When players start venturing into the competitive side of fighting games, most people want to be like Alex Valle and “rush that shit down!” It’s no surprise; everyone wants to be the crowd-favorite daredevil destroying opponents in twenty seconds or less.

That plan works like a charm as long as you’re battling other risk-takers. Then you face your first seasoned defensive rival and it’s like running into a concrete wall. They’ll gradually slow down your game and eventually take away most of what you enjoy doing. When that begins happening on a regular basis, it’s easy to get discouraged.

To make matters worse, the reality is that some fighting games are defensive in nature. If you ever see a tier list with Vega, Honda, and Dhalsim at the top, it’s going to mean an uphill battle for aggressive specialists. Along with Guile and Sagat, these characters tend to have a strong influence in slowing down match pace.

However, the real problem is that many players are guilty of romanticizing the ideal. Let me tell you, nobody gets a clear path to becoming a top player. You will have to face a number of forks in the road where you have to decide if you’re willing to do what it takes to get to the next level. Street Fighter IV in particular seems to have evolved into a more zoning-oriented defensive game. Still, there are no realities in SF4 that are remotely as harsh as CvS2 or SFA3 or MvC2 any other bullshit-filled tournament title.

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The term “footsies” refers to a subset of zoning focusing primarily on close range normals, where the most common goals are to knock the opponent down and set up crossup opportunities. What the hell does that even mean?

Unfortunately it means literally everything at the core of competitive Street Fighter strategy. That makes it a difficult subject to cover in one session. None of the short definitions are useful and it takes time to process conceptual ideas before they can be converted into anything practical. I’ll give it a shot, but i have a feeling i’ll have to come back to this on several occasions because there’s always more to it.

Footsies is figuring out what your opponent wants to do and punishing them for being predictable. Footsies is putting your opponent in a situation where they have to take risks they were trying to avoid. Footsies is knowing both characters’ attack ranges better than your opponent does, and finding ways to exploit that advantage.

The concept is so complex, that you may as well define it as “close-range critical thinking.” When you try to create a comprehensive definition of footsies, that definition refuses to end. Watson, Valle, and Choi could probably write books on the subject.

The simplest concrete example of footsies is walking into your opponent’s attack range to bait them into poking at you, walking back out of range to let their attack whiff, then punishing their recovery animation with a sweep. When someone decides to learn footsies, this is commonly the first tactic attempted. However, anyone who’s actually tried this will tell you that (alert) people stop falling for it very quickly. Then what do you do? Well, mastery of footsies is knowing how to punish everything, including your opponent’s decision not to poke.

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Zoning means acquiring and maintaining certain positions on the screen favorable to your character’s arsenal but disadvantageous and restrictive to your opponent. Rushdown, footsies, turtling, runaway, and all other major categories of tactical gameplans employed by fighting game players involve some aspect of zoning.

In some cases, these areas occupy enormous chunks of the screen. For example, take almost any Street Fighter character and draw an imaginary vertical line 1/3 screen distance away from their foot. If you put Dhalsim anywhere in the remaining 2/3 of the screen, he’s automatically got a significant advantage that you’ll need to overcome in order to hurt him.

Conversely, if you put Zangief anywhere within that same 2/3 area, he’s automatically got a significant disadvantage that you’ll want to preserve. Of course if Zangief finds his way into your nearby 1/3 zone without leaving the ground, suddenly he becomes quite scary.

In other cases, these areas can overlap in complex and subtle arrangements. For instance, Guile is generally dominant from long distance because he can throw Sonic Booms at will, and your opponent has to take risks to deal with them. If your opponent somehow reaches point blank range while carrying momentum, Guile’s in trouble.

However, the interval between these extremes is actually reversed. Guile has an advantage when your opponent is a few steps away as long as Guile’s still within c.MK range. That’s Guile’s best poke and it pushes opponents away when it connects, enabling you to throw Sonic Booms again. However if your opponent stays a few pixels outside of Guile’s c.MK range, that poke becomes unsafe, severely limiting Guile’s options. Therefore the entire strategic playfield looks like a fuzzy checkerboard.

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Mirror matches tend to be problematic in fighting games, because both players have the same exact general objective, often without sufficient versatility to properly impede that objective. Either they devolve into complete turtlefests (ST Guile vs Guile), mindless rushdown (ST Vega vs Vega), or blind guessing (ST Honda vs Honda).

Somehow Ryu vs Ryu is always exempt. It’s always a good matchup, even in games which are competitively subpar otherwise. By contrast, most characters only get worthwhile mirror matches in one or two games, e.g., CvS2 Guile, 3S Chun Li, and SFA2 Akuma.

