Why combos are the easy part of fighting games - lightslingergame.com

Why combos are the easy part of fighting games

Brian_F
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Let’s debunk the popular perception that fighting games are ONLY about combos. Yes there are VERY difficult combos that can exist, but the strongest players have to know much more than just combos…

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173 Comments

  1. This reminds me of people who post strive clips saying "How come this does so much damage?!?!?!" when the risc bar is nearly full. Take a moment and think! The answer is right in front of you!

  2. All that aside the Guile combo is fucking hard, good luck ever landing that even when the stars align

  3. So someone once called me a Call of Duty Scrub because I said I prefer realistic guns and don’t like to use cheap tactics (explosive spam and camping)

    Am I? I just don’t like using guns that aren’t from real life and look like plastic toys (cough futuristic shooters) and I like to play fairly so it’s fun for me and my opponent. I don’t play to blindly rush and spam cause that just ruins the fun for everyone.

  4. I remember SFV was built around jumping in because anti-airs did jack. 10 jump ins and land 1 gives you the round.

  5. You can spam anything. Combos aren't to blame without combos how can you tell if a player is trash ? Know how to play? By pressing back back lowpunch? 😂😂😂🤪🤪

  6. Its hard to find people that actually r good at any fighting games. Luckily i can find myself pretty easily

  7. Whenever I see fighting games TikTok it’s so funny they think combos are dumb

  8. Good video 🙂
    The way I like to explain the (relative) importance of combos to the uninitiated is this:
    "If you know a combo that deals (let's say) 34% damage, you know that you need to land three to win, while if your combo deals 25% you need four. In the first case you need three touches on your opponent, while in the second one you need four. HOWEVER, if your neutral isn't good enough that you're able to get the three or four touches, you're not going to land your combo. It's much better to have good neutral and be able to land your 25% combo four times than to know a 34% combo but not be able to land it".
    Of course, winning off three touches rather than four minimizes the risk of messing up, because you need to win one less interaction, but optimizing your combos so that they deal just enough damage to kill while also saving meter is much more advanced stuff and definitely not the first thing you should focus on learning when you're starting

  9. You should've also mentioned how noone that got stunned will never have enough health for this combo to be practical anyways lmao

  10. Finally I have video to send to my friends instead of trying to explain why fighting games are more then just combos. Thank you!

  11. I got into MK11 recently to get a break from SF. people rage quit on me cuz I zone them with Frost AA and fireballs. their fancy minus strings did not help.

  12. "Memorize a series of button presses and doing them over and over till you win" mortal Kombat in a nutshell

  13. One thing to note as you become a more advanced player combo purpose becomes more and more important. Off the same starter in different situations, you may want to do different combos. Should I go for Oki or damage? Should I spend the meter or save it? Fighting games aren't only PVP interactions but also understanding the strategic implications of your decisions.

  14. Good video, but all I can think is ""Combos are the easy part" – USF4 Evil Ryu has entered the Chat" lol

  15. Pringles on defense 💀💀💀 I'm stealing that term

  16. Funny part is i just picked up fighters genre to add to my list and i understood this within a month or two a year ago and i kept hearin players that played way longer experience etc. That didn't think this way🤣 just crazy its self explanatory when you're training in fighters tbh IF ur trying to get better. If your just playing, alls good

  17. When a scrub doesn't know that blocking even exists… lol

  18. Okay fighting game analyst need to understand the value of citing credible source to back them up.

    Because we have yet another video making a total hair brained bizarre analysis based on no game principal design, no commonly used definition of difficult or easy. There are psychologists who study learning. But no screw them a dude on YouTube can just wing it with all the confidence in the world. This dude is just making stuff up.

    You seriously think that Daigo would have a harder time pushing a rookie player or a diamond player to the corner then he would doing that combo that he had to lab? It would be incredibly easy for him to corner a bronze player. That's a total valid usage of easy.

    You could spend years trying to get down a combo in a fighting game.

    I can't imagine someone spending years trying to figure out how to fake that they're going high and then actually go low.

  19. Not fully through the video but I already know I agree. I'd never played fighting games much at all until a buddy of mine and I got Strive. One of the first things I learned was a Sol corner to corner combo cuz I saw a video and I thought it was fucking sick.

  20. Brian at the beginning: "oh the camera's on!… Camera was on the whole time huh?"

  21. Neutral is hard, being able to plan each action or react to any situation is mad difficult but doable. Combo is just the cherry on top.

  22. You know, it's funny. People think Strive has so much depth and yet, the game is just fishing for a hit, then comboing. The game use to have so many interesting things going on for it. Now, the neutral game has been dumbed down SEVERELY, yet people think that Strive has depth and usually the argument is because "combos". Not because of a mixup, not because someone did any impressive neutral, not because of the unique traits Guilty Gear use to have.

    Anyhow, I think this was a great video. It sucks, I loved Guilty Gear and people justify it's depth, based on combos. There use to be crazy okizeme, crazy variety in what you could do, plenty of room for experimentation, many ways to open people up, proper spacing, now a lot of that is has become the same things over and over again. The decision making in that game has become repeating a lot of the same steps during neutral, then getting off a combo. And apparently, the craziest part of the game has been getting off a combo. And even during the neutral? The game just hands you opportunities due to the limited movement the game has and how ridiculously stupid the hitboxes/hurtboxes function in Strive. Opening up someone in Strive has now been reduced to doing the most basic things a fighting game would ever require from you.

