Learning to Love, to Learn and to Let Go

Prior to Guilty Gear Strive and Dragon Ball FighterZ, Arc System Works’ three most prolific and popular fighting games were Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R, Guilty Gear Xrd Rev2 and BlazBlue Centralfiction. These are all games I’ve spent varying – but generally large – amounts of time with, and my opinions of them have varied accordingly. My rocky relationship with all three of these games is well-documented, here and elsewhere, but I feel like I’ve come to a pretty clear idea of how I feel about all these games. That’s what we’re talking about this time.

Learning to Love: Guilty Gear Xrd and New Perspectives

Guilty Gear Xrd is a game which made a great first impression on me, and then gradually lost its appeal the more I began to understand what it was doing. I – along with lots of other people – did not like the effect that the game’s Yellow Roman Cancel had on its pacing, decision-making and general flow. It’s a very, very powerful mechanic, and whether or not you can vibe with it decides whether or not you can vibe with the game as a whole. While I wasn’t expecting my opinion on Xrd’s YRC to change any time soon, my experience with ACPR (which I’ll be outlining soon) left me wondering if I’d come away from more time spent with Xrd – a game I hadn’t played in years – feeling more positive about it.

The answer to that question is… kind of?

Recently, I played a long set with my day-one Rev2 Venom against my friend Toneblerone and his region-dominating Jack-O’. I didn’t go in expecting to win, especially when coming up against a character as heavy on the knowledge checks as Jack-O’, but man, that didn’t feel good. And she’s mid-tier?

Anyway, my overwhelming impression coming from Rev2 is that it’s definitely a game that I like more than I dislike, because for all of its elements that I don’t fully appreciate, it’s still largely based on a fighting game that I genuinely do like. I’d like to say that I have problems with the way Xrd’s new characters were designed, but my lack of experience with the game’s high level meta, combined with my slightly more extensive background in ACPR¹ is like. Do I get any right to complain? They are at least mechanically interesting, especially in the case of Jack-O’ and Ramlethal.

I did, however, have my dislike of YRC heavily solidified. I’m not opposed to “pause button” mechanics in fighting games on principle, and I’m definitely fine with Xrd’s trademark slowdown on the game’s other Roman Cancels, but YRC does so much, and so well, for so little cost, comparatively speaking. There are certainly interesting things you can do with it, and I don’t want to discount that, but the fact that there are so few restrictions on it, on top of the way that RC slowdown eats your opponent’s inputs and even grants you some invincibility when you perform it just makes it so, like, unbelievably strong, but more importantly, it’s strong in a very homogeneous way. Not everyone uses YRC in exactly the same ways, but everyone can take advantage of it in similar enough ways that it just makes the mechanic feel less interesting than any of the war crimes ACPR’s cast can commit, even if said war crimes are (in)arguably more egregious than doing move > YRC > air throw.

I don’t think I’d play very much Rev2 if it got rollback, but I definitely feel more sympathetic towards the people that would. People love this game, and despite my mechanical gripes, I completely understand why they do. All signs point to this game not getting a rollback update (at least not in any official sense), but it really does deserve one.

Learning to Learn: Accent Core +R and Attitude Adjustment

I love this game. No, really! I know what I’ve said about the game in the, uh, very recent past, but… okay, let me tell you what happened.

Guilty Gear – the entire thing, not just Accent Core – is a very selfish game. This is how Lord Knight described the game, but while he meant it in the sense that “every player hates every character that isn’t their own”, I mean it in the sense that Guilty Gear is a game where your success as a player is contingent almost entirely on locking your opponent out of their ability to play the game – it’s a real “mom said it’s my turn on the Xbox” kind of experience. Which makes sense – every character is capable of some truly abominable stuff² – and understanding this is key to getting maximum enjoyment from the game. It took me a good while to understand that.

See, I’ve “quit” ACPR a few times now. I’ve run the gamut of excuses, blaming my opponents, myself, even both at the same time! But despite all my complaining about “the Australian Regional Meta” and whatever, whenever I stopped playing, I kept feeling like I still wasn’t giving the game a fair chance. I said I’d rather pick the bullshit that I like, but do I really, actually dislike ACPR’s brand of bullshit? Or am I just giving up because I don’t get easy-mode answers to the problems that are most commonly presented to me?

I determined that it was the latter. So I came back one last time, trying to keep my mind as open as possible, not just to what my opponents might want to do, but also to novel ways to approach the game as a whole. In doing so, I discovered the true beauty of ACPR – it’s a game where there’s always a strategy or technique I’ve never thought of, an answer I’d never considered.³ And while my ideas don’t always pan out – Justice is still a pain in the ass to fight – my capacity to come up with new ideas is making the experience feel much more rewarding.

