Fighting on the Streets: 2 months with Street Fighter V
At some point in the thralls of my Puyo Puyo fever–where I’d stay up all night practicing stair patterns and T-Spins–it became clear that I’d caught the competitive bug. Playing with friends drove me to improve, and getting absolutely bodied by others playing online made me want to understand what techniques I needed to be adding to my arsenal.
Eventually I came to realize that Puyo Puyo Tetris was pretty much a fighting game–you needed quick reactions, practiced techniques and the ability to read an opponent. All of that had just been obscured by my lack of basic knowledge. My practice regimen also wasn’t unlike what happened in a fighting game training mode–hours of repeated motions to nail a specific technique. I’d finally entered the mindset you needed learn a fighting game.
Enter Street Fighter V.
I didn’t have a deep rationale for picking Street Fighter V. I had some affection for the series, spent a lot of time playing the Gameboy Advance versions of Street Fighter II and Street Fighter Alpha, or watching the various anime. I played some rounds of Third Strike with friends and even found myself excited about a lot of what Street Fighter IV did. But even with the significant additions of SFIV I never found an in for learning fighting games. Luckily, Street Fighter V proved to be one of the most accessible fighters yet. Well, as far as the actual fighting was concerned anyway.
One of the most profound contrasts in SFV is how many changes it makes to make the game easier for beginners, and how little it bothers to explain itself. There’s a half-hearted mandatory tutorial, some non-interactive demonstrations for characters that sometimes don’t even cover all their moves, and a trial mode that asked me to do difficult combos that might not even be relevant.
At the same time there’s a much heavier emphasis on the spacing and finding an opening. Damage on normal attacks is higher, requiring less need for long combos, and the timing for combos is much easier (though still not exactly easy). For the first time I found myself appreciating the utility of each character’s basic attacks, instead of being obsessed with landing special and super moves.
It’s easy to see how Street Fighter might look like a game about complicated inputs and special moves. When I played with other beginners just knowing how to do special moves or a basic combo gives you such an advantage over other players it seems like the surefire way to success. It was easy to blame my losses on my inability to perform complicated inputs instead of understanding why I needed to be doing those moves to start with. Learning normal moves let me respond to each situation with a single button. So instead of focusing on landing big damage with flashy special moves I started to look for ways to control my opponent, to push my opponent them into a corner where they’d make more mistakes. Two months in and I’m coming away from matches with other rookies winning by barely pressing anything other than the hard kick button.
Getting down such basic knowledge isn’t a big deal in the long run, but it’s given me something that’s been missing from other competitive games: a tangible sense of improvement. Modern shooters and team based games have so many variables that it’s often difficult to tell where I made a mistake. Street Fighter is more binary than that. I lost because something hit me in the face too many times. There’s a certain pain in knowing that only I was responsible for losing, and frustration in not knowing how to deal with it, but it’s always clear how it happened. And when I know that it’s easier to find a solution.
That’s why one of my favorite features in Street Fighter V has been the ability to immediately rematch a player. When I fail it gives me a chance to analyze my actions and find a way to get around a particular move or character. It’s a chance to start understanding an opponent and tell them “naw that won’t work on me a second time”. More often than not I’ll lose the first match, but that will tell me if they’re playing with me or if they’re following a flowchart of moves hoping to score a hit.
This is the point where I learned how to deny an opponent. I began to read my opponent’s pattern, see their train of thought, and repeatedly shut them down. I’d be there every time they tried to jump in to knock them to the floor. Then when they tried to get up I’d be there to throw them back down. Then I’d do it again. And when they found an opening? I’d stand at the perfect distance for their attack and bait them into it, just It’d get into an opponent’s head, push them into the corner, and force them to make mistakes until victory was assured. I’d know those mistakes well, because they were the same ones I’d made a hundred times before.
It’s clear that even at this level, or especially at this level, psychology is as much a factor as my ability to transfer my intentions into button presses. A good skirmish can give me the momentum to win an entire set of matches. A bad trade can put me into the same loop of mistakes I was trying to force from my opponents. Staying clearheaded and thinking has turned out to be a skill just as important to build up.
This goes along with the change in mentality I needed to have any fun. The truth is that playing Street Fighter V online means you’ll be doing a lot of losing. For a long while, it’ll be nothing but losing. Even now, after two months, my win ratio is about 25-33% depending on when you check. That means I’m losing 75% of my games on a bad day. But looking at it another way, i’m winning 1 in 3 matches on a good day. Not impressive, but not bad considering how tough some of the competition is.
With that in mind, I made a 50% win ratio my goal. That’d mean I’d win every other game, but I’d still be learning. The key is that I’d made learning my goal rather than winning. I was here to enjoy the process of learning itself, with the recognition that winning would come later. Focusing on that has made it exciting to have a close match, even when I’ve lost, because I know that I’ve been outplayed, but that I can improve and maybe one day defeat them.
It’s a hard mentality to keep up. Seeing yourself lose rank points after a defeat can make it hard to see anything but a win as worthwhile. It doesn’t help that you only get in-game currency on a win. It’s even worse now that I’ve made it out of the rookie league, which makes me feel like I should be easily outmatching other rookies, despite knowing I’ve won against others higher ranked than me as well.
This is where Street Fighter gets the most difficult to play, and frustration comes to an all time high. I panic, lose my temper and become upset when I fail to do motions or simple combos. It stings even worse when I lose to someone who can do these combos, especially when I know I made fewer mistakes than them, but can’t do the damage to take advantage of their mistakes.
I’m at the crossroads now. The progress I’ve made so far has been satisfying, and more than any other game I find Street Fighter V consuming my thoughts. But progress is slow, difficult, and discouraging. Practicing and playing matches sometimes feels like a chore. On the worst days it feels like I’ve made no progress, that I’ve wasted my time. From here I’ll have to find the right people to play with, and the ability to keep that future focused mindset. Only time will tell how positive of an influence it becomes.