Think, Don't Mash! Part 6: Other Games
Over the course of the series, we’ve slowly zoomed out from one specific Street Fighter V character to SFV as a whole. In Part 6, as promised, I wanted to widen the scope even further and take a look at another game entirely. I picked Dragonball FighterZ as it's pretty different mechanically from Street Fighter, so I thought it would do a good job of illustrating how a very similar mindset and approach would work for two very different fighting games.
I realized pretty quickly that hitting all the points I wanted to in a single video was going to be impossible. My solution was dividing part 6 into three mini videos. Luckily, this aligned nicely with the fact that there were three distinct concepts I needed to cover. Before anybody mutinies on me: all of these ideas still apply to Street Fighter V! Anything I've ever talked about wasn't speaking to a single game, but the genre as whole. Also, even if you have zero interest in non-Street Fighter titles, eventually (presumably) SFV will fade and be replaced by SFVI or something and people will move on. Learning how to learn fighting games has always been the goal.
Part one covers how to land hits in the first place. Surprisingly (or not?) the basic game plan for DBFZ is a lot more similar than you'd think to what we did in SFV. I also address one of the most overwhelming aspects of learning a tag fighter like DBFZ: that you have to learn three characters (or do you?)
In part two, I look at combos. Practically every game under the sun has combos, so the important point of differentiation between games is not really if a game has combos, but how important combos are and how soon you need them. One of the original things that drove me to make the Think, Don’t Mash! videos in the first place was my frustration with some huge widely-held misconceptions about the fighting game genre as a whole:
Combos/special moves are hard.
The difference between good and bad players is their ability to do combos and special moves.
I suck at fighting games because I can’t do combos or special moves.
To try and prove this wrong, I explicitly made sure my Chun-li example plan didn’t involve a single combo or special move, and I think the results showed how wrong those misconceptions were. Plenty of players, even in low ranks of online play, used specials and knew a combo or two, but it didn’t help them at all. However, I don’t want to misrepresent things: combos do eventually matter in SFV (if you want to progress past a certain point, anyway), and in some other games, you might need combos on day 1. This video is about why that is, why it’s way less difficult than you might expect, and how to craft practical combos from beginning to end.
In the final video of the trilogy, I explore how to put parts one and two together. It might seem a bit counterintuitive that I start off by giving you two building blocks that you can’t put together yet, but I promise that it makes sense. You need to understand your start point (landing hits) and end point (doing combos) before you can understand how to link the two together.
UPDATE: Bonus blog post with some tips for practicing hit confirming (topic of 6.3)