turtles, turtles everywhere
I’m getting tired of Shoryukens.
I’ve been playing Street Fighter IV rather religiously over the past few months, you see, and while it is on the whole a great fighting game with lots of neat little quirks, I’m beginning to think it’s a little too fond of defense.
The mix-up is the basic currency of fighting games. The idea, essentially, is to put your opponent in a position where he must choose between a few mutually exclusive options. The humble and much maligned throw, for instance, is part of a very basic two-choice mix-up. If my digital pugilist is right up in your comfort zone, I may choose to throw a punch (which you’ll have to block) or a throw (which defeats a block but can be broken entirely with a ‘tech’ – an opposing throw command). Simple, yes? There are nuances here and there (one can throw an opponent out of a slow enough attack, allowing the throw to beat both options in some cases, etc.), but those aren’t important to us at the moment. Or one might mix up between an overhead (an attack that must be blocked standing) and a low (an attack that must be blocked crouching). Or one might cross up one’s opponent with an ambiguously spaced jump attack, leaving him to guess whether left or right is the correct block direction. Options abound, depending on one’s character…
…and pretty much every last one of them loses to the Shoryuken, or attacks of its ilk. These – Dragon Punches, Zangief’s lariats, Blanka’s EX up-ball, etc. -are invincible reversals: attacks that will blast right through whatever you’re trying to do and hit you for it.
So what, asks my devil’s advocate? Ken’s been throwing flaming fists around for the last fifteen years or more. Besides, they’re risky. If you can bait one and block, you can punish it with anything in your arsenal.
True. True.
The issue is one of risk versus reward. Many of the characters with such attacks can use them as the starting point of a combo. If Ryu has two stocks of the little blue super bar, any connected uppercut can lead to an Ultra, and any blocked uppercut can be cancelled, leaving Ryu safely on the ground instead of sailing through the air. And these Ultra combos, they hurt. No risk but two stocks of meter, and two rewards for the price - get out of pressure and rack up some damage.
Now, all of a sudden, the attacker – that is, the person that took the initative and tried to press an advantage – is the one that needs to make all the difficult decisions. Press a wee little bit too hard, lose half a life bar. And forget about tricky link combos – your opponent can just fling the stick in any direction that ends in down-forward while you’re on the prowl, and if your combo is just a thirtieth of a second too late, SHORYUKEN!
Even attacking a rising opponent with the ‘meaty’ attack, launched with early timing such that an opponent stands up into the active (hitting) frames, is unsafe. SFIV not only offers a generous reversal window by comparison to previous iterations, but it automatically turns a downed opponent around to the right direction in case of a cross-up. The result? A more rigid game, in which characters with strong reversals are untouchable while rising, while characters without them need to sit around and wait for a hole in your pressure.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, per se. Different characters have different abilities, strengths and weaknesses, and for all that balance is a nice ideal, this kind of stuff is hard to design, full of nuance and unintended consequence. Not everybody can be at the top of the food chain.
Moreover, the opposite extreme – highly offense-friendly fighters like Guilty Gear, where the attacker holds most of the cards – can lead to a feeling of disconnection. I’ve heard GG’s gameplay boiled down once to ‘do your stupid shit to your opponent before he does his to you’, and that isn’t inaccurate. The game doesn’t always present the same feeling of push-and-pull, of attacker and defender. The opponent becomes in some ways irrelevant – it feels sometimes as though the struggle is not one against another player, but rather against one’s own character. Can you nail that big combo? Can you execute that complex trap?
The perfect balance will vary from player to player, of course. Some like the frenetic action of a Guilty Gear or Blazblue, and some the more measured (if highly unforgiving) simplicity of a good ST match. But when I occasionally watch an SF4 match in which two players are clearly afraid to approach each other, I find myself wondering who exactly enjoys the turtle-off into which it so often devolves, and if maybe there remains some work to be done.