Also, for what it’s worth, my newfound attitude towards this game has once again allowed me to both appreciate the game’s sense of humour even more, AND truly recognise when my opponents do Genuinely Cool Shit. It’s good to be back.

Learning to Let Go: BlazBlue and Growing Up

One of my gateways into competitive fighting games was picking up a copy of BlazBlue Continuum Shift for the Xbox 360. Being a fresh ‘09-er, hot off the heels of Street Fighter IV and Tekken 6, I had no idea what I was getting myself into,⁴ but it set me on a path that I’d basically be stuck on – to this day, my main group of friends in the FGC, both locally and abroad, is a bunch of Anime Players. In a sense, I kind of owe where I am right now to BlazBlue. Which might explain why it took me so long to accept that I’m just not cut out for this shit.

I want to begin this by saying that, despite its very troubled history, BlazBlue’s most recent iteration, Centralfiction, is inarguably a good fighting game. It’s pretty well-balanced, there’s a generally high power level among most of the cast, and there’s a lot of fun to be had with the wildly divergent and creative tools available to players. But, as a consequence of that, BlazBlue is a game that has a lot going on, and it demands that you learn not just its systems, but pretty deeply learn the functions of each character in order to properly engage with it. After the game got its rollback netcode update, playing it a lot more made me realise that I am unable, and perhaps unwilling, to meet that demand.

Now, this might sound like I’m complaining about losing to everyone because of matchup knowledge, and that’s kind of true – you will get got by a ton of tools in this game because you don’t know what they’re doing, or what they look like, or how it behaves in relation to each other tool the character is using. A frankly disconcerting number of those tools are attached to characters whose primary gimmick is making the screen immensely difficult to look at, adding “don’t look at the thing that’s actually hitting you” to the list of knowledge checks you need to pass before you can start properly interfacing with the character.

But for all of the dense, layered puzzle-box characters to contend with, of all the Sega rhythm game-inspired gimmicks to play through, what truly took me out of BlazBlue was, interestingly enough, its wakeup mechanics.

BlazBlue, similarly to some 3D fighting games, gives you a bevy of ukemi options to utilise after a knockdown. On top of quick getup and a massive delay getup window, you can also tech roll forward and backward. In theory, this should make okizeme an interactive and thoughtful game state that requires good reads and intimate knowledge of your character’s options to properly capitalise.
This is not the case. Perhaps this is less a consequence of the systems themselves and more of the way character tools have been designed and redesigned as the series has gone on, but playing the game was an exercise in learning that just about every competent character is capable of making this wide variety of wakeup options almost completely irrelevant, thanks to basically every knockdown leading to a meaty that will check delayed getup and both tech rolls while still allowing them to get another meaty into guaranteed pressure if you happen to quick getup.
This dynamic is only compounded by the fact that most of those competent characters have pretty easy access to a hard knockdown, which removes your ability to quick getup entirely, forcing you to interface with the game’s other wakeup options. The way the controls for these wakeup options work, though, means you can’t just hold down-back and A+B to wake up in place with Barrier – because holding down-back after a hard knockdown will give you a fairly punishable back roll. And instances where forward roll is a good idea are few and far between, so most of the time, the best way to get up from a hard knockdown is to tech, and then not hold down any directions until you see the tech animation.
They put a character whose primary reversal is a flash kick into an environment like this. Don’t pick Kagura Mutsuki.

It’s not that I disagree with strong okizeme or anything like that,⁵ it’s just that dealing with the okizeme in BlazBlue, at least for me, feels really bad. Like, it just sucks knowing that you have this suite of wakeup options, and that like half of them lose to your opponent timing a meaty 2A. It feels like the game is lying to me.
Maybe I’m just a fighting game oyaji after all, at the ripe old age of 27, but I think there’s something to be said for a game being content to tell me that the way to deal with an oppressive tool or setup is, “you don’t”.

I did honestly try to properly learn BlazBlue. I hit the lab, I read the wiki, I talked about the game and problem matchups. I couldn’t make it stick. I wasn’t really comfortable thinking about how a game that defined my early years as a fighting game player was one that I didn’t actually enjoy all that much, but maybe it’s okay that I don’t. It’s not like I learned nothing from the experience, and it’s not like the friends I made because of it aren’t going away, either. Something that fighting games are pretty good at is teaching you about yourself, and it may just be that “Sleepmode really is just a fucking old man” is a lesson I was finally ready to learn.

All of these games are cool, though. Play ACPR with me. Or play BBCF with someone who can handle that game. I would tell you to play Rev2, but I don’t know if my conscience can handle telling you to play a game with netcode from the stone age, even if it’s not really anyone’s fault that we’re in this situation. Then again, if the Samurai Shodown players can survive through that netcode, then maybe there’s hope after all.