Movement in Fighting Games
In most popular fighting games, the amount of offensive tactics vary, and different games will reward them to different extents. You won’t see the same kind of offense in the Street Fighter series that you see in the Guilty Gear series.
A lot of this has to do with each game’s different mechanics. Games with more mobility options, such as the Marvel Vs. Capcom series or most “anime”-genre fighters, tend to have a heavy focus on offensive gameplay. Likewise, games with more restricted movement, like Street Fighter don’t really offer the same kind of offense oriented gameplay
One mechanic that heavily influences the significance of offense is each game’s version of dashing. In games like Street Fighter, a dash is a essentially a small leap forward that you cannot act out of. Although it is great for closing space, it’s a huge commitment and will often get punished in neutral. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are other fighting games that have a similar dash that you can act out of (Marvel vs. Capcom series), while other games have more of a run than a dash that you can also act out of (Guilty Gear, Blazblue). Other games like Skullgirls have a middle ground of sorts where different characters have different dashes.
With the introduction of dashing, players can close space safely. The ability to approach like this opens up to new mixup opportunities, such as fast approach sweeps or overheads. On top of dashing, some games feature an air dash mechanic for a number or the entirety of its roster. By doing an instant air dash (air dashing as soon as you leave the ground), you’re put in an aerial state close enough to attack your opponent while moving towards them. This allows for much safer aerial approaches, as well as the ability to perform an aerial attack rather than a grounded overhead when trying to hit high.
There are also techniques (tech) unique to dashing. Although it’s only good in some games, you can cancel a normal dash into a crouch, which will cause you to slide forward from the dash while being able to instantly return to a neutral position. This is called wavedashing, akin to the Smash tech of the same name. Unlike Smash however, wavedashing is often used with other wavedashes, allowing one to close distance incredibly fast. In Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, this tech is crucial at a high level due to the importance of space, which you can read about in a our article about spacing.
Aside from dashing, many games have alternative forms of mobility, but these vary greatly from game to game. Some games have flight and others even focus on aerial based combat. For now, we’re going to restrict the analysis to the Guilty Gear, Blazblue, and Marvel Vs. Capcom series.
Offensive Mechanics in Fighting Games
While a wide range of movement options can encourage offensive gameplay, there are also other mechanics that have the ability to do just that and can even force one’s opponent to play offensively.
Two prominent examples of these mechanics are chip damage and guard breaking. Although it may seem obvious to include these from a balance standpoint, as they prevent blocking from being too strong, they also influence both players to play more offensively. The player attacking is encouraged to keep doing so, as it will net him chip damage or an opening, and the person blocking is encouraged to find an opening and take the offensive to prevent that from happening.
Some games even have mechanics that can help or hinder an attacker’s approach. In Blazblue and Guilty Gear, there exists the negative penalty, in which the game punishes you by making you take more damage if you repeat the same moves or block for too long. In Marvel Vs. Capcom and Skullgirls, assists can be used to lock down opponents for a more safe approach.
Most of the mechanics made to encourage offensive gameplay are simply movement mechanics. Like the aforementioned dashing, fast movement encourages offensive gameplay by allowing players to close space quickly. Simple movement mechanics like characters have different speeds or different movement options lead to some characters being more offensively oriented than others.
Pressure in Fighting Games
Once a character can use the movement and offensive mechanics we’ve discussed to close the space between an opponent, they need to capitalize on their ability to do so. If the opponent blocks, the player must try to apply pressure to force them to drop their block. Most of the time, this pressure on block is either a high or low mixup that can lead into a combo. This can be done with sweeps, overheads, instant air dash overheads and more depending on the game and character.
Let’s take a simplified look at an example from Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator with the character Leo.
Leo’s pressure is arguably its best when he’s in his stance mode, which allows him to counter, dash, or perform several attacks which hit high or low. In order to get into this stance, he must use one of several moves that put him into it, meaning that he can activate it while pressuring the opponent. The dash he can do in this stance will also go past an opponent, allowing him to cross them up easily. All of these options force his opponent to be careful about what options they choose to punish him: If they try a reversal, they might get countered, and if they choose to block or run away, they can get hit with an incoming mixup.
Usually, after you successfully mixup your opponent to make an opening for a combo, that combo will end in a hard knockdown. When in a hard knockdown state, the opponent is forced to get up, normally invincible while doing so.
