Think, Don’t Mash! Part 1: An Introduction to Learning Step-by-Step
Why do people think that fighting games are so difficult? There's a lot of different possible explanations, but I think that ultimately people fall into one of two camps. You either believe:
Fighting games really are just that damn hard -or-
People (often for understandable reasons) overestimate their difficulty.
One of these, or some mix of both have to be the truth. People who have bounced hard off of the genre tend to believe in number one. People who love fighting games tend to think that the second argument holds more weight.
I understand the reasons why people end up believing in the former, but I firmly believe fighting games are ultimately learnable by pretty much anybody. I didn’t start playing fighting games seriously until my 20s, and I managed to get out of pools at Evo in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 when I was 31. I’m a nobody with old man reactions and got OK at fighting games. You can do it too.
There are a million reasons why people think fighting games are hard, but one undeniable truth is that fighting games are complex, and one of the biggest errors people make when approaching fighting games is ignoring this.
Even the simplest fighting game character has dozens of moves, so you can’t learn to use a character’s full repertoire of moves from day one. This seems really obvious, but many would-be fighting game players miss this. I picked a random Street Fighter V match I played against a bronze level Necalli player. They used nineteen(!) different moves in the first round alone. No beginning player has a pool of nineteen moves they’re keeping in mind, carefully picking and using strategically to their benefit. If you try and learn a musical instrument, you don’t learn nineteen notes before trying to play a song. You learn four notes and play “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” In Street Fighter V you don’t try to use nineteen moves when you barely know how to play the game. You pick four or five moves and go from there. The same principle of starting simple applies.
This is what the “Think, Don’t Mash!” video series is about. The analogy of learning a musical instrument is often used when describing learning fighting games. People draw parallels between the difficulty of the two, as well as how rewarding it feels as you improve. It’s important not to forget maybe their most important commonality: whether you’re learning Street Fighter or guitar, you learn a complex skill by starting simple, and you only add to your repertoire of options once you’ve internalized and become comfortable with what you already know.