When Harder is Easier
When I first picked up Guilty Gear Strive over COVID, it was with a resolve to learn that had been absent my previous forays into the genre. Previously I'd dabbled with classic Street Fighter, Smash, and some Blazblue and Undernight, but my dabbling was limited to fucking around with friends or trying (and failing) to play mediocre story modes. I tried to learn to wavedash in Melee at one point, a project that lasted all of about an hour. With Strive, I was looking up combos, studying matches, asking friends for advice, and all the things that go in to first learning a fighting game. I started with I-No, then Ramlethal, and finally landed on Testament when they released in the spring of 2022. During that time I found a new side of friendships, grew as a player and training partner, and got a first taste of the drama and stress of open brackets online and in person. However, while I initially put in quite a bit of time, I found that once I'd gotten passed the initial hump of learning combos and basic strategy, it was very difficult to move forward and I was unhappy trying to improve at Strive. Sets with friends were increasingly stressful, and I found myself coming away with more frustration than joy. Over time my play time dwindled to nothing as week-long breaks became months.
The year following Testament's release, ArcSys launched the rollback update for Guilty Gear Xrd. A friend and Strive training partner was a big fan of the game as a spectator but hadn't played, and so we picked it up just to mash a bit. While that friend soon dropped the game, I'd recaptured some of the joy that had initially excited me so much about Strive and decided to ride that high until it burnt out. Sticking with Xrd proved to be an auspicious decision as since I've met friends and been folded into a community that now forms a lovely wing of my social life. Strive offered my first taste of competition but Xrd gave me the will to put in the work required to establish lasting connections, connections that translated to my first bracket win. Xrd was also the game that finally pulled me out of my lair to locals, and spurred me to attend events that fostered the connections that made it feasible to bum rides to those locals. The Xrd community is a gift that I have been honored to receive.
But over my 1500-or-so hours of Xrd, I've also learned a fair bit about why my experience with Strive was so tumultuous. Not just that, but the inklings I had have then been repeated back to me by Xrd players who arrived at the same conclusion independently. That is, "harder" games are not "harder" to learn. Despite this seeming a contradiction in terms, I've found that as you tease out what makes a fighting game difficult, it begins to make more sense. I put some 500 hours into Strive, and in that time I learned essentially every relevant combo for the character I played, was effectively copying blockstrings of much stronger players, and had a sense of what my neutral strategy and win conditions were. However, I'd only barely begun to scratch the surface of what I consider to be the much harder part of learning a fighting game: the process of shifting from playing "singleplayer" into engaging in the duet of deliberate decision making informed by matchups, spacing, and conditioning that is the most base level of the genre. In essence the "singleplayer" is learning to play a song. Even learning the most technical piece of music won't impart upon you the skills that grant true masters the ability to electrify audiences and move their bodies to dance and eyes to tears. I had learned to play the song called "Ramlethal" and the song called "Testament", but I knew very little about the genre of fighting games and less still about the game of Guilty Gear.
The Hard Part
The core of what made Strive such a frustrating experience for me, in hindsight, was just how quickly I learned the singleplayer experience of my character. In an effort to appeal to a wider base, ArcSys designed Strive to be highly consistent and intuitive. Characters tools have highly telegraphed purposes, the combo system was simplified by removing air teching and eventually character weights entirely, wake up timings were homogenized and wall breaks were added to limit the power of looping setplay while making it easier to learn, and characters more esoteric tools were pruned away. To belabor a metaphor, I had learned a fairly simple song in my 500 hours of play. The best practice is often to copy, but it also takes deliberate study to become proficient beyond the scope of just your practice. I had done my due diligence and copied the motions of other Testament players, and I'd even begun to see a little bit behind the curtain of why those better players did the things they did. Testament's gameplan incentivizes keeping your opponent away with preemptive projectiles, but to do so you open yourself up to large pokes or air dashes, so learning when to wait and instead allow your opponent to commit to something and respond accordingly is the second layer to the character. That's a fundamental skill that I'd begun to hone in my practice of Testament.
