Fighting Games: Where Do I Start?

After watching EVO a while back, my interest in fighting games was piqued. Since, I have discovered the marvelous - deeply scientific - coverage of fighting games on Giant Bomb. Sadly, at this point it feels that fighting games are completely impenetrable to me!

My question for you all is this: What is the best game for people wanting to get into fighting games? Ideally it would have three things: An excellent tutorial or just simple mechanics, an active community to play with, and an entry level price.

What are your thoughts? I would love to get into fighting games, especially after seeing the awesome reception Injustice 2 and Tekken 7 are receiving. They look awesome. Where do I start?

I'm horrible at fighting games but I find the Netherrealm games to be pretty accessible and jam packed with features. Injustice 2 is my favorite fighting game in years because of how much single player content it has. It has a good campaign that's about 5-6 hours and the multiverse and gear system has kept me hooked. I haven't touched the multiplayer but I'd imagine it's pretty active since it just came out

Killer Instinct might also be a good place to start. It's got a great tutorial that's teaches you fighting game lingo and fundamentals. They've also added a ton of stuff since it's release. Plus it's free to try

Don't know how active the community is, but Skullgirls seems to be pretty beginner friendly and is relatively cheap. Netherrealm fighters are also really great. Mortal Kombat 2011 got me hooked when it came out.

yeah from the current crop i'd definitely try out injustice 2. lots of stuff to enjoy even if you don't want to venture online and get utterly trounced.

A few disjointed thoughts that are disjointed because it's almost 5:30 AM and I haven't slept yet like a dingus:

This is never an easy question to answer because mechanics vary between fighting games quite a bit. A lot of people will suggest learning on something like Super Street Fighter II Turbo because it's mechanically pure and thus will force you into learning the fundamentals instead of relying on some of the crutches modern games give you, not unlike the argument people give for why you should learn guitar on an acoustic. I can sort of understand the logic behind such a sentiment, but I tend to just be of the mindset that you should play whatever interests you the most and whatever you have the most fun playing. Fundamentals are cool and all, but sometimes you just want to turn the amp up and peel the paint off the walls.

There are tons of informational videos and websites for any of the games you're likely to pick, so I don't think any route you choose is a bad one. Some games are certainly more complex than others, but I don't think any of them are insurmountable, even shit that's incomprehensible to me like Guilty Gear. Just dive in, mess around, and remember to have fun instead of getting too tied down by the "learning" aspect of it all.

Patrick Miller, who has written for Giant Bomb in the past, wrote a good book that goes over the fundamentals of fighting games. It uses Street Fighter II HD Remix for its examples, which here in 2017 might not be as easy to play since I imagine a lot of people don't have their previous-gen consoles still hooked up, but we are on the Internet and it's not hard to find a way to play Super Turbo if that's what you wish to do. In any case, the stuff it talks about is pretty universal and very good. I definitely recommend it. You can find it here, though I believe it makes you sign up for Shoryuken's newsletter before they send it to you.

Feel free to ask me any questions if you've got them, about specific games or general questions or whatever. Depending on what you decide on getting and what you get it for, I'll always be down for some fighting.

It's kind of a double edge, but SFV has the easiest and most basic mechanics. So it is almost definitely the easiest game to learn. However since it is so straightforward and lenient on the controls, people online are very optimized in what they do and good players superior spacing and fundamentals widen the gap heavily. It's an easy game to learn, but really hard to win in. If that makes sense.

For my money, I think Killer Instinct is the most intelligently designed to work on multiple levels of skill. That game is just fun when you are new, intermediate, and expert. Stuff is really smart.

I'm also playing Tekken 7 right now as a scrub, and I have to say it is a lot of fun to just play with basics. But I can no longer claim to be a complete beginner in the genre so not sure how that translates. The game is also insanely technical at higher levels and good Tekken players will just maul the shit out of you (and me).

