They weren’t my ideas to begin with, and a lot of them have been developed further and expressed more clearly since then. We just have better words for things, like saying hitbox vs hurtbox, instead of calling everything a hitbox. Someone had to be clever enough to find a precise term that stuck, which is an ongoing process that takes time and effort. So here are a few articles and videos that have done a better job of capturing and expanding the concepts i tried to convey. I’ll keep adding to this list from time to time.
Footsies Trilemma by HiFight
– Simplified rundown of the most common fundamentals of footsies: hit attack (advancing attack), cover attack (preemptive poke), and whiff punish attack
The Art of Footsies, Chapter 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 by Johnny Worms
– Concise and eloquent breakdown of the “footsies triangle” as whiff punishment, approaching, and poking – along with feinting as a half-layer for each option
The Rules of Footsies by Celia Wagar
– An expanded overview of the various rock-paper-scissors triangles involved in footsies, with detailed examples of ground-run-centric anime fighting game interactions
GG Fundamentals by Shinjin
– Guilty Gear neutral may not look much like SF footsies, but there are some analogous concepts that map to airdash-centric gameplay, as many GG/Marvel players have pointed out
(Mis)understanding Samurai Shodown by Sleepmode
– Excellent comparison between SF footsies and SamSho neutral at the other end of the mobility spectrum, illustrating how the paradigm can shift to accommodate slow movement
Tekkenomics 101 by AverageVideoGameJoe
– An extensive compilation thread of Tekken resources from various creators, covering virtually every fundamental concept to get you started
The Joy of Footsies by pattheflip
– Short article about a long set of SF5 footsies, with some really solid takeaways
The Fighting Game Glossary by Infil
– Detailed definitions of basically every fighting game term across multiple subgenres, complete with examples and even Japanese translations!
One last note: Footsies isn’t the only style of play, or the most admirable, or always the most effective, but it tends to form a pretty good foundation for a fighting game when it’s viable. Even in classic games, there were footsies-heavy matchups and others where it wasn’t much of a factor. We were always excited to find match videos where someone played great footsies, because even at the highest levels it wasn’t that common. Some of the non-footsies matchups were pretty fun and intricate too! So no, old games were never all about footsies either. But even if you prefer a different style of play, it’s still important to understand footsies concepts so you don’t just get beat up by stuff you can’t parse.
More on the way! Had to update the site theme because it was so old that comments stopped working. Not how i was planning on spending my Tuesday night, but software’s gotta software.
Alright i think that’s a good start. Thanks to SSK and a few other folks for the excellent recommendations. There were a few others i was tempted to include, like this awesome GGStrive neutral explanation by Krackatoa on Secret Sauce. But i lean more towards scripted/edited videos because they tend to be more concise than live streams.
I’m sure players will find better and better ways to explain/illustrate this stuff, as well as adapting it to (hopefully) more popular fighting games in the future. So if i happen to see anything that’s a significant step up, i can always move some links down here to make room for more. (Mostly just want to avoid too much redundancy in the list.)
Appreciate that you’re still around
What would you say are the “other styles” besides footsies? I thought footsies was fundamentals that everyone applied regardless of style
People use the term in different ways, so it’s worth clarifying. In my mind footsies involves some kind of granular movement and generally occupies the mid-range. Some people generalize the term to mean any mindgames involving movement or any mindgames at all, which is fine, but i think the term becomes less useful. You could also say that footsies is a subset of zoning, and that everything in fighting games is either zoning or mixups, which might be accurate. But zoning doesn’t necessarily emphasize movement, so i think footsies is a useful term that refers to something more specific.
I’d say that close-range mixups, very defensive zoning, or (in certain situations) pure runaway are some alternative styles to footsies. With some characters, you can just bulldoze through the mid-range and just start forcing mixup loops. Or you can just hang back and put stuff on the screen without having to react to any small movements your opponent makes – just whether they’ll jump or not.
Since the mid-range tends to be pretty valuable in most games/matchups, usually you have to know how to play footsies to some extent in order to do whatever else your gameplan entails. But that extent depends on how much your opponent is able to force you to play footsies.