they’re so fucking unenjoyable. they ALL are pure brain poison that punishes you for missing an arbitrary 50 button combo and has the SINGLE WORST character movement of any video game genre. every movement button either completely changes your moves or gets misread. imagine making a non-platformer game where JUMPING SIDE TO SIDE is the most precise way to get around and god help you if you want to attack AND move. 0 people are actually capable of the kind of perfect input required to do anything outside of button-mashing while relying on visual queues. you either spend hours non-stopping practicing perfect inputs to get the timings right or are button-mashing in all but name. no one is actually “good” at fighting games, they’ve just learned the order of buttons they should hit for whatever one character they’ve locked themselves into in the game and hit it over-and-over as fast as possible and claim victory/defeat. and that’s probably the worst aspect design-wise: it is UNFATHOMABLE to me that an entire genre of game exists where the selling point is the amount and diversity of playable characters, but playing any more than one of them at any point reduces your gameplay to spray-and-pray compare that to racing games, which also have the prime selling point of the amount and diversity of usable vehicles, but the skills associated with each one viably translate out to any other vehicle build. spending time with a certain build obviously makes you better with it, but switching between vehicles isn’t \*literally certain\* to handicap your ability to play at the same level, the way that switching between fighters does in ANY fighting game. and this is a genre-wide problem: mortal kombat, soulcalibur, smash bros, etc. fighting games either have diversity among characters and suffer gameplay wise, or are incentivized to make all characters play similarly. for example, “Alien”, from the Alien movie and game franchise, could be the absolute coolest character in any fighting game, but instead in mortal kombat it’s just a humanoid bipedal fighter with a tail. they HAD to make it play similarly too other characters for gameplay to be viable, which sacrifices all the coolest potentials of adding a literal xenemorph to the game, while making its moveset as dull are arbitrary as any other, but with cool graphics. it’s so fucking frustrating that there’s no way to make a fighting game with diverse characters without having the act of playing any character over your “main” completely compromise gameplay. fighting games are just categorically unfixable in terms of game design and balance. not one adult has even a single healthy relationship with another human being and enjoys playing fighting games. but the movement in fighting games holy shit it’s so fucking bad. trying to control where your character is in a fighting game is like throwing your shit at an industrial sized fan, while getting hit by the backblast of an RPG, while hanging upside down the best i’ve ever seen is either Dragonball’s flying or SoulCalibur’s 3D dodging. any genre where the highest quality games are Dragonball and SoulCalibur doesn’t deserve the embarrassment of existing. like FFS fighting in Dragonball is a fucking chore and shouldn’t even be considered fighting as much as chasing in circles. and if you play smash you’re honestly just a pedophile. straight up. that shit is so fucking weird to me; it’s an inconsistent mess of characters from different universes with 0 attempt at game balance that requires hundreds of hours of practice per character to get ANY enjoyment meanwhile it has like what? 50 characters? idek because it’s so fucking boring that i’d never waste my time paying it attention. it should be a crime to market it game on its range of characters while having that kind of NECESSARY per-character time-investment like jesus fucking christ, if you actually know the down+b for every smash character i seriously hope you see a therapist, for your own sake and for the sake of the 9 year olds who these games are made for if improving skill at fighting enemies in video games is the enjoyment someone is looking for, dark souls or even batman: arkham night or any spider-man game is infinitely less rage enduring and requires WAYYY less time investment. and that’s not to mention games that co-center world exploration like the witcher or assassins creed i’m obviously just raging out over the 1’s and 0’s i don’t like at this point, but i’m actually mind-blown that anyone would spend their time in shitty fighting simulators when they could be playing a game with MORE CONTROL over the fights and other content. like even fucking Watch Dogs is more fun to me, and those games are ass, but at least when i press a button i know what it does and it does it consistently and predictably i cannot imagine coming home and thinking “oh, i know what sounds like fun, trying to win a competition based on my ability to reproduce a 50-button sequence completely from muscle memory” i’d rather just blast my mind with xanax and build a house in minecraft LMAO and for fucks sake playing against a sweat-lord who’s put in a thousand hours into one of these fighting games (but hasn’t ever played more than two of the 50 characters lol) is objectively worse than human torture. you ALWAYS just end in either a grab/throw spiral or bouncing up and down like a piñata without ANY control of your character whatsoever. HOW IS THAT FUN? even for the sweat-lord cheeto man doing the juggling, HOW IS THAT FUN? god they’re repugnant af when i regain control of my emotions i’m gonna look over this thread again and try to psychoanalyze and synthesize the reasons i hate fighting games into a coherent message… might even write a medium article lol last post in this thread is a genuine plea: can someone tell me 1 reason to play a fighting game over a racing game or call of duty zombies or any 2+ player platformer or coop-rpg?