall disorient your “rhythm” with inputting combos.
It’s been a while since I’ve played Setsuka, but I believe one of the attacks I’m referring to was notated as 6A+B for the simple version and the complex version was 2143B. Those notations might be wrong, it’s been a while and again, I don’t care about her anymore. But for those who can read fighting game notation, you’d know that 6A+B is a very simple single movement to input whereas 2143B requires a backward quarter circle motion directly follow up by a diagonal input the opposite way, a motion which is much easier to perform on a stick rather than a controller, and I am indeed a controller player. With the game’s netcode, this kind of input was difficult to successfully pull off online when you have a much easier macro that could do the attack but penalize you for doing it. This wouldn’t be as big of the deal if the game simply had rollback netcode. So, I dropped Setsuka.
So, how did I end up being a Tira main today, then? Well, the simple answer is two things. The first one is that I simply kept going back to try and learn Tira every time I gave up on another character. I eventually just went back enough that by the third or fourth time, I basically had both of her movesets memorized and was ready to dive further into the fundamentals of the game rather than having to take on both learning a new character and how the game works at the same time. The second answer is that I like Tira. I’ve always liked Tira. And it’s not hard to see that most video games (with a few exceptions) go out of their way to try and make you feel a connection to the main character. Fighting games offer so many characters to choose from both for the sake of diversity in gameplay and for the sake of diversity in characteristics; for the sake of identity. I’ve always thought Tira was a fun and whacky character, and that’s just how it ended up.
My experience with Tekken 7 draws a few parallels to the Setsuka situation, but mostly differs. When my family used to take vacations to Disney World, I often remember my brother and I trying to find the arcade in every hotel and spending some time in them. Of all the arcades in Disney World that we went to, the one located at what’s now known as Port Orleans had a Tekken Tag Tournament machine, and goddamn if I didn’t button-mash a mean Kunimitsu and Yoshimitsu team. My brother played Armor King and Yoshimitsu as well, if my memory serves me right. We both played Yoshimitsu out of familiarity, being a character who also features in the SoulCalibur series. I had never really played much more Tekken outside of that, but the series is just so well-respected for its depth and I just had to get a taste of that. So I received Tekken 7 as an early birthday gift at the beginning of 2020 (thanks, Sachi!!) and had so many different characters I wanted to try. I remember really liking the idea of King in Tekken Tag as a kid, but with so many cool and strong female fighters and the totally genderless Leo, I had a lot of characters my gay ass wanted to try out, so I wrote them all down and started going through them.
I started with the maligned Lucky Chloe (I love how mad she gets people, go Chloe!), learned a few BnB combos, and moved on. I did the same thing with a few other characters, namely Leo, Josie, Kazumi, Xiaoyu, Alisa, and Asuka Kazama. Those previous three were my top picks — Xiayou, because I had often heard her compared to Dead Or Alive’s Leifang (though I’m not sure how true that is, I never got far enough), Alisa because she’s a fucking pink-haired flying robot who can grow wings and remove her own head to attack, and Asuka, the spunky tomboy schoolgirl who reminded me of my favorites from Street Fighter’s Sakura Kasugano and The King Of Fighters’ Yuri Sakazaki. I found Asuka’s playstyle to resemble Dead Or Alive 6 the most, which is exactly why I went to Tekken 7, looking for a new 3D game to replace the recently discontinued DOA6. And so my work began, learning all of her intricacies and combos and eventually finding out that my friend Ryen (check out his art by clicking here), who helped harbor my newfound interest in fighting games, also mained her. He also happened to let me know that she was at the time considered one of the worst characters in the game. That didn’t stop me, though. Tekken 7 is a game with a massive community and following, and all of that “this character is great, this character is crap” stuff only matters when you’re playing at the top level, and I wasn’t expecting to do that anyway — sure, I was a pretty high level Dead Or Alive player, but that game’s playerbase is significantly smaller and we don’t have guys like Knee, Qudans, or Chanel dominating the upper echelon. I just wanted to have some fun.
Determination unfettered, I learned the in-and-outs of Asuka and did fairly well, working my way up to a higher rank than I thought I would ever get to (Juggernaut, if you’re interested). But something about playing Tekken reminded my of my time playing TTT in the Port Orleans arcade with my brother, something reminded me about Kunimitsu, a fairly niche character who despite an ultra-cool character design, apparently was a fairly straight-up Yoshimitsu clone. I nevertheless wanted to see what she would look like in Tekken 7, and it didn’t seem too far out of reach due to her appearance in the previous title, Tekken Tag Tournament 2, one of the few games I had on the massively underappreciated Nintendo Wii U. Right after Tekken 7’s competitive scene was rocked by the absurdly overpowered Leroy just that past December (a happening that drew my attention and wallet closer to Tekken), another overpowered character stomped onto the scene in the form of Fahkumram. And boy did this guy ruin both my enjoyment of the game and also my rank. Back down to the light-blue ranks did I ever fall so ungracefully. So what did I do? I mostly put down the game (at least ranked mode, I’d still hop in player matches from time to time) to play SoulCalibur, of course. And then on that same fateful day Setsuka was announced, Kunimitsu was revealed as a Tekken 7 DLC character. There’s not much else to say, really. I still play both Kunimitsu and Asuka and have lots of fun with Tekken 7. It’s a great and fun game and is worth the buy if you ever catch it on sale, which it usually is. It’s also surprisingly more accessible than its reputation would let on.