  23. When he was saying that the stars had to align nobody really mentioned that the man he was talking about literally did something believed to be impossible when he parried chun. Super in third strike and followed up by his own combo into super to win the match thus giving us one of,if not the greatest fighting game moment of all time.

  24. This is why SC VI sucks speedy characters like Talim and Yoshimitu can spam combo until your guard breaks even with perfect defense, even in high rank and most of characters have no other options than waiting for a mistake in her combo execution

  25. So true on the scrub part. I literally lost all interest in fighting games because I got opened up like a can of sardines. Straight into a full length 10 second combo. I honestly mostly got bored by seeing the same long combo XD Sure, losing sucked, but it was mostly "oh ffs, here we go again" that got to me. Did I learn to block? No, ofc not. I was pissed while losing XD

  26. All this that you said is how things used to be. Now-a-days days it's about using the character with the most exploits. Its been happening lately with FPS games too. Skill goes out the window if your character can do more powerful combos than your opponent and has a better recovery. Take Balrog for instance. He's an incredibly easy (and totally cheesy) character to use. That's why you see "pros" switch characters. Daigo was known for his Ryu, right? Think he got bored of his bread and butter? Or is it that Guile is stronger in every way? Look at his videos talking about Ryu and why he switched. Yeah, he is incredibly skilled, no doubt, but he threw skill out the window for an easier win. Anyone here ever heard of Leroy from Tekken? Took a ton of skill to use that character lol! Yeah, you need to know which combos you can use I any given situation but you can also spam combos for chip damage. Especially with someone like Balrog which has an amazing recovery after spamming.

  27. The way I see it, is combos are just a form of making your good decisions more beefy. Good decisions/gameplay have combos as a reward, and sometimes involve risk, so reward is a required payoff. And it gets to the point where very good players have a very hard time opening each other up, so it’s more of a poke/chip game, where combos become more rare. But knowing combos is necessary to keep up with your opponents damage. If you get incredible at neutral and know 0 combos, you’ll severely lack damage, and lose to an opponent just as good at neutral who knows even 1 combo

  28. The only thing sadder than the fact that some people who need to hear this won’t watch, is that some who already know and act like it’s not the case (in recent games).

  29. Gill mains don't need to wait for the stars to align. We force them into harmony.

  30. I memorized qcf+p, qcb+p, qcf+k, back+roundhouse, cr.fierce, cr.forward, and st.fierce to win most games. Maybe that's just because I play Rose? I do miss having better range on normals and combos from SF4 (I hit grand master with her on SF4, best wake up backdasher), but at least I can do st.strong into cr.forward now.

  31. Meanwhile over in Hondas neck of the woods, everything leads to a big combo thx to v-skill 2.

  32. If I had to guess, peoppe think fighting games are just spamming combos for the same reason everyone who hasnt been in a fight thinks they know how to fight. "Just walk up to the guy and punch them in the face and win", whithout realising that maybe the other guy doesnt want to be punched in the face, so they will react, and now your plan is gone.

  33. Will Diago even be able to do the whole combo in a match? Like if the opponent gets stunned he already has low health. Maybe with a lot of scaling on the stun I suppose?

  34. Fighting games players have this huge misconceptions about combos and non fg players
    Combo arent the hardest part of a fighting game, but are the hardest part to enjoy while being the hardest part to learn
    And no, footsies arent the hardest part to learn, you can learn those organically by playing the game, that is both fun and easier
    Saying that combo are the easy part of fg is just saying that you neevr played a game outside fg, which isnt a bad thing but you should talk about things you dont know.
    One of the most popular genre ever is "moba" which is composed 75% (totally random number) of "footsies" and macro, and people love that
    And you know what people hated about those games? Going in training mode memorizing jungle patterns, this is why it was removed in Smite and heavely tuned down in lol

  35. Lucie’s Guard [8th Apostle of the Twelve] says:

    How dare he use combos
    That’s unfair

  36. Being a Gold player and watching your content hurts as hell. But yeah, my defense is shit, even though I do understand how the game should be played (I think)

  37. The thing about high-execution combos is they're satisfying because:
    – in training mode: you get to see big numbers after mastering complex inputs
    – in a real match: you get the satisfaction of being in the right place at the right time and having conditioned your opponent to block that combo with their face.

    I remember my GF saying the same thing about spamming a combo when we were playing skullgirls and I told her "why not just block?". And she did and whooped my ass. Turns out I really moved onto liking the PvP aspect of FGs while she loves the single player aspect of it – thanks to her I have all story modes completed on everything since it's too boring for me to do. While she likes watching me play ranked online but is too afraid to try it out. There are many ways to enjoy FGs but the disappointment comes when you realise exactly what things you have to learn to git gud against other people.

    So the notion of FGs being about spamming combos usually come from outsiders who saw moment 37 and imagined just being instantly good and doing cool anime moves, while in reality with no experience you feel like you're some sort of alien learning to walk for the first time in your first FG. Really sad since there's many ways for casuals to enjoy the experience.

  38. If Daigo ever does this combo to someone in a match, they'll be the new Justin Wong.

  39. I learned this lesson on sfv where I spent a day learning Cody’s biggest combos and his v trigger 2 combos, problem was I got washed by an unga bunga Ken and he capitalised on my lack of anti airs and punishing I was just trying to do my combos. Learned a very important lesson there

  40. You need to know your poke combo, and your whiff punish combo, and eventually a combo that ends in super. That's 3 combos total that you have to learn; that still leaves positioning,blocking and the rest of the game.

  41. Let's just remove combos from fighting games. For me is soul crushing seeing my character doing random movements while I turn off my brain mashing one button.

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