What are Fighting Games?

Fighting games. All of us have seen them. Many of us have played them casually. A decent amount of us play them competitively. Very few of us are good at them.

Some of us like them, and some of us don’t. Many of us are very confident of our opinions of them, but we struggle to understand the facts about them. What is a fighting game? How does it function?

To put it simply, a fighting game is a head-to-head competitive video game. In it, the 2 competitors each choose fictional characters from a roster wherein each character has unique tools to help them win the match. The players can move their character around the fighting arena with a variety of movement options which vary drastically from game to game. The match itself typically has a best-2-out-of-3-round structure, and each round typically has a 99-second timer attached to it. A player wins a round when his or her character has more health than the opponent before time runs out, or when he or she whittles the other guy’s health to zero, whichever happens first. The first player to win 2 rounds wins the entire match.

Some of you reading this may be saying to yourselves, “Yeah, I already know the skeletal structure of fighting games. What about all those complex mechanics?”

To understand the mechanics that govern fighting games, one must think of them like a cyclical chain reminiscent of rock-paper-scissors. The first and most fundamental of these describes the 3 basic combat tools in all fighting games: attacking, blocking, and throwing.

An attack is just what it sounds like: the standard tool for dealing damage. Attacks always involve pressing at least 1 button on the controller, as opposed to simply hitting the joystick by itself. When a character attacks, the player controlling it commits to that attack. In other words, the player loses control of all other actions and must wait for the attack to finish its animation before he or she can do anything else. All attacks have a specific range, and most of them push the opponent back a specific distance. Excluding throws, there are four main types of attacks, but we’ll discuss them later.

Blocking is, not surprisingly, the standard tool for defense. In most 2D fighters, this is done by holding away from the attack on the joystick, while most 3D fighters have a dedicated button for blocking. When a character blocks an attack, it is put into a state known as “blockstun”, during which the player cannot counterattack the opponent.

A throw is a very special type of attack that cannot be blocked. To throw the opponent, one must either press a singular button in combination with a direction or 2 buttons at the same time; the requirements vary from game to game. Throws exist primarily as a check on blocking to ensure that it doesn’t end up as some sort of “magic shield” that is impenetrable to all attacks. Throws usually come out very quickly, but the thrower must be in range for the throw or else the throw attempt will whiff, leaving him or her vulnerable to be attacked.

How do these tools interact with each other, you may ask? The general rule of this rock-paper-scissors chain is as follows: As mentioned earlier, throws beat blocking simply by virtue of the fact that they are unblockable. Blocking beats attacks because they negate (or, at the very least, minimize) damage dealt to the defender. Attacks beat throws by pushing the thrower out of throw range and/or hitting the thrower in the middle of the throw attempt (once again, this depends on the game in question).

Some of this is overly simplified, but that is how things work at the most barebones level. This isn’t even getting into strategy; all it does is tell you what tools exist for both players and what is possible with these tools. Tune in next time, when we will investigate the fundamentals of strategy in fighting games.