But while these fundamentals are crucial to the character and thus new players will begin to intuit them as they play, the experience of hitting the point where there are few new singleplayer things to learn but no fundamentals to rely upon is what exhausted my enthusiasm for Strive. A musician will always have more music to dig into and mine for ideas, but a Strive character only has so many practical options. As a new player runs out of new cool things to introduce so rapidly, instead replaced by nebulous concepts like "spacing" or "consistency" that are difficult (and often rote) skills to practice, their learning experience quickly begins to feel like a wall. Rounds against players just a bit better can feel repetitive and nigh-futile, and rounds against players a bit worse can be consistent stomps. In both cases players are met with the difficult task of trying to understand why, and the game offers little help. At this stage, I didn't have the knowledge to identify my own problems and understand how to change them. Watching replays often felt as though I was watching someone do the same things I did, with the very loud very uncomfortable difference that they were winning.
These fundamental skills measure not so much one's understanding of their character's moves, but rather how their character's moves interact with the totality of the potential situations in the game, are collectively what I've seen others refer to as "the hard part". Any idiot can sit in training mode and mash out buttons until the combo works, and then do it a thousand more times until it comes naturally. All you need is time. Especially in a game like Strive where hits are almost universally expected to stabilize into one of very few combo structures and all convert in to a knockdown, learning to convert your character's hits is often an exercise in learning just a few common combos. On the other hand, learning which of your moves are most well suited to every micro-situation based on meter, screen position, characer-specific resources, distance from the opponent, and the properties of both characters tools is something that only those who already have strong fundamental knowledge are going to be able to figure out on their own. For the rest of us, these skills are often a product of trial and error and a deliberate desire to try new things, implement advice or copy better players homework. They require an immense amount of focused effort to cultivate.
Where Strive comes up short is that it fails to offer enough easy stuff to ease players into the hard stuff. Many tools' purposes are too obvious, character strategies too transparent in their design, system mechanics too heavy handed in illustrating what strategies are good, and this reduces the time required to overcome the easy stuff's onboarding. It's not that Strive is an easy game (it isn't!) but rather that its learning curve hurtles players head first in to the hard stuff. Plotting Strive's difficulty, one would see it starts moderately high, as a new player learns to control their fast moving character and press buttons with deliberateness. It would fall as players learn combos and begin to see how to to stabilize all their stray hits in to them, learn how to string their moves together into blockstring offense, and become comfortable swinging their buttons in neutral. However, as players reach the bottom of the trough, having learned their bread and butter combos and fostered an understanding of how their buttons each factor in to their character's strategy taken broadly, they are met with a sheer cliff of hard stuff. They've learned that 5K is good, but they haven't learned why, or how to convert that knowledge into the framing most appropriate for each matchup.
In comparison, Xrd's difficulty starts higher. There's more to learn both in terms of sheer volume (more moves, more common combo structures, more options to cover on offense, more defensive volatility), and in terms of the amount of practice required to hone these skills as Xrd has a smaller buffer and faster pace of play. As players learn, the difficulty initially falls just as it did for Strive. Unlike Strive, following this gradual fall is a gradual incline. Instead of learning the easy stuff and then hitting a wall of hard stuff, players instead continue learning easy stuff for hundreds or thousands of hours, gradually introducing more hard concepts over time. The two categories intermingle for longer as players begin to recognize that the layers of easy solutions begin to tackle hard problems. For instance, as Dizzy, I spent my early days doing a simple combo into H fish, which fires a horizontal laser low to the ground. I'd then either run up and do a low, or fly over their head and cross them up. This is vulnerable to characters who get up from knockdowns sooner jumping out, as well as the universal blitz mechanic and some other reversals. As I learned, I introduced K fish, which is harder to time but works more consistently against more characters, and can cover blitz. But it's hard to mix players up when they know what to expect, so I introduced H fish plus K bubble to get more reward and corner carry, foregoing the immediate mixup and instead being safe from most counterplay on reaction. Then I learned H fish air dash P bubble to bait blitz, and H fish dash jump jS to beat jump outs, and the list keeps going. I was constantly introduced to new asterisks in what I thought I'd learned. Rotating between each of these options to keep my opponents on their toes is using easy stuff to develop the hard skill of abusing my opponent's mental stack. H fish is great* (*but vulnerable to jump outs, blitz, and some other reversals). Learning to compensate for each asterisk pushed me to think about the situation in greater detail with more branches of potential options based on what I or my opponent might do. By offering so many options that each have their own little niche, Xrd does increase mechanical complexity out of the gate, and it may alienate some new players in doing so, but it also ensures that the trough of difficulty is rather shallow and allows for a gradual incline into the things that differentiate the me from two years ago, and the me today or between the me today or the better Dizzy players.
