Genre of the Month (JUN 2024 TR) - Frenzy Fighters

[Ziggy]

Together Retro - June 2024 - Frenzy Fighters

* Sorry for the delay on getting this post made. If I'm ever late again in the future, anyone can feel free to post the next month. The planned genres for the rest of the year are here: viewtopic.php?t=54087

[Ack]

Fighting games is a tough one for me. At one point, I was very much into them, collecting fighters for my favorite consoles, checking what I could find, enjoying regular bouts.

And then I beat nearly all of them on the Super Nintendo. And it kind of killed my interest in playing them. I still love to make recommendations for folks looking to check out the genre and trying different styles, but after knocking out nearly all of the ones on my favorite nostalgic console, I basically hit a wall. It's interesting to me how this kind of burnout developed, and maybe my tastes changed as I have gotten older, but yeah, I can't say I'm nearly as into them as I used to be.

[Ziggy]

Fighters is a tough one for me, too. I played a crap ton of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter back in the day, and those remain my favorites (especially MKII). For the longest while, I never cared to try new fighters. Any time I did, I just felt like playing MKII instead. More recently, I realized that I can enjoy more fighters outside of MK. But I've also realized that at this age I don't really care to play against the computer. I would have a lot more fun playing a human opponent, but I almost never have anyone to video game with these days. So I end up playing very little fighting games.

[Raging Justice]

I used to love fighters back in the 90s, I lost interest in them over time. I briefly was interested again when 3d fighters got popular with games like Tekken 3 and Soul Blade and Soul Calibur.

A couple of things killed my interest in the genre over the years.

There is little to no focus on single player. In the older games single player was just playing against the computer. That was fun until developers starting making the AI either absurdly tough to beat or just had them outright cheat and read your inputs. A few games incorporated interesting single player content in them like Soul Calibur, the beat 'em up mode in Tekken 3, or the interesting RPG mode that was in the Playstation version of Darkstalkers 3. Red Earth was even designed around single player. By and large though, the genre and its developers don't CARE about single player.

The accessibility is gone. Now the games revolve around incredibly complex and difficult combos, things that require PERFECT timing like perfect guards/counters, etc, etc, etc. Go back and play the original Street Fighter II or some of its iterations on the 16-bit era consoles. It's wonderful how simple and easy they are to pick up and play. The comic book games from Capcom like Marvel Super Heroes and X-Men vs Street Fighter seemed accessible early on, but even they eventually got rather complex with people now doing insane shit in those games that I can't even wrap my brain around.

I feel like the games are now designed for hardcore, competitive players. The emphasis is online rankings and tournaments now. Sadly, pro wrestling games have pretty much gone in the same direction and developed all of the same problems as the fighting game genre

The games just doesn't feel fun to me for the above reasons.

The only exceptions to this I will say are certain anime fighters, which I have had some fun with. I say this because some of them do place an emphasis on single player content, and some of them are accessible and easy to pick up and play. Some examples:

The Naruto: Ultimate Ninja series
The Dragonball Z: Budokai/Tenkaichi games
Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot - It's marketed as an RPG, but the core gameplay revolves around fighting

I think as licensed games a lot of anime fighters are more interested in providing a fun experience for manga/anime fans than they are on appealing to hardcore types who play fighters online all day long while having fighting game tournament videos playing on youtube in the background. Plus, as licensed games they have to offer some kind of satisfying single player content that is focused around the anime.

I gravitate more to beat 'em ups/hack n slashers today than fighters, because some of them are still accessible and some of the ones coming out these days are actually quite fun as pure single player experiences like River City Saga: Three Kingdoms and Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir. Personally, I believe that the beat 'em up genre has surpassed the fighting genre and is BETTER. Some people are even saying that beat 'em ups are experiencing a Renaissance right now. The genre has been evolving over the years, even more so if you count musou games and character action titles. There's actually a nice variety of choices now for beat 'em up fans. Musou titles provide that fun, accessible experience. Character action titles appeal more to the hardcore types. A lot of 2d beat 'em ups occupy a space somewhere comfortably in the middle.