On a fundamental design level, Ryu is arguably the most fleshed out character in Street Fighter. He has answers for everything, but executing them requires planning and risk. While there are dominant areas in Ryu’s arsenal, he has almost nothing that would be considered “free.” For instance, there are countless situations where Guile can safely throw Sonic Booms, whereas one careless Hadoken is all it takes for Ryu to lose the match. Even his famous fireball traps are only guaranteed for two or three reps at maximum; the rest are mindgames.

 

Since Ryu has a direct answer for every telegraphed angle of attack, everything in this mirror match has to be earned the hard way. There are no shortcuts, and establishing the upper hand in the ground game is worth a lot. All of the wonderful fundamental nuances of zoning and footsies take center stage here.

Ryu vs Ryu is an awesome learning tool. Even minor mistakes committed during the course of a round become immediately evident, because there are no instant comeback shenanigans to mask them. Of course, the term “minor” is absolutely relative. There’s nothing like the shock of getting demolished by a seasoned veteran for errors you never bothered correcting because you never thought they were punishable. That’s the beauty of the matchup: it’ll go as deep as you want to take it.

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The Street Fighter series has gone through several major arcs over its 20+ year history. Each new release has received heavy tournament play all over the world for many years at a time. In order for a competitive game to survive under such harsh conditions, it must be elegantly designed, meticulously balanced, and of course somewhat lucky. After all, if a team of fifty designers and testers spend two years working on a game, a community of a fifty thousand players will surpass their combined man-hours within the first week of public availability. Here’s the widely accepted list of Capcom fighting games to have passed the test of time.

Street Fighter II Series

SF2: Hyper Fighting – Quite possibly the purest Street Fighter game ever made, HF demands incredibly sound fundamental skills without providing any super moves or custom combos to bail players out of tough spots. Its quick pace builds reaction time and helps improve concentration. Almost every character on the roster is competitively viable and the top tier contains a broad variety of styles. It may seem a little intimidating at first, but HF is easily one of the most accessible Street Fighter games ever produced in terms of how long it takes to reach “the good part” of competitive play.

Super SF2 Turbo – Even after fifteen years, ST remains widely supported in the tournament scene. It introduced super moves and throw softening to Street Fighter, along with countless new bells and whistles such as overheads and juggle combos. No advantages transfer from round to round because super meter levels do not carry over. The established top tier contains at least five characters: Dhalsim, O.Sagat, Vega, Balrog, and Ryu – with Bison, Chun Li, and Dee Jay also making strong showings.

The Rest – World Warrior is always fun to play for nostalgia’s sake, just to see how many things have changed since the beginning. However, WW is inherently flawed due to the inability to choose the same character as well as the lack of reversals to escape throw setups. Champion Edition solves the reversal problem, but doesn’t properly balance the boss characters – especially Bison, whose insane Scissor Kick frame advantage actually leads to lockdown strings. Super Street Fighter 2 managed to hurt the entire Capcom fighting game scene with its painfully slow gameplay after Hyper Fighting raised the bar across the board. Many years later, Hyper Street Fighter 2 mixed together all these versions to create an entertaining but ultimately unbalanced mashup, with several unpleasant control bugs to boot.

Street Fighter Alpha Series

SFA2/SFA3 – Depending on who you ask, either Alpha 2 or Alpha 3 (but usually not both) will be listed as a classic title. In a lot of ways, SFA2 revitalized the Street Fighter community after SSF2 drove so many people away. SFA2 is fast and chaotic fun, yet still fundamentally sound in terms of what it takes to win. By contrast, SFA3 is one of the most technical Street Fighter games ever created, with a wonderfully unique combo engine to explore. Most importantly, A2 and A3 changed the fighting game genre forever by introducing two different kinds of Custom Combos. It’s impossible to discuss either game without delving into the merits and downfalls of the Custom Combo feature. Therefore it’s not surprising that most of the disagreement between A2 fans and A3 fans comes down to CC preferences. A2 Customs generate insane amounts of damage for relatively little work, but thankfully they’re over very quickly. A3 Customs manifest with much greater diversity and require way more technical skill, but they can drag on forever.

The Rest – As with many of Capcom’s first attempts, SFA1 is relatively slow, somewhat bland, contains some new poorly designed or implemented feature (in this case cast-wide chain combos), and contains one or two massively overpowered characters (in this case Ken and Guy). Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold (or Street Fighter Zero 2 Alpha in Japan) were both slight upgrades over SFA2, with slight changes made in the interest of balance – Alpha Counters costing an extra half level of meter and weakening Custom Combos in every way. However, these upgrades have never been well-received by the Capcom fighting game community because nerfing everything usually comes off as a lazy shortcut and makes the game less fun. Hyper Street Fighter Alpha is a mashup of the entire Alpha series similar to HSF2, but HSFA received too little tournament play to accurately determine its status, despite being obviously more polished than HSF2.

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