But yeah the old adages stand. Fighting games are rough if you like winning. Because you are destined to lose for weeks before getting better. And thats only if you are actively trying to learn. If you stick to it and do your practice and research you WILL see results eventually though, and that's really satisfying.

Also get a beginner friend to play with. It helps a lot to have someone in a similar position for the first bit of awkwardness with the controls.

Super Turbo is the only fighting game that matters

Injustice 2 is the most non-fighting game pro friendly game I've played, lots of single player content and training.

@changethel1ghts: I'd recommend the original Injustice: Gods Among Us, because of it's Star Labs mode, which gives you a pretty decent story based reason to try all the characters out, and it's got plenty of single player stuff, being a NRS game and it's also probably pretty cheap. Injustice 2 is also pretty fantastic, and has an ever changing list of single player stuff due to it's Multiverse mode, but it doesn't have the Star Labs stuff the original had.

Don't buy a fight stick, just start playing whatever you feel like; Injustice has the most content, Guilty Gear has the best tutorials, Tekken has three whole dimensions.

I think you should just pick up something you think looks cool and go from there. Some have good tutorials and some have bad, but the deciding factor is how much you like it and want to learn it, and there are resources on youtube and stuff for games that aren't good about it. It would be ideal if you could rope a friend into playing with you as well. If you're not sure what kind of fighter you like, because they're all pretty different, then the older fighters are cheaper and often on sale for ten-ish bucks.

Personally I thought Skullgirls had a great tutorial and was fun to play, and you can choose whether you want to use 1, 2 or 3 characters, which meant I could stick to a single character for years. But I never played that game online, I only played it with my about-as-bad-at-it flatmate. Let me note that I loved playing that game with him. Fighting games are tons of fun even if you never learn shit besides special moves, but they depend on likeminded opponents.

I don't even know now. I've never really played a fighting game extensively, but I'm getting way into messing around in the new Tekken and that game doesn't even have a tutorial. I just like the way it looks and the simplicity of the moves and slower pace (as opposed to an anime fighting game, for example). I think you should probably just pick one that "speaks" to you and start with that. No fighting game tutorial is gonna be enough to make you great at the game (or at least they never did much for my abilities past basic understanding), so for me it was really just a matter of finding something with enough charm for me to stick with it for a long time.

These are the main things that got me into FG's with Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition in 2014.

1. Find a game that looks cool (there is no best game, the one you want to learn is the one you like the most. Not the one with the best tutorials)
2. Find a character that you like
3. Be prepared to commit to the game (this means treating it as something to study and learn, not just an entertainment pass time)
4. Learn to enjoy losing (This is the biggest one)

Tutorials and all that are great (when they exist), they teach you the mechanics and provide a vague idea of the mindset you should have. They will never teach you to accept the fact that you're going to lose, you're going to lose a lot. If you can't accept loss and try to improve yourself after losses you're not going to get into FGs. Unless of course you're just looking to spam buttons with friends which is all good.

♥️ Thanks everyone. I'll be digging through this info and making a choice. A lot of the insights were plain great as well! Right now I am leaning towards Injustice 2. I'll let y'all know how it turns out!

What everyone else has said about the trials of getting into fighting games is spot on, so let me add a few extra thoughts. Fighting game skills do, for the most part, transfer over to other fighting games, so even if you end up disliking one game you can switch to another and it won't be a total waste of your efforts. Also, even if you aren't the best player yourself the better you understand a game the more you can enjoy and appreciate watching games as entertainment. Even just being a part of the community is fun, and there are tons of events to follow, no matter what game(s) you like. I highly recommend going in. Seriously, once you're on the level fighting games are so good they'll ruin other video games for you, it's just getting there that's tough.