This is known as wakeup. During the opponent’s wakeup, the player is tasked with setting up for their next mixup. Known as Okizeme, or the wake-up game, this “setup” can be anything from reading what they will do from wakeup, to putting a hitbox over them to prevent them from doing anything on wakeup. Characters like Millia and Raven in Guilty Gear have great okizeme since they can lock an opponent down with a lasting hitbox and go for high-low mixups. In games like Street Fiighter, okizeme is usually just reading an option on wakeup. Games like Blazblue and Skullgirls have okizeme-oriented techs, making theirs revolve heavily around tech chasing.
Speaking of tech chasing, I think it’s about time we begin talking about Smash.
Movement in Melee
Like I mentioned in our article on spacing, Super Smash Bros. Melee tends to handle movement differently due to it’s freedom of movement, and not being restricted to a simple “forward and backward”. The introduction of platforms only complicates this matter. Wavelands, wavedashes, dash dances and more are all involved in movement, but it’s not so different than faster paced fighting games. Options like SHFFL aerials share many of the same surface benefits as instant air dashing, as it allows you to close distance while being low enough to the ground to get a quick aerial out and land in time to continue pressure.
One thing fairly unique to Melee is its dash and run system: When you input a dash, you start in a short burst of movement, and if you hold that direction, it turns into a run. Although some games have a similar system, such as Filia’s dash/run in Skullgirls, most of these systems only change the speed, with the dash having a faster speed than the run.
Melee, however, changes the options. You can only dash back, dash attack, jump (and perform jump cancelled options), shield, or grab out of a dash. In a run however, you gain the ability to crouch and lose the ability to turn around. This mechanic creates the whole dynamic of crouch dashing, as a run can often be punished in neutral much easier than a dash.
The concept of dash dancing and overextending a dash dance into a run is related to basic concept of spacing. Pretty much every fighting game has this, but Melee does it in a unique way compared to most. Something else unique to Melee (and most some platform fighters) is wave landing and platform movement. This grants a wider variety of movement, mixups, positioning, and approaches, similar to how different dashing mechanics can create a new dynamic to approaching as well.
Pressure in Melee
Reminiscent to blocking and chip damage, shields in Melee deteriorate over time, and getting hit diminishes them much faster. For this reason, shield pressure is encouraged. It allows one to whittle your opponent’s shield down to force them into a compromising situation. Characters like Fox can do this best with his shine: By hitting an opponent with an aerial, he can lock them in shield stun and begin his pressure.
Let’s break down his options, starting from a SHFFL N-air.
Assuming the Fox carefully spaced the N-air and is now behind the opponent, they cannot grab him. Let’s also assume he’s playing against an opponent who doesn’t have any fast out of shield options aside from grab. At this point, Fox’s best option is to shine. From this shine, he has the opportunity of performing options like another shine, another aerial, a wavedash and more.
Going back to our example with Leo, Fox has about as many options, if not more. All of these options can be read and punished by the opponent, and each option covers specific options. They both have the same end goal of opening the opponent up for an attack (and hopefully a combo), and their methods are fairly similar. They both force their opponents into situations where they must pick the right option and punish based on a read, but the player applying the offense can read what they are doing as well and punish. Both scenarios create a tense situation for both players, but the player on the offensive tends to have the advantage.
After a successful combo in Melee, the opponent is ideally put into 3 situations: They’ve either lost a stock, they’re off stage being edge guarded or they’re forced into a situation where they must tech. If the opponent is in the tech situation and is tech chased, the attacker can then continue the combo and score even more damage, possibly even a stock. This scenario is similar to okizeme, where the opponent is knocked down and the player must try and figure out their “wakeup option”. In this case, that wakeup option is just a tech direction.
Conclusion
Offensive gameplay in any game is encouraged by movement options. The ability to close space and approach the opponent efficiently makes offense more appealing to any player and this tends to be one of the biggest draws to an offensive game. Once a player succeeds in approaching, pressuring the opponent opens up new options for offense that are radically different to what you see in neutral. The players don’t have any more space in between them, and both players are now put in a close quarters scenario where they must best the other to get the upper hand.
The offensive aspect of most games tends to be similar. You put the opponent into a defensive position and force them to play your game. Different characters have their own ways of doing this, but the most common tends to be approaching and applying pressure.
That’s all just on the surface, however. Offensive gameplay can come in many shapes and forms. The fact that we were only able to scratch the surface in this article’s length proves that. Offense and its counterpart Defense play into a multitude of other topics, which means both concepts will most likely be revisited in the future.
See you all next week!
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