When the pandemic hit and all local tournaments had to be cancelled, EVO (before it itself was like…wiped off the face of the earth, thank god) switched its format to online, dropping nearly every game and adding games with famously good netcode. Among those games were smash hits like Mortal Kombat 11 and the wonderful Them’s Fightin’ Herds, which started off as an unofficial My Little Pony fangame before being hit with a cease and desist and ultimately having the creator of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic reach out to the devs to do official character designs for an original IP rebrand. Despite recent titles like those, one game on the lineup stood out most — Killer Instinct, the 2013 reboot. Originally an Xbox One launch exclusive, Killer Instinct eventually made its way to PC with full crossplay between the two platforms and glorious rollback netcode. I had never given Killer Instinct a chance before, but with this resurgence in popularity due to its inclusion at EVO Online, I decided to pick it up super cheap on Steam and dive in. When presented with the character select screen, a few characters caught my eye, notably the vampire lady Mira, The Arbiter (yeah, like the guy from Halo 2), and Hisako.
After seeing Hisako, it wasn’t even a question anymore — I was going to learn how to play her. Hisako’s character design is fabulous, being designed after the “vengeful spirit” trope of Japanese horror; you’d know the one if you’ve ever seen movies like The Ring or The Grudge. Playing into her trope, Hisako’s movement speed is super slow except, using her naginata as a literal crutch when moving forwards or backwards, except for her forward run, which sees her phase-shifting and crawling along the floor, just like in those Japanese horror movies. Even her attacks play off of her trope as well, with her most powerful combo-ender seeing her possess the opponent, inflicting damage as a spirit inside of their own body. After EVO Online’s cancellation, the playerbase once again dwindled, but the 2013 Killer Instinct reboot is something glorious and made it an incredibly easy choice for me to find a main character with a super wild design.
Another game I have a lot of fun with character choice in is The King Of Fighters series. KOF is notorious for having — pardon my French — a metric fuckton of characters to choose from, with the series’ magnum opus, The King Of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match featuring over 50 characters to choose from (I think it’s a lot more, actually). In KOF, you choose teams of three, and with so many varied characters, finding a character you want to play isn’t the hard part, it’s narrowing it down to just three. I’m not the most competitive when it comes to KOF, I just enjoy sparring with friends so I don’t know too much about good team composition (apparently in most KOF games, there’s not much in the way of team synergy anyway), but in any time I’m almost certain to pick Kula Diamond. There’s just something so cool (it’s a pun if you want it) about her character design and her forward dash literally being her ice-skating. Another character I love to play is Yuri, essentially being one of many back-and-forth pokes that SNK and Capcom have taken at each other throughout the history of the rivaled King Of Fighters and Street Fighter series’. I also really like Shermie, a grappler whose bangs cover her eyes almost all the time; it’s especially telling since I’m not much of a grappler in any other fighting games, she’s just that cool. Of course there’s also maniacally cackling Iori Yagami, as well as SNK mascot Terry Bogard, and the androgynous King. With The King Of Fighters XV on the horizon with currently no confirmation on the all-important netcode, it’s worth pointing out that The King Of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match just received an update in the last few months that gave it rollback netcode, and at sub-$10 prices (I think I picked up KOF98UM, KOF2002UM, and KOFXIII in a bundle on Steam for like $12), that game alone is worth picking up if you’re interested in the KOF series.
Guilty Gear Strive is getting closer and closer to release, and all signs are pointing to it being a damn good game. I’ve never played a Guilty Gear game before since anime fighters have never really been for me (‘anime fighter’ is essentially its own genre with its own set of fundamentals and rules, it’s not just a descriptor for the art-style), but Strive’s more methodical pace and de-emphasis of overly long and complicated combos in place of more meaningful short strings, in-depth and accessible tutorial, as well as its exceptional implementation of rollback netcode have almost the entire FGC excited, especially since the usual Guilty Gear crowd seems a bit alienated by the fact that their favorite game is getting “dumbed down” (read: “not an unnecessarily inaccessible anime fighter anymore”). Me? I’m playing I-No. Why? Because I really fucking like Ringo Sheena, who her design is very clearly based on (talking early 2000s Mole Ringo, not the Paul McCartney Is Dead-style imposter who’s been writing shitty showtunes for Coca Cola commercials since 2012). No one is quite sure how she’ll play yet since she wasn’t in the beta and we only got a brief look at her in the trailer that announced her arrival as the final member of the game’s base roster just last week. I don’t necessarily care how she plays, though. If the game is good and worth putting time into, I’ll put time into learning the character that I identify with.
Will I ever write a 5-minute read? Find out next time.