Fighters have not evolved at all. They've gotten more complex, but that's not necessarily evolution. Beat 'em ups have also flourished with OpenBOR. I guess there's MUGEN for fighting games, but I don't know how popular that is. Beat em ups give you the fun of beating the crap out of someone, like a fighting game, and many of them even have similar gameplay mechanics as fighters. However, the genre has evolved to incorporate so many other things like RPG elements, strategy elements (which you see in many musou titles or the Kingdom Under Fire games) and even some deep story telling elements. You just don't see that in modern fighting games. Fighters are not evolving. The genre is quite stubborn.

Also, I don't know what you call Punch Out style games (is boxing a genre?), but I also find them more satisfying and fun than fighting games and there have been some good ones over the years. I get more excited to see any new game that is "inspired by Punch Out" than I do any new fighting game announcement.

A few old school fighters that I do still love though, despite having largely lost interest in the genre today would be:

X-Men vs SF
Marvel Super Heroes
Street Fighter II - The pillar of the genre
Super Street Fighter II
Darkstalkers 3 on the Playstation for that cool, RPG mode
Rival Schools: United by Fate
Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 - You can't do a list without a Mortal Kombat game
Samurai Showdown
Astra Superstars
Guilty Gear
The early Fatal Fury games
Psychic Force
Battle Arena Toshinden II
Tekken 3
Soul Blade and Soul Calibur
Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance
Dragonball Z Budokai and Budokai II

[o.pwuaioc]

I have just a few fighters left after getting rid of most of them. I've found though that I largely shy away from fighters these days, and the ones I keep focus on simpler mechanics.

Despite playing SFII and MK more on the Genesis, these days I'd rather play the 16 bit fighters on the Super Nintendo. The ones I have still are:

Mortal Kombat II (for that classic feel)
UMK3 (for the roster)
Street Turbo II Turbo (for the mechanics)
Super Street Fighter II (for the roster)

The one Genesis fighter I still have is Samurai Shodown.

I never really liked Street Fighter III or all the complex fighters that followed thereafter, and really did not enjoy 3D fighters even back in the day, but I've found that these Saturn fighters are loads of fun, and, equally important, they're just cool:

X-Men: Children of Atom
Marvel Super Heroes
Vampire Savior

---

Aside from these, I also enjoy, for reasons I cannot fully articulate, SNK fighters on the NGPC, namely:

Fatal Fury: First Contact
King of Fighters R-2
Samurai Shodown! 2
SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium

The funny thing is I don't own and don't care for their full-fledged arcade/console equivalents. But these bite-sized fighters are just fun still.

[Ack]

Since we seem to be wanting to focus on earlier fighters with limited complexity, how many of you have tried World Heroes? It came out before combo systems were fully developed, so instead tactics involve understanding when to use anti-air, how to get in a quick hit or special, and chipping a turtling opponent.

[Raging Justice]

I played World Heroes in the arcade once. I don't remember much about it beyond thinking that it was a good Street Fighter II clone with nice graphics.

[marurun]

While I do think a lot of newer fighters have embraced too many different mechanics and a frequent reliance on tight execution (1-3 frame move links, parrying, extended move cancel chains for combo goodness, extended magic chains or move linker memorization), the oldest fighters often feel a little lacking. As much as I love the original Street Fighter II, CE' and HF are my preferred jam due to some improvements. The original Fatal Fury feels overly simplistic. Even Fatal Fury 2 feels strange with an inability to really combo anything. My preference is for what I sort of consider that second generation of clones and SF follow-ups and the post Super SF 2 mix (though I'm not a huge fan of Super SF2 or SSF2T). Give me Samurai Shodown, Fatal Fury Special, SF2' and SF2HF, World Heroes 2/Perfect, X-Men: COTA, Night Warriors, etc...

[pierrot]

The accessibility is gone. Now the games revolve around incredibly complex and difficult combos, things that require PERFECT timing like perfect guards/counters, etc, etc, etc.