@changethel1ghts: Just fair warning as a fellow fighting game noob who tried Injustice 2 - the tutorial is terrible. I mean, kudos to them for at least trying to put something in there, but it utterly fails to teach you the timing of the inputs, or the terminology behind anything it has you doing. I banged my head against the wall jump attack tutorial for like 30 minutes before I figured out because it did such a bad job at telling me what I was doing wrong. It's clearly a tutorial built by people who are really, really good at fighting games and so assume the "base" level of a player is much higher than it actually is for someone new to the genre.

Just prepare to be frustrated. That's all I'm saying.

@ivdamke: Ha I started in like 2012/2013 with KoF XIII; such OG 12er status much wow. The general theory is that the best players really don't like losing and never lose that edge; but if you don't care about being good and just want to have fun/gradually get better at the game then by all means.

I guess I should mention KoF is the best game, good luck getting good at it though.

Right now, I'd say the place you'll find the most relatively-inexperienced fighting games players are in Tekken 7, since it's the latest fighting game and has a broad reach. In terms of mechanics, I'd say Street Fighter V is the easiest to learn, but as @tobbrobb said, most people who are playing now are pretty good. Not to say you couldn't learn SFV now, but be prepared to lose a lot while you're figuring things out. Guilty Gear Xrd is probably the toughest to master, but it has an excellent tutorial, probably the best of any fighting game. You could learn everything you needed to know about GG just via the in-game tutorials.

Pick one of the major games like Mortal Kombat, Tekken, or Street Fighter. They'll give you a feel for the ins-outs and a lot of controls that carry over to other titles.

Maybe even grab one of their older, cheaper, entries to just kill time with. Especially if you can get one with all the DLC included.

Then maybe move on to one of the cheaper, but still competitive, anime titles. I've occasionally played them and found them pretty fun and interesting. The communities for those games tend to be smaller, and sometimes more welcoming to newcomers (emphasis on sometimes).

Finally try and find a fighting game tourney near you. Doesn't hurt to go, support the tournament, and just try and take on some players. You'll probably get beat but in my experience most players are just happy to play, no matter who against.

Marvel vs street fighter

KI is pretty great. I should probably try playing it again, it's been a while.

@fredchuckdave: No one enjoys the act of losing, I probably should've said learn to enjoy your time with the game despite losing. The best players don't like losing but they also don't let that get to them or sway their views about the game or the people they vs.

Not many guilty gear mentions? A new one just came out. Those games have huge amounts of great tutorials and are spectacular as all heaven&hell.

I'm pretty bad at fighting games but I have a way better time with arcsys games than most other fighting games. They might be the hardest to master but imo you dont need to be anywhere near mastering them to have fun with 'em. The characters also have more novel/unique abilities from each other than in most other fighting games making learning what the strategies are more fun and easy to me (especially with the character specific tutorials giving you the gist of what they can do). I also find that making mistakes in these faster paced games rarely frustrate me, making them paradoxically easier to process. Thats obviously all personal though.

Even though I only dabble in fighting games I do have a stick, I am incapable of pulling off stuff like dragonpunch or quater-circle back to forward motions consistently with any post snes dpad. My first time using a stick was a revelation to me, pulling off moves was suddenly not an issue anymore.

It's pretty subjective what even makes a game like this accessible. Street Fighter V is purer mechanically, but knowing when to use what strength of a special move and input nuances is pretty hard to get down. Guilty Gear has a good tutorial, but is also one of the denser, systems-heavy fighters out there. If you want to play an arcsys game I'd recommend the latest Blazblue or especially Persona Ultimax, though the later definitely won't have an online community at this point. It's not too hard to make cool stuff come out in Tekken and have low-level fun, but poor tutorial makes getting beyond that hard. I'd honestly like to say Virtua Fighter or Soul Calibur are good places to start, but since they aren't around at present, I'd probably recommend Injustice, even though the game has fairly complex meter management mechanics.

Of the current games, Street Fighter 5 hands down. It's nowhere near the best, but mechanically and fundamentally if you get comfortable with Street Fighter you will have the basics to pick up most any other fighting game.