If we assume video games are a form of art then “Street Fighter II: The World Warrior” would be one of those rare masterpieces created through the usage of either unparalleled genius or sheer luck, or more probably a mixture of both.
It had many revolutionary features. For the first time, a fighting game had asymmetrical gameplay. There were seven different playable characters, and each of these characters had entirely different move sets. The player characters were gigantic in size. Each of them had a dedicated arena with lots of background animation and parallax scrolling.
But the most unbelievable feature was called “hadooken”. It was unbelievable even for me back in 1992. For the uninitiated, hadooken is a fairly well known strike in karate or kung fu. The practitioner breathes in, pulls his hands towards his body, and channels his chi from the main five chakras towards his palms. When done correctly this should already form a white fireball in the fighter’s hand. It is then possible to shoot this fireball towards the object you desire to annihilate. It’s a very hard maneuver to pull. The training is only given in the Himalayas. Don’t try it at home.
It wasn’t the fact that a kung fu practitioner can shoot a fireball from his hands or the fact that the aforementioned fireball is white which bothered me. The part of my traumatic childhood I had spent in cheap cinemas watching horrible Chinese or Hong Kong action movies taught me that when kung fu is in the equation anything is possible. No, the thing that amazed me was how you were supposed to do the hadooken move in the game.
See, back then there were only eight things you could do with a joystick. The game instantly responded to whatever move you did with the controller. Hadooken, on the other hand, required you do make a quick quarter circle and then push a button. This was entirely illogical and against the very working principle of the device called joystick.
Yet it worked.
This was the beginning of everything. There you had the god of fighting games. Every single fighting game made after Street Fighter II took it as a template and tried to improve on it. Experts would agree that, in the 17 or so years which followed, not even the producers of Street Fighter II itself could make a better game. People tried and failed. That’s probably because the evolutionary tree of fighting games grew towards the wrong sun. It’s a classic example of Socrates’ observation of artists. Even the artists themselves don’t know what makes their creations so marvelous.
No, the switch from 2D to 3D doesn’t help. Most 3D fighting games still play on a 2D plane anyway. The problem is a bit more complicated.
Any game designer worth his salt would say that the ultimate goal when designing a game is making it easy to learn and hard to master. What does this mean?
Every game has an objective and a set of rules defining how the player can legally reach that objective. The rules mostly define the core of the game. The game of soccer may require superior agility, strength and endurance, but without knowing the rules you cannot even start playing the game. With the knowledge of the rules but lack of the required traits, you can still play soccer, even if you’d be playing it very badly.
Every game is a test, but it’s not supposed to be a test of your rules knowledge. Whatever it is that the game is designed to test, rules are not part of the test and therefore not a part of the game. For two reasons it is best to have simple rules which can easily be learned by the players.
A good example of a game with simple rules would be the game of Chess. For the uninitiated, Chess is a turn based, tactics game played on a field made of tiles, much like Final Fantasy Tactics. Yet compared to Final Fantasy Tactics, its rule set is pretty simple. There are only 6 different units and one rather bland map, no resource management, no base building, no unit advancement, no skill points, no spells, no alternative attacks, no reinforcements, no random events, no weather conditions, no terrain obstacles or elevation, no custom mission objectives and no party building. On top of that, the combat resolution is rather minimalistic: Attacker wins.
The obvious advantage of this is the fact that even a 7 year old can learn the rules of Chess in quite a short time and start enjoying the game. So Chess isn’t intimidating people with its 1000 page, 20 kg manual. All the rules of chess can be explained on one page.
This doesn’t mean that chess is a shallow game. In fact, it’s one of the deeper games in the history of humanity. And if you’re playing it with an experienced opponent, the game itself is everything but simple. There is a difference between a game being difficult and a game being difficult to play. Which brings us to our second point.
It is a widely known mathematical fact that complicated rules usually result in simple systems while simple rules counter-intuitively tend to yield complex systems.
In our example, Chess is a game with very simple rules. But the number of possible and viable moves available to a player each turn is huge, and therefore the number of possible games is staggeringly high. This is the reason why people are still playing it. The game has incredible replay value and depth, even with its relatively simple rules.
This is not a coincidental trait. Compared to Chess the game of Wei-Qin (known more widely as Go) is much more simple when it comes to rules. The rules “set” of Go consists of only one main rule and a supplemental rule considering a special circumstance which can occur when using the first rule. And that’s it. Yet the number of possible Go games is so high that Chess by comparison seems like a very shallow game.
Exactly this was the genius behind “Street Fighter II”. Despite its six different attack buttons and one stick, everything was clear and simple for each character. Each button was labeled. There usually were only stick and button combinations and these almost always resulted in an expected action from the fighter on screen. Pulling the stick down and pressing medium kick would do exactly what you expect: A low, medium powered kick. Push the stick up for a medium powered kick in the air.
Virtua Fighter, widely known as the best fighting game today, is also believed to be extremely deep. Each character has an amazing number of moves which can be executed by pressing certain buttons in quick succession. The buttons most of the time have little to no relation to the move executed. The mechanic is called Dial-a-combo. It was popularized by the Tekken series and used by every single fighting game released in this century with different results. Some, like Tekken, used a system which gave the player a false feeling of these button presses being relevant to the moves. Others, like the Mortal Kombat series, simply required you to enter a combination very fast to execute the move.
The move itself, being a part of the game’s rules, becomes a challenge while what should matter is using that move at the correct moment in a correct way. This makes the game complicated to play but not necessarily complicated.
The interface is there to translate the player’s thoughts to the language the game understands so that the game can obey the player. What these developers call “deep combo system” is nothing more than a bad interface. You could bind one hand of the player to his back and I’m sure the combos would be even more complicated.
In “Street Fighter II”, each character only had around 3 special moves. And by special move I mean moves which can be executed by complex controller input. A newcomer could easily start playing the game in a few minutes. These special moves were a bonus, an extra for those who discovered them.
What other fighting games have done wrong is making the special moves the entire focus of the game. Consequently only insane people who read trough pages of moves lists and memorize all the combinations can truly play these games. For the rest the games are made button mash friendly. Poor normal people can press random buttons very quickly and hope their fighter will do something relevant.
It’s a shame that since 1992 there really wasn’t any revolution in the genre. We’re still using the rule set from Street Fighter II, in the right or wrong way.
Long ago I gave up waiting for a new exciting mechanic in fighting games. Now my only hope is Street Fighter IV, which I hope will be going back to the roots of fighting games for normal people, using the rules set by its predecessor, but this time in the right way.