Combo Expression

You guys don’t fucking know how to talk about anything. I mean, I know that Twitter as a format is basically anathema to actual discussion but you could at least try.

The Twitter account FightstickArt, ostensibly an account centered on showing off people’s cool fight sticks and artwork and stuff, took part in the time-honoured tradition of engagement farming by posing a question to FGC twitter: what’s most important to you in a fighting game? Four answers were made available – “varied movement”, “combo expression”, “customization” and “a large roster”. A fairly innocuous question, but the problem with engagement farming is that sometimes your crops grow in places and ways you’re not ready for.

Such a growth was shown in a quote response¹ which read:

If you’re one of the 37% that picked “combo expression,” congrats! You have no idea how fighting games work! Combo expression is a myth. There will ALWAYS be optimal routes. Combo expression exists for the first 5 days of a new game. After that, you’re just doing bad combos.

The idea is that “combo expression” as a concept does not exist, because there are generally worked out “best” ways to conduct combos – this is why we have ideas about combo routing, combo theory, etc. If we take “combo expression” to mean “the ability to do whatever the fuck you want for your combo”, then even if any game does provide space for that, “whatever the fuck you want” is probably not the best choice in any given situation, and if you’re playing to win, why would you go for something that isn’t the best possible option?

It should probably go without saying that this guy got ratio’d to hell and back, becoming the main character of FGC twitter over some inconsequential bullshit that people didn’t make an effort to properly engage with.² For my part, I think this idea is worth interrogating on its own. And I will interrogate it a bit, but not until I yell at the rest of you for responding with shit that was, at no point, ever the “gotcha” any of you thought it was.

The clip of your BlazBlue Central Fiction Fatal Counter punish doesn’t prove your point. Neither does your Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 combo. No, neither does MarlinPie’s Doctor Doom TAC.³ This shit is like disproving the “Guilty Gear is a low damage game” accusations by posting a max-RISC touch of death on Chipp. That shit doesn’t prove anything, and it’s frankly a little offensive that you think it could. The fact that you can do cool combos does nothing to address the idea that your cool combo fails at being an effective means to the end of “winning the game”.

But really, that’s the heart of it, right? This frame of reference, this idea that “combo expression is a myth”, is based on the idea that every action you take in a fighting game is purely a means to an end. And, admittedly, on a base level, it kind of is – fighting games are a competitive endeavour, which means your goal is broadly to win the competition. But viewing fighting games, or even just this one particular avenue of them, in such utilitarian terms leaves us liable to missing the forest for the trees here. After all, if there is no such thing as “combo expression”, just “good combos” and “bad combos”, the logical endpoint of that line of thinking extends to every other potential decision we could make. There is no character resonance, just good characters and bad characters, and if you pick a bad character, then you don’t understand how fighting games work.⁴

Now, I want to emphasise that I don’t think this is what the author of the tweet in question was trying to say – far from it, actually – but it does highlight that there’s a problem with the way we’re even talking about this concept. After all, the reason why broad character viability in a fighting game is a good thing is because it means there are more avenues for players to play the way they want to – different characters have different tools, different means of enacting different gameplans. I often hear that Testament in Guilty Gear XX ACPR is a “better version of Venom”, but I play Venom because while the broad strategy between the two is superficially similar in many respects, Venom’s particular method of enacting that strategy is far more interesting and compelling to me. Venom better represents my interests and priorities as a player – meaning my character choice expresses those things. But now we’re talking about characters, not combo rules. This is about combo rules, right?

Kind of.

From where I’m standing, “combo expression” is just kind of an imprecise term that people have ended up indirectly arguing about the definition of. The contention, again, is that irrespective of how open-ended a game’s combo rules are, ultimately any unique, “expressive” combo will fall short compared to an optimal route. After all, the famous MarlinPie Doom TAC that used six reverse-hit j.Ls, while impressive, didn’t kill Spencer. So why do it? Why make sub-optimal decisions?
Simply put, playing fighting games is not a singular skill – it is an amalgam of an innumerable number of densely interrelated skills, and players, with their varied interests and priorities, will have different aptitudes for different aspects of the broad fighting game skillset. And because players are people – humans who will invariably put part of themselves into their play – they will want to express their aptitudes in ways that they are best able to convey.

So the phrase you’re looking for is “skill expression”. And combos form a part of that.

This can, as the tweet’s author contends, take the form of something closer to “knowledge” rather than “expression” – different combo routes become useful in different situations depending on factors like screen position, resource availability, character matchup, or sometimes even more granular factors. But knowing those combos and being able to consistently execute them is not something just anyone can do, and if you can, the game has given you the space to express your skill in that manner.
But this can also be expressed through raw execution of sub-optimal combos. A great example given by my friend Cleo is that Guile in Street Fighter II Champion Edition has two different stun combos – one is quite easy, the other is significantly more difficult. And both lead to the same result; that is, a stun, which of course means a dead character. If the end goal is the same, then the only difference is in consistency – are we to say that the harder combo is “bad” or “less optimal” because of its difficulty?
I’ve personally been on the giving and receiving end of this in X-Men vs Street Fighter – Magneto can do the ROM loop, a combo he is famous for in Marvel vs Capcom 2, but in the XvSF environment, that’s just one of at least three infinite combo variations the character can perform, and it’s far more difficult than just looping 5HK into Hyper Grav. The main reason to do the more difficult combo is… just because you can. You do it for style points. You do it to send a message.
On the other end of the spectrum, we can look to a game like The King of Fighters XV. There are plenty of powerful anchor characters in that game, characters like Antonov, Terry and Yamazaki who can dump 3-5 bars on a fairly simple combo that will obliterate most of your opponent’s life bar. And here I am playing Ash, a character who, while a very effective anchor in his own right, dumps his meter on highly technical extended juggle combos that are very prone to dropping if you’re not on point. The thing to note here is that there is largely only one Sans-Culotte combo you really want to be going for as Ash. But the point isn’t that the combos are expressive, it’s that I’m choosing to express my intentions and priorities as a player through the vehicle of Ash – because I want to do long combos. I’m a showboat.

Which leads us to the point we touched on earlier – skill expression isn’t, and shouldn’t be, limited to just combos. Character choice is an avenue of skill expression, since your character will showcase what you’re best at or most comfortable with in any given game, be it rushdown, space control or anything else. And depending on the game, players often have their priorities shape the way they play a given character in turn, leading to situations where you can almost immediately identify who is playing a given character just by watching how they play. After all, if it’s all the same to you, why not do what you feel?

I guess the thing to say, really, is that “combo expression” isn’t a myth, but viewing it just through the lens of combos is needlessly limiting. After all, combos are just a thing you can do in a fighting game, and there’s lots of other things you can do in a fighting game, which of course means that there’s lots of skills to develop and priorities to express, whether it be playing optimally or playing like a madman because it’s funny. And it is funny.

So in conclusion, my one disagreement with the original tweet is that it discards the idea that “combo expression” can result in the expression of one’s desire to be the digital pugilist version of a slapstick comedy act. There’s value in that.