As you become increasingly proficient with a character, you naturally develop a repertoire of attack strings that just plain work. Whether it’s a sweep after a low short or an uppercut after a blocked fireball, everyone seems to fall for certain patterns.

Free damage for minimal effort is always nice, but the inherent danger is falling into the trap of playing footsies on autopilot. What happens when you face someone who sees it coming and knows the counter? How quickly do you adapt? Are you prepared to adapt? Have you taken the time to plot out and practice the counter to the counter?

The truth is, you can get pretty far just by watching top players and mimicking their combat maneuvers without understanding the active thought processes behind them. Many beginner and intermediate level players will have trouble overcoming refined tournament tactics.

There’s nothing wrong with relying on proven, successful strategies. However, running into someone who can beat you will set you two steps back – not just one. After all, how can you neutralize their rebuttal if you don’t even know why your gameplan worked in the first place?

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The way i see it, defensive success boils down to two tasks: capitalizing on opportunities and maintaining a realistic gameplan. Defense has always been clearer than offense, and always more reliable in tournaments. It doesn’t take as much practice to win with defense.

Imagine you’ve got two evenly experienced players. The offensive-minded player’s job is to create openings and capitalize on them. The defensive player’s job is to minimize damage at every opportunity while gradually chipping away at the opponent’s lifebar. If they’ve both been swamped at work for the past month, the defensive player comes out way ahead because the offensive player will fail to capitalize on an opening – drop a combo, mistime a crossup, get too close on a throw attempt, whatever. Generally speaking, you have to be more on-point to win with offense.

More specifically, the term “capitalize” conveys a different meaning to a defensive player than it does to an offensive player. It’s not simply a matter of dealing damage. Let’s say you bait an uppercut. From a rushdown standpoint, you want to punish with the most damaging combo possible, which also gives you the best chance of maintaining momentum. Depending on your opponent’s habits, sometimes it’s better to sacrifice a little guaranteed damage in order to set up an immediate throw mixup. Chaos favors offense.

Conversely, turtles should generally avoid ambiguous situations. Structure favors defense. If you’re confident in your ability to counter everything your opponent does, then you shouldn’t be gambling with offense, right? Thus, the defensive definition of “capitalize” is all about inflicting as much damage as possible while maintaining superior positioning.

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When most people hear the word “rushdown,” they visualize reckless offense. Believe it or not, that attitude actually works more often than it should, but not always and not against everyone. Of course, the more reliable approach is building a sophisticated offense on the fundamentals of footsies, but both methods share a lot of common ground.

There’s some vague threshold of aggression which varies with each individual you face, but crossing it overwhelms them. It fries their circuits and they start playing markedly sloppier or letting you get away with openings they clearly ought to punish. If you can make it past that line and maintain that aggressive pace, the risks you take will be counterbalanced by the mistakes they start making under pressure.

On the other hand, the closer you get to this threshold without crossing it, the more likely it is that you’ll get punished at every opportunity. What this means is, if you’re going to throw caution to the wind and go all in, you’d better be ready to run at full speed until somebody stops getting up. You can’t take your foot off the pedal, not even for a moment.

Rushdown is risky. That’s the nature of the game. There’s no way around it. Your success hinges on your ability to accelerate the match to the point where your opponent can’t think clearly anymore. This is going to sound obvious, but if whatever you’re doing isn’t working, then either speed it up or slow it down. (Who says you can’t have slow offense?)

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Frame data can shackle your creativity. If you don’t understand it completely – and nobody does – access to frame data can limit what you think is possible. There’s a whole range of fundamental tactics that top players have been using since Hyper Fighting, which are just now being explained in terms of frame data. Who knows how much longer that development path would’ve taken had frame data gotten in everyone’s way from day one?

Unless you can visualize how fighting game engines run better than i can, be careful about restricting all your ideas to frame data. Even the most experienced combo video makers commit mistakes when interpreting and applying that breadth of information.

Not to mention, published frame data neglects or misrepresents a broad spectrum of elements including jumping attack properties, cancelability windows, elusive hitboxes, effective ranges, pushback distances, and a whole slew of projectile characteristics. If you think about it, the sheer amount of critical information regularly left out of frame data tables is simply staggering.

The question is, how much of your game do you want to put on the line for some oversimplified numbers you read on a chart? In truth, the way to learn fighting games hasn’t changed since the first generation. You simply browse through the available cast, narrow down your choices to a handful of characters which appeal to you, and choose one to start with. Spend an hour or two learning their moves, and then it’s on to matches – either against the CPU or preferably against human competition.

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