Accessibility for Whom?
Many of the changes that Strive (though Strive is in no way unique among modern fighting games in this) has made that reduce this initial barrier and streamline learning the easy stuff are done explicitly in order to reduce barrier to entry. While I'm all for making fighting games more approachable, I'm concerned that my experience is one that is rather common and while the perceived ease of play may bring more players to the table, it fails to keep them there and fails to encourage players to make the connections and investments that would keep them going even when the going becomes hard. Indeed, while we're now beginning to see developers introduce features that help decode the systems that underpin many of the genre's most arcane elements such as frame graphs, toggleable hit- and hurtboxes, advanced recording functions and replay takeover, the idea that reducing mechanical complexity and situational variety increases ease of entry remains. I can't speak to the effect of these design goals on sales, but I do feel strongly that they undermine the game's longterm health. When combined with new paradigms of online queueing systems, I think these games do their players a disservice in putting new players on the fast track to the hard stuff before they're ready to assess their own play in a helpful way or have developed the networks required to ask for help.
I see the biggest reason for this as being a failure to ask who these reductions in difficulty are for. The claim is that they make onboarding easier, but I find the claim that it makes onboarding easier for total newbies to only make sense for the initial first impressions. It is certainly frustrating to pick up a new game and being unable to do the cool moves that led you to picking your character in the first place, but many of the most popular fighting games of all time have high degrees of technical execution or a fast pace of play. Marvel vs Capcom is beloved among the hardcore enthusiasts but was also popular among the layperson interested in mashing with their roommate or sibling at home, and the hand-breaking difficulty of some combos (let alone learning to navigate neutral and defense!) wasn't a deal breaker. More recently, Dragonball Fighterz brought tons of new players in to the scene but was also a game that demanded a high degree of situational awareness as many characters could close a gap nigh-instantaneously and avoiding getting hit was seriously hard. Sure, DBFZ simplified some of its gameplay and introduced features like auto combos, but it was also a game where you died for being wrong, frequently without any real way of knowing what you did wrong, and where you were asked to pick up three characters (albeit similar in structure) right out of the gate. These titles both ask a lot of its player base and yet had mass appeal, so who does simplifying this sort of onboarding actually help?
Paradoxically, limiting the complexity and quantity of the easy stuff actually helps a fairly narrow band of players — primarily competitively-minded players who are already adept at problem solving in competitive games. So players who have established communities (say, people already going to a fighting game local for other games), or players who have put a lot of time in to competitive games already. For totally new players who are less experienced in competitive games, having fewer things to practice as they're gradually introduced to the hard stuff creates a point where the game simply stops being fun for many. Even someone like me, who is not very competitively motivated but enjoys learning games, can feel stranded without guidance and not having more things to focus on to distract from that can lead to folks who don't enjoy grinding games in a ranked queue (let alone Strive's tower system) losing interest.
