Argue With Yourself

One of the best ways to learn Fighting Games (and honestly anything for that matter) is to argue with yourself.

What do I mean by this exactly? As an example, take this piece of Fighting Game advice: “Your normals are just a way for you to reposition yourself.” At first glance, there might be some truth to this statement! It is definitely true that making someone block a normal pushes someone back, and it’s also true that the way they push someone back is consistent. 

Therefore, the statement has some validity to it, and you could definitely use normals as a way to reposition yourself. But there’s no way that’s the only thing they’re meant to do, right? If that was the case, then why use a normal at all? We could just walk our way into those positions instead! 

Well, can we? Does that idea apply to every character? Take Cammy for example, she can definitely get away with using her fast walk speed to reposition herself around the opponent and score whiff punishes. Sure, we might need to press some normals here or there, but that would only really be necessary once we want to actually do some damage to our opponent.

But what about a really slow character like Marisa or Zangief? Those characters have extremely poor walk speeds, but they have a lot of attacks that can move them forward really quickly. Zangief sHP for example lurches him forward, and can put him at a much more desirable range even when you space it at max distance. While less good, Marisa sHP and fHK can accomplish similar purposes. Once these characters make these normals land on their opponent’s block, they have access to a lot more options purely because they’re closer to the opponent.

Ok, so maybe for some characters, this statement holds up. But for Cammy it certainly doesn’t right? She can just walk around and wait for whiff punishes or go for counter poke attempts! But what about moves like Cammy sHK or sMK? Those moves don’t net a lot of reward for the character, but are also extremely long. Also, because they put a hitbox on the screen, we have the added benefit of checking the opponent for some chip damage if we think they’ll try to do something. But, it’s not like we can score game winning combos off of these normals. Does that mean we shouldn’t use them at all?

In order to show and not tell (which would completely defeat the entire point of this blog post), I’ll leave the rest of this “dialogue” for you to complete. This dialogue could continue and become a lot more complicated, but I really want to emphasize that the truthfulness of the statement doesn’t actually matter here. Instead, it’s the dialogue that you have with yourself the determines what you get out of it. 

For all you know, this statement could be completely wrong! But, at the same time, we were still able to create some (hopefully) meaningful bits of information. I think a lot of players fall short of what they want because they think that there is a step-by-step recipe to getting good at Fighting Games. Unfortunately, a lot of this success comes from intuition which is built from experience, reasoning, and an attempt to create something of your own.

Don’t just ask other people for Fighting Game information, ask yourself! You’d honestly be surprised with what you’ll come up with.