Maybe five to ten years ago, but I don't think this is particularly true as much anymore. Yes, most fighting games are aiming for the big stage at EVO, but Street Fighter 6 has modern mode that makes almost everything close to single button execution, and has brought in all sorts of people who had little to no fighting game exposure. Ironically, anime fighters (primarily the Arc System Works variety) have been the worst in terms of mechanical complexity that weeds out players who can't hack it, but Guilty Gear Strive still dumbed down the mechanics significantly into a more Street Fighter style in a move to make Guilty Gear popular. There are a few very mechanically complex characters, but also a number of very simple ones. That was another game pulling in all sorts of new players not too long ago. Also Tekken has always been a more accessible series, even if there are some weird physics interactions at competitive levels (and I believe Tekken 8 doubled down on this in a similar way to SF6). Nothing like the level of reads for possible interactions in VIrtua Fighter.

At this stage, most fighting games are trying to add accessible mechanical options to bring in a wider base of players, and classic options for people who still want to play execution heavy, high stakes matches. Not that I'm personally a fan of new fighting games for other reasons, anyway. (Although, Elena being announced for SF6 has made me think about maybe actually picking it up some time.)

Since we seem to be wanting to focus on earlier fighters with limited complexity, how many of you have tried World Heroes?

I played World Heroes Perfect on the Saturn like over a decade ago, now. All I really remember is that I picked a big dude with mid-length blond hair (looked a little like Krauser from Fatal Fury, I think) after booting it up, and blew through the arcade mode without losing more than two or three matches (no continues). I think I remember seeing something after that indicated the character was a boss in a previous game, but I never really cared about checking out more of the series after that. I do have the World Heroes Anthology on PS2, though.


I was noticing the other day that I have a handful of fighting games in my library that I haven't gotten around to, but kind of would like to. I might take this opportunity to play through some of them. Contenders are:

KoF 2000,'01,'02 (DC) (I remember '99 Evolution taking a whole lot of patience to get through, though)
Fighter's History Dynamite (Saturn)
Fighter's Megamix (Saturn)
Galaxy Fight (Saturn) (I think I remember trying this at one point and kind of giving up on it)
Samurai Spirits: Amakusa Kourin (Saturn)
Waku Waku 7 (Saturn) (This one I'm pretty certain I played for a while without much luck against the boss)
Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee (GC)
Naruto: Clash of the Ninja Revolution 2 (Wii)
TMNT: Mutant Warriors (SNES)

That's about all I have left for unbeaten fighting games on physical media. Whole bunch of stuff in my PC libraries that I could turn to for something maybe more engaging. I think it's kind of really weird that I've never bothered to beat Fighter's Megamix and unlock all the extra characters, so I might just start with that. Basically all of these I've played some amount of in the past.

[Syndicate]

...I'm catching this at the end of the month, again. Fighting games are definitely one of my favorite genres. Street Fighter II came out when I was in middle school and my older sister would drop me off at her college commons and I got hands on with this classic pretty early. I was terrible, but hooked nonetheless. I studied all of the coverage in EGM and put in lots of quarters just to get decent or at least able to do a fireball or sonic boom

...SFII was the start, but I played pretty much every fighting game that I could get my hands on. Once I was in college and finally got my hands on the Vs games and some SNK classics like KoF '95 and Samurai Shodown 3, I was late to classes sometimes b/c I "had next." Fighting games remained one of my go to genres all the way up until I became a parent and just didn't have time to spend in the lab if you will. I think that UMvC3 and USFIV were the last games I spent serious time in. Most days now I just play fighting games w/my kids and other dads , I still watch Evo and other tourneys as well if I have the time. I mainly prefer games from Capcom, SNK, Arc System Works, and etc. Some of my favorite games include:

- SFIII: 3rd Strike
- SSFII Turbo
- SF Alpha 3
- KoF '98/'99 Dreamatch Never Ends
- KoF XIII - XV
- Virtua Fighter 2-5
- DOA 1-4
- Fighters Megamix
- Garou: Mark of the Wolves
- Samurai Shodown series
- Blazblue series
- Guilty Gear series
- Vampire Savior
- Powerstone
- MvC 1-3
- JoJo' Bizarre Adventure
- Soul Calibur
- Dragon Ball Fighterz
- X-Men Children of the Atom
- Last Bronx