I think it's likely that I would have burnt out on Strive eventually regardless, but the biggest difference between me and my training partner — who stuck with the game and improved at a much higher rate — was just a general appreciation for Strive's base gameplay and tolerance for the tower. I still really enjoy watching Strive and I've come to appreciate its higher level intricacies as a spectator, but I don't enjoy its slower pace and smaller screen space. No amount of ease of onboarding is going to make a game fun, and while Strive is a great game, it's not something I want to grind for its own sake. What I found most fun about the game — as is the case for every anime fighting game I've ever touched — is that the characters are insanely cool and have really interesting and fun tools. However, where games like Blazblue, Undernight and Xrd each emphasize this element of their design above all else, Strive's design heavily emphasizes consistency across its systems and this necessarily crushes character differences. It is much easier to pick up Ramlethal in Strive than Xrd for any given player, but for players who are already familiar with Strive this is especially true, while in Xrd she's a commitment even if you already have a few thousand hours of play. By removing character complexity, this again advantages established players and players who enjoy picking up new characters and dabbling within the ecosystem of a game over totally new players.
Going a step further, much of the complexity present in a game like Xrd, even those features that are mostly often cited as needless complexity that makes the game more opaque like character-specific wakeup times (two per character!), manual teching and mash to tech, and character-specific gatlings are layers of complexity that mainly impact already established players. A new player doesn't even know what "oki" is, let alone how it varies between face-up and face-down knockdowns. A new player may not even realize that being able to cancel their 5H into fS is a unique feature rather than a standard. Hell, good odds they don't even know all their potential cancel options. So I ask again: by simplifying these systems, who is being served?
It's not you, it's them
In an era where games are increasingly forced to target larger audiences in order to make up for ballooning cost of development, I can't blame developers for trying different tactics. Strive finally put Guilty Gear on the map in a way that no prior game had managed, and I'm sure the perception of being easier to pick up helped. I'm even more sure that having good netcode and releasing during COVID were much larger factors. Street Fighter 6 has absolutely exploded in Japan and modern controls certainly play a part, but so does the absolutely absurd marketing of having some of the most popular content creators in the country playing in the Crazy Raccoon Cups along side legendary fighting game pros.
For any given game, luck is the primary determining factor for sales. Luck in who gets their eyes on a marketing push, luck in the state of the world and economy when the game is ready to ship. Luck in retaining developers who could be paid better elsewhere and luck in managing to share a vision of what the project ought to look like between management, team leads, and developers. Sure, making a great game certainly helps, but many a mediocre game has sold well.
The simple fact of the matter is that fighting games are not a genre with natural mass appeal. Arcades are a thing of the past, and competitive gaming is dominated by free to play titles with bi-weekly updates. Fighting games are, for all intents and purposes, a legacy genre like RTS or arena shooters that persist on cultural cachet and the intense devotion of their fans. The FGC's willingness to spend money and proselytize their favourite titles has allowed us to persist with much greater relevance than fighting games genre compatriots, but I feel strongly that has more to do with the community of fighting game players being so strong rather than the strengths of the genre itself. Guilty Gear is truly fantastic, but I also wouldn't expect the average video game enjoyer to enjoy sinking hundreds or thousands of hours in, and I don't think anyone else should either.
To that end I'd like to see the genre move away from this emphasis on reducing onboarding friction. Instead, I'd like to see fighting games focus on making games that excite fighting game fans first, rather than trying to bring in outside audiences. Trust that the community's dedication will bring your game positive word of mouth and focus on making titles that are deep and intricate, rather than approachable. I, and so many others in the Xrd community and others, are living proof that difficult fighting games are still fun for newbies. It's not necessary for the games themselves to change to accomodate new players, rather emphasis should be put on getting the game into the hands of enfranchised players and giving those players the tools to bring in newbies. Sponsor events, add training mode features that make wiki-creation and experimentation less cumbersome, and create games and characters that make a few people vibrate with joy rather than trying to fit into a box of broad appeal.