antillese A lot of folks have suggested games or series to me that are “closer to jazz” which is fine, but we were critically trying to find the intro to jazz of fighting games (after deciding “fighting games is the jazz of video games”, where you see it and are like “oh I see what’s going on with this genre.”
I don’t think you can as easily look at a guilty gear game and think “ah, I understand what the genre of fighting games is about, now.”
@kory PT is a good one! I feel like this topic is worth revisiting when I’m in a better podcast mood ha ha. also lol at romanceable alien npcs
I’m going to double down on SF IV - you don’t need to understand every nuance of it right away, you just need to understand What Is Happening. To me the pacing of it is what was most important (meaning you can visually follow the action without getting confused), followed by the ubiquity of fluency in the game across the player space (everyone who plays fighting games basically understands how to play street fighter IV). you don’t understand cancels and option selects at first, but you more or less understand what’s happening, and upon further investigation can get into the deeper stuff. I didn’t want to go with SFII Super Turbo because I think it’s too simple, and doesn’t invite that deeper layer of investigation into systems.
I could see a good argument for third strike, if it were more popular (that was another factor, SFIV pretty inarguably revived fighting games in the West).