Celia Alexis Wagar's CritPoints

The first step in picking up any fighting game is picking a character. Character crisis is a familiar experience for any fighting game player, from beginner to veteran. Even seasoned professionals with decades of experience go through character crisis.

If you’re completely new to fighting games, there are 3 basic mindsets to how you should pick a character:

1. Eat your peas and carrots, pick a shoto.
2. Pick a character you think is fun or cool!
3. 
   

   

I’m very much a “peas and carrots” kind of person with a lot of beginners. I think some characters are easier to learn the fundamentals with (blocking, anti-air, zoning, footsies), and I typically have beginners play those characters before picking up more advanced ones. In most games, there is a character that emphasizes the core systems of that game, the core ideas of fighting games in general, and simplifies these concepts in a digestible way. And in most games, that character is a “shoto”.

Shoto is an FGC slang term for a character that is like Ryu or Ken from Street Fighter, meaning they have an average fireball projectile, an invincible dragon punch uppercut, and usually some type of advancing melee kick. These characters are incredibly common across 2d fighting games, and the main character of most games is a shoto. The term comes from a magazine that mistakenly claimed Ryu and Ken used “Shotokan Karate”, and the name stuck. The equivalent to a shoto in other subgenres might be a Mishima in Tekken, or Marth/Mario in Smash Bros.

Shoto type characters can be helpful for beginner players, because fireballs and invincible dragon punches are two of the universal constants across the fighting game genre, and together they create a simple and fundamental gameplan of fireball/anti-air. Force the opponent into the air with fireballs, then catch them jumping with an anti-air move. Shotos typically also have good poking moves that they can frequently get short combos off of.

The invincible dragon punch also gives beginners something they can do on wakeup, and quickly educates them on why they shouldn’t always DP on wakeup.

By simplifying fighting games in this way, beginners don’t have to worry about as many things at the lower levels of play, which can help them learn the core concepts they’ll be using and running into across fighting games in general.

Peas and Carrots Make Me Sick!

The drawback of this approach is: Not everyone likes shotos! Being told, “pick this beginner character,” can lead to people playing a character they hate and quitting the game. The fundamentals you learn with shotos might not be relevant if you go on to play a grappler, rushdown, or setplay type of character that lacks the shoto tools of fireball and dragon punch.

So the emerging advice is to just pick a character you enjoy. The biggest thing drawing many people to fighting games is their characters, and character choice is a big part of how people express themselves in fighting games. A player is more likely to stick with the game if they’re having fun with it, instead of using a bland character they dislike just because it’s supposed to teach them a lesson.

The downside to just picking any character is, you might pick a crap character, or a ridiculously hard character that requires a lot of time in the training room to get anywhere with, and that can also be a turn-off to beginners. I’ve seen a lot of people pick a character they thought was cute, only to find out they take 2000 hours in the training room only to still be garbage. Every time I sit down with a new 3rd strike player, I tell them, “Don’t pick Twelve, Q, or Sean, just trust me.” And just recently, I had someone quit a character because they were a stance character, making them rather difficult to play.

The last approach is of course: PICK A TOP TIER! Look at the tier list, see who’s on top, pick that character. At a lower level, tier lists won’t make as much sense, but it’ll guarantee you’re set up for success in the long run. Sometimes top tier characters are really easy compared to the rest of the cast, like Chun Li in 3rd Strike, or Byakuya in Under Night. Sometimes they’re really hard, like Vatista in Under Night, or Magneto in MVC2. Early in a game’s lifetime, the top tiers are typically going to be easier characters than later in a game’s life cycle, once players have had time to figure them out and optimize them.

My personal approach to new games is to pick the highest tier character I know I’m comfortable playing. So that means counting out characters with techniques I know I’m not good at performing (like puppet characters, or stance cancel characters).

Archetypes

Next up, what kind of characters do you typically enjoy? Fighting game characters tend to get broken down into about 5 different archetypes: Zoner, Grappler, Rushdown, Footsie, and Setplay. Each of these characters is defined by what zone they’re most effective at on the screen, and many characters mix these archetypes.

Zoners are characters that have superior long-range moves for hitting the opponent at fullscreen. These characters are also frequently called, “keep-out” and typically have lower health than the rest of the cast. The idea is that they’ll keep the opponent away from them, but if the opponent ever gets in, they’ll crumple like paper.

There are two big styles of zoner: Fireball Zoner, and Buttons Zoner. In Street Fighter, Guile is a fireball zoner, and Dhalsim is a buttons zoner. Guile has fireballs that are good at keeping opponents out, with fast recovery to help him follow up with anti-air, and Dhalsim has long limbs that can poke from behind his less substantial fireballs. Dhalsim also has more situational anti-air than guile’s downback turtle style. Frequently fireball zoners will also have good pokes with poor followups to keep opponents out. Zoners tend to get lower damage off of combos than other characters and more damage through neutral wins.

