Fighting Games – Parry Everything

Thoughts on Multiversus: Sticking Out In Well-Explored Territory

I’ve spent a few hours playing Warner Brothers’ answer to Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. this week. Yeah, Warner Brothers. Seemingly also an answer to, uh, I guess Viacom’s Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl. (MultiVersus developed by Player First Games and Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl developed by Fair Play Labs and Ludosity). It’s funny video games’ premiere crossover game has met its competition lately from the television and film industry. Or maybe not quite competition. I’ve had a lot of fun playing MultiVersus, and it definitely gives me some of the same chaotic, good vibes of a good Smash Bros. session, but it also feels distinct in some key ways. MultiVersus has been pulling some impressive concurrent player numbers and seems to have drawn a great deal of positive attention. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here, so these are more or less my first impressions and initial thoughts on the matter.

Finn and Superman team up to fight Batman and Harley Quinn on a concert stage from the show Rick and Morty — Ah yes, the classic matchup. Superman, Batman… Harley Quinn… and Finn The Human from Adventure Time

Drawing People In

I think of lot of MultiVersus‘s initial success can be attributed to some very savvy distribution and marketing decisions on their part. The game dropped with an absolutely delightful fully animated short featuring some of the more surprising inclusions to the game. Fighting games are complicated beasts, and as crucial as their nuances may seem to the enthusiast and designer, it’s often the case that an audience is found by virtue of aesthetics or indeed, character roster. Smash Bros. has earned its reputation as mechanically deep and irrepressibly fun to play, but lots of games are like that – Smash is so huge because it has a singularly unmatched roster of characters. The absurdity of Arya Stark defending Bugs Bunny from a batarang may be matched only by the absurdity of the Iron Giant rolling up alongside actual Superman. MultiVersus starts strong with a trailer that features a great deal of the character roster, including surprising editions with devoted pre-baked fanbases, in out-there abnormal team-ups and head-to-heads.

The aesthetic of this game is just appealing too. Not too fancy on graphical fidelity, but the game has a soft, round, inviting look to it and all of its characters. The models are animated well and look quite appealing from the middle-distance a player is going to seem them in the heat of battle. The inclusion of not just voice acting, but the legitimate, genuine article original voices for much of the cast is a huge appeal for me personally. As much passion as Nickelodeon All Star Brawl clearly had, I struggled to maintain an interest in the game when it was eerily silent, without the iconic voices that helped make its cartoon fighting cast stars in the first place. Their post-launched inclusion in an update was much appreciated, but the production values of that game, likely on the basis of budget, simply don’t compare to the push Warner Bros. has clearly given to the development of MultiVersus, financially speaking.

Maybe it’s not that surprising that TV and film companies see opportunity in the crossover fighter space. Original characters, regrettably, just don’t have the kind of draw that legacy characters do for a genre like platform fighter, that has traditionally only maintained a few active games. Even then, Smash is arguably the only one that’s achieved mainstream appeal. When Sony last challenged the throne with PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale in 2012, they struggled to populate the game’s roster with characters that are as instantly marketable as Superman, Batman, Bugs, Adventure Time‘s Jake The Dog, Tom and Jerry, and, uh, Lebron James. Warner Bros., obviously, owns a lot of properties, so they’ve got an inherent edge in that marketability by way of character roster. Selling on the merits of your character roster is essentially selling on the merits of your game’s possibility for play. When someone sees the Iron Giant – it primes their imagination for what is possible in your game, because even if you don’t know the Iron Giant, he’s a big terrifying metal man with jet boosters. It gets a potential audience excited in a way the presence of something more abstract like a “wave dash” never could. Not that mechanics are unimportant to retaining your audience, but more on that later.

The Iron Giant, a massive robot, picks up and throws Shaggy from Scoobie Doo, before jumping on him in a grid-lined empty arena. — I always knew shaggy could totally take The Iron Giant in a fight. Now I can prove it.

Next to consider, the game is free. Now I have a lot of personal issues with some of the particulars of the game’s monetization strategy, but it cannot be denied that playing the game, at bare minimum, costs not a penny. That’s something MultiVersus has over its contemporaries and seems a natural fit for fighting games. Free-to-play gained a lot of notoriety among business types for its wild success on behalf of games like League of Legends, games about battling between champions chosen from a huge roster of distinct characters sporting unique abilities. A high-skill-ceiling game that rewards intimate knowledge of the game’s intricacies, experimentation with multiple characters, and an understanding of how all the different characters interact. Yeah, a fighting game also seems a good fit.

Finally, with modern netcode and full cross-platform play support, MultiVersus has a refreshingly smooth online experience. For all of its popularity and quality in other areas, Smash Bros. has never been able to say that for itself. I cannot understate how delightful it is to be able to install a game on multiple platforms, pick it up where and when I choose, carrying all of my game progress between machines, and play with any of my friends who are all using their preferred devices. It really makes online games without this feature feel… a little archaic. Honestly, this is the form online gaming always should’ve taken since its inception.

“Platform Fighting Games”

With all that tertiary stuff going for it, it’s no wonder MutiVersus has retained such a player base and media presence in the last few days. People are loving it. A game can’t be carried by media presence alone though and I can confirm that the game is, indeed, fun to play. MultiVersus is a “platform fighting game” like Smash Bros. before it. Smash is certainly the most famous and successful of these, but there have been more platform fighting games than you might think. In addition to the recent Nickelodeon, there’s been a number of indie games following the formula like Brawlhala and Rivals of Aether, and also weird stuff you might’ve never heard of like DreamMix TV World Fighters, developed by Bitstep and published by Hudson, a crossover fighting game featuring the likes of Bomberman and Optimus Prime. Really.

