Total Begginner at Fighting Games in need of help

Here. Might be a bit to read but there is enough to get a clearer perspective of things.

Check out the playlists for these two youtube accounts: vesperarcade and ultrachentv, they have some good tutorials in there I think that are not just how to do combos, but theory and strategy. Especially the latter. Lots of "how to play fighting games" in a basic way. He uses SFIV/SFV mostly I think, but they're all fundamental concepts anyways.

Just learn the combo's and special moves in that game and practice till you can be beat the computer, worry about the complicated stuff whenever you decide to up the difficulty or play online. Back in the day before online games etc, i used to just pick my favorite character and do a practice mode and up the difficulty till i got decent. (did this mostly with tekken games)

I don't know what to tell you duder, you're not going to get a lot of guides that focus on beating fighting game AI. The only way you get to experience the depth of the intended combat design of a fighting game, is either by playing against specialized AI that has a human-like 200 millisecond reaction delay built in and makes decisions in a very probabilistic/mind-gamey way like people do (the only place I've ever seen this is in Killer Instinct's Shadow Lab), or by playing against actual human beings.

Traditional fighting game AI just gets to play a fundamentally different game. Examples:

• Your pokes can only counter an opponent who is attempting to go in and throw you if an opponent's decision to go in is a commitment that gets them hit by a poke that they can't react to if you go for the poke. If they're capable of reacting to that poke (an impossible feat for human players), then they're playing a mechanically different game to the one you're playing, one where their "go in and throw" option is basically risk-free, which means your pokes basically don't help you control space against the AI. Fighting game AI will often do this "Terminator walk of death" thing where they'll just advance on you and block anything you throw at them, because their decision to advance isn't a risk.
• Mixups, where you randomly choose from two or more options to use against an opponent which must be defended against in different ways (e.g. high/low mixups) aren't potent offensive tools against AI unless the moves involved are flagged as moves that the AI should let hit more frequently. It's common for casual players to think that overhead attacks are slow, bad moves, because they can take more than twice as long as other normal moves to start up, and the AI just blocks or stuffs them, whereas a human player defaults to crouch block to block fast low attacks and must switch to stand block to block the overhead, and that slow overhead is still on the edge of human reaction time, hence hard for human players to block on reaction.
• The AI can't be conditioned. In fighting games there's an important concept known as frame advantage, which is where you recover from performing a move some frames before your opponent recovers from the stun induced by blocking said move. A frame trap occurs when you have frame advantage and you immediately press a fast button -- if your opponent also presses a fast button, then your button hits first because you got to press your button earlier thanks to frame advantage, so you win. Frame traps punish impatience (you have frame advantage, so it's your offensive turn, and your opponent should sit and block until you do something that doesn't have frame advantage, handing them their offensive turn, or until your moves push them out to neutral range, instead of being impatient and trying to hit you), and they also condition your opponent to block, which means you can go for a throw or a high/low mixup or something when they're expecting the frame trap. Traditional fighting game AI knows as soon as you press the button whether you're running your frame trap or going for a mixup, so it can just sit and block the frame traps and disrupt or defend against the mixups without sweating about guessing which one you're going to do.

Beating AI eventually becomes more about exploiting flaws in the AI's behaviour: find a situation where they always try to start something, do an invincible dragon punch, rinse and repeat until they're dead. In a way, higher difficulty AI is _worse_ about all this stuff than lower-difficulty AI, so if you want to enjoy the single-player content of a fighting game, I'd probably turn the difficulty down.

@bouldernozzle: fwiw I'm terrible at fighting games but I can usually handle the arcade mode/campaign in most of them.

All you really need to be able to do is find a character where you can execute specials and combos reliably, so you can focus on blocking and waiting for openings etc. To play these well those moves need to be reflexes for you, so you can focus on what you see on the screen. The Ai is going to cheat in many cases, so you need to be an offensive force to win.

Injustice if I remember picks which character you fight as in Story mode, that can be tough if you get to a match where you don't have good command of your characters. So in a way it's tougher than most. Otoh it does force you to learn a decent number of characters as a result.

You might be better off with something like Street Fighter IV (not V because it doesn't have an arcade mode) for your first fighting game as it will let you play through the whole thing with one character. Plus pretty much all fighting games are derivative of the concepts established by the SF series. If you understand SF, you'll have a good base knowledge for the rest. That's certainly how I got my start back in the day.

I mashed through Injustice and found it an enjoyable time. It does pick your character for story mode so you're not settling with a single character for long. Some work better than others and there's maybe 3 mirror matches involved.

This is the basic concept that governs all fighting games (and many other games as well). You don't need to learn the numbers to make use of it, but for explaining it helps. The thing to pay attention to most here, is the advantage number. When you do a move that stuns the opponent longer than it takes for you to recover and move again, you gain advantage over the following situation. In the above example, any move you do will come out 4 frames faster than what the opponent decides to do. Letting you use slower moves to beat fast moves, or even using a move that's fast enough to hit while they are still in stun to create a "combo", basically an unescapable combination of attacks. Frame data like this governs everything you do including movement and special attacks like fireballs. A dash for example in street fighter V tends to include 22~ frames or so of vulnerability while you are moving where an opponent can stick out an attack and hit you.

Now if you understand the basics, we can start ignoring the numbers a bit more and just simplify it to a more usable concept. Advantage/disadvantage and punishable. A move where you both recover simultaneously is considered 0 or neutral. Whatever you decide to do will start at the same time and the faster move will win. On advantage "positive/+" your move will start first, and if you use a fast move it will beat out equally quick moves giving you a clean hit. On disadvantage "negative/-" the opposite is true and your opponent will be able to beat you. On VERY bad disadvantage a move might make you recover so slow that the opponent gets a free hit in, "punishing" you for using it. The regular example for this is the shoryuken, which leaves Ryu falling from the sky slowly when it gets blocked. The enemy can have tea and crumpets before you land and still hit you on the way down.

So as a beginner, one thing you can try and do (this will lose you games first, win you games later). Is just to try and light punch after anything you or the opponent does. This will give you a decent indication of who is at advantage after something so you can adjust what you want to do. If you get hit a lot trying to punch, the opponent is almost certainly at advantage and you should start blocking there instead. If your punch lands a lot you are maybe on advantage or neutral and can experiment with starting your offense from there. This isn't entirely foolproof because humans are humans and don't time attacks perfectly, so some of the information you get won't be 100% accurate. But good enough to be usable for a start, you can always adjust later if stronger opponents with better timing start correcting some assumptions.

If you pay attention to advantage or disadvantage in it's most basic form and just try to understand when it's your turn to attack or defend. You can develop an understanding for the flow of a match much faster. It'll definitely help.

Two smaller tips to conclude. Get a friend that's also new and play each other. Just experiment and mess around and you will find cool stuff while also practicing the inputs and execution of the game without getting ruined. Getting past the initial hump of feeling like everything is difficult and takes too much concentration is a lot easier if your partner has the same concerns, so you can move past it together. And the last tip is the eternal one that you will work on forever (I know I still do for sure). That's anti airing. Finding what attacks you have to hit someone out of a jump or aerial attack and then doing it. Sounds simple, but it's actually incredibly difficult and nuanced. You will probably never be perfect at it, no one really is. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try though. Stopping people from jumping at you is massively helpful. It'll actually win you rounds outright in the long run if you can get one or two anti airs in.

TLDR: I know not everyone no one likes wall of texts, but this was the shortest I could muster. If you understand what I attempted to explain, it'll help you look at the game from a less confusing angle. Kinda the first step into seeing the matrix I suppose. I think this post is useful against AI as well, but it's more to create a foundation to work off of for playing against people.