Rushdown is the diametric opposite of zoners, these characters have short stubby limbs, fast movement, and ridiculous pressure on block that confirms into the highest combos in the game. Much like zoners, these characters tend to be glass cannons, with a high damage output, but easily shut down as well. Rushdown characters want to close the distance at all times and hate getting shut out.

Footsie characters are inbetween zoners and rushdown in terms of their preferred range. They typically have excellent pokes, with a special move that can close the gap afterwards, allowing them to start a combo. And a more subtle feature is that they’ll frequently have very good close-range normals for counter-poking, whiff punishing, that can lead into their combos. In this way, they can outrange rushdown characters trying to get in, and outspeed zoners when they can get to their prefered distance. Footsie characters tend to have a little bit of everything from across the cast, but never the best version of anything. Footsie characters tend to have very good damage, but not incredible, and middling amounts of health.

Grapplers are big and beefy, sporting the highest defense, but the lowest speed. They tend to have longer range and slower pokes than the footsie characters, but lack the followup to convert into big damage off a poke. The grappler gameplan is to outfootsie the other characters, then tank damage to get in and go for grapples. At close range, their damage can be either incredibly high, or just on the higher end.

The win condition for grapplers is to get a knockdown, then use the hit/throw mixup to either get a high damage combo, or a powerful grab that leads into another knockdown situation.

Grapplers tend to be lower tier in most fighting games, because having more health with slower movement typically doesn’t work well in a lot of games, and they usually get less damage than rushdown characters with worse pressure to compensate. Most games don’t allow grapplers to combo into or out of command grabs, which hampers their damage output even more. Sometimes grappler characters are allowed to shine, but they typically pay for it with huge nerfs, across multiple games even (Potemkin is still paying for his sins in +R).

Setplay characters share a lot with grapplers and rushdown characters. They typically have short stubby limbs and want to get in for a knockdown. Setplay characters are all about combos into knockdown that allow for mixups on an opponent’s wakeup. They tend to get less damage than other characters in exchange for this improved mixup ability. Good setplay characters typically have some type of fireball that can sit on top of an opponent as they wake up, to force that opponent to block the mixup. Millia Rage is one of the most prolific setplay characters of all time, due to her ability to leave tandem top on opponents as they wake up, and mix up with a variety of fast combo-starter overheads, or crossup.

Most fighting game characters don’t fall purely into one of these archetypes. Vatista in Under Night is a very strong zoner, but her real win condition is incredibly strong and difficult to counter setplay. The versatility of shoto characters is that they’re typically pretty good at zoner and footsie styles of play. Sol Badguy is a shoto that combines footsie and rushdown more than zoning. Makoto is a rushdown grappler.

Axl from Guilty Gear might arguably count as a zoner grappler, given he mixes long-range unblockables into his zoning. Gordeau in Under Night plays like a zoner in some matchups and a grappler in others, given his mix of stubby A and B buttons with massive C buttons and specials. This combination tends to be more exotic and rare.

Some characters are defined by things outside of these archetypes, such as puppet characters, but typically still prefer a certain effective range, and share win conditions with the archetypes above.

Sometimes games will emphasize one archetype more heavily than others, like Guilty Gear usually has a lot of setplay options across its cast, even on characters that aren’t really setplay oriented; 3rd Strike has a lot more command grabs and hit grabs than other games.

Patch Culture

Across a modern fighting game’s lifespan, patches will change the way the game plays. This will take effect through character buffs and nerfs, changes to the system mechanics, the introduction of new system mechanics, or the introduction of new characters. When these changes occur, you need to make a decision: Stick or switch?

Character familiarity is a very strong asset in any game. Being strong with a character will probably net you better results than picking a stronger character most of the time. Frequently, toughing out your bad matchups is a lot better than trying to switch to a counterpick or a higher tier character.

The corollary is, there are absolutely no rewards for loyalty to a low tier. A low tier character winning can be a crowd pleaser, but a loss is a loss. If you choose to stick with a weak character, remember that you’re responsible for that decision and it’s bad sportsmanship to get salty over losing to stronger characters.

Wrap-up

Many top players have gone through character crisis, like Daigo with Ryu in Street Fighter V, leading to him ultimately switching to Guile and posting better tournament results. Sometimes the characters we want to play aren’t always the strongest, or the best for us.

Some players like to specialize in certain characters, others bounce around, some players just pick whatever is best at the time, and others are character loyalists, regardless of tier. A good strategy for picking a character in any game is to try characters out and see which one has a gameplan you can execute reliably. Be sure to do a little supplementary research to figure out what skills you’ll need, where they place on the tier list, and how much work you’ll have to put into them before you get too invested. A little research can save you a lot of time.