I think one reason platform fighting games haven’t had the same presence as traditional fighters like Street Fighter or Dragon Ball FighterZ, despite one of the genre’s advantages being its beginner-friendly nature, is the ever-present shadow of Super Smash Bros. No other platform fighter has been near as successful as of now, to the point that “platform fighters” were once “smash clones” much as first-person shooters started their history as “doom clones”. But, as with Doom I think there’s been a period of experimentation with with these Smash Bros. off-shoots that have tested the water of what can be done to distinguish oneself from Smash while remaining familiar enough to draw in the players looking for platform fighting games. How much do you change? How much do you keep? Player First Games’ answer? Not too much, but just enough.

Platform fighting games are by nature more beginner friendly than the traditional variety of fighting game, with a greater degree of freedom of movement baked-in, and less reliance on complex minimally-visible mechanics. Multiversus well leans into this strength, even in some ways better than Smash. For example there are much more robust control customization features, allowing you to do things like separating combo moves and charged moves to two different buttons, or swapping what moves are mapped to neutral button presses and directional button presses, among others. Movesets are somewhat limited, even, which could potentially be a mark against it for some, but really does make the game simple to pickup and play. I’d go as far to call it somewhat button-mashy. You may find success just throwing attacks out there. I think there’s some depth to be found here though, the game seems much more naturally suited combo strings that Smash, allowing plays to intuitively juggle their opponents and give chase. And although things can get a little chaotic and hard to read, the action does remain readable if you concentrate, I’ve found, and just a little getting used to if you’re coming from Smash.

There’s a lot familiar here to platform fighter veterans. Characters have their standard attacks, which change depending on directional input, as well as four special attacks likewise influenced by direction. Taking damage makes you more vulnerable to being launched by enemy attacks, and getting launched past the game’s boundaries results in a KO. The ringout KO with ramping knockback from damage is one of Smash’s most elegant inventions, I think. It’s such a natural fit for a fighting game with platforming because it makes one thinking about their standing position within space. Most fighting games exist on an abstract flat plane, with implied impenetrable barriers on either side. The terrain is not a concern there. In platform fighters, where the player’s relationship to the terrain is as important as their relationship to their opponent, a win condition involving the ejection of your opponent from the terrain is brilliant. Some other platform fighters like PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale have had win conditions that just did not work for me, because they de-emphasized this player relationship to the battle arena in a way that made the platforming capabilities of the characters feel somewhat redundant. MultiVersus knows what to crib from its contemporaries.

Finn the human teams up with Superman to fight Batman and Harley Quinn on a floating concert stage from the show Rick and Morty. Finn digs BMO the living calculator from his backpack, then holds BMO up as he karate chops Batman and Harley Quinn into the distance. — Finn’s down-special operates like a simpler version of Hero’s from Smash

It’s also a little different though. Weird and unique decisions like giving Finn the Human from Adventure Time the ability to charge his attacks while moving keep the game fresh. Most characters have such small interesting unique mechanics, in addition to bigger and noticeable ones. On a broader scale, this game has some intense aerial mobility. Every character practically plays like Sora from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, flowing nimbly through the air at high speeds. In Smash, players are allowed two jumps and a recovery attack to stop themselves from falling off the arena. In MutliVersus, you can use a recovery twice, air-dodge twice, then climb up an vertical surface. They really didn’t want people falling off the stage by accident. In free-for-all mode, the edges of the play area draw in, making the safe ground smaller when the round’s timer nears its end. It’s a pretty elegant way to prevent camping, an often reviled somewhat bad-faith way of playing, which I think is quite clever, especially in a ‘just for fun’ party mode like free-for-all. I always appreciate fighting games that encourage engaging the enemy and utilizing the fighting mechanics, rather than just turtling up or running away.

Another unique and rather clever angle the game has is that it’s 2v2 focused. Now this is a mechanic that I think does come across somewhat in building your initial audience, because it has such an overriding effect on the game’s design and, like the character roster, is something that can spark a general audience’s imagination. Some people play games for the experience of being a support role for their friends. These people, I’d say, are less likely to play traditional fighting games, but the presence of characters with a support-specific focus like Wonder Woman or Reindog might be appealing to them. You can really feel the way the game wants to encourage team-play too. The presence of cooldowns, a rarity in Smash Bros., encourages teams coordinating their available resources and the timing of their most valuable moves. Having support roles in a fighting games allows MultiVersus to do things that Smash simply doesn’t, carving its own niche.

Superman and Finn The Human from Adventure Time team up to fight with Wonder Woman and Steven Universe. Superman's ice breath slows so Finn can followup, and Stephen creates a barrier with his shield for Wonder Woman. — Superman’s ice breath slows so Finn can followup, and Stephen creates a barrier with his shield for Wonder Woman

The game also just makes some design decisions for their fighters that just seems very… not Smash, not necessarily in a bad way. Smash is far from creatively stifled but it does have a little bit of a brand, and that’s fine. It’s nice to see its contemporaries establish their own brand though! Some of the wacky stuff characters can do feel like things Smash didn’t really start doing until the later downloadable characters of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. When I see the Iron Giant enormously stomping around the battlefield in MultiVersus I can’t help but think of the years hand-wringing online discourse had about the inclusion of “too big” space dragon Ridley from the Metroid series as a fighter in Smash. He got in anyway (and I will go to my grave being smug about that), but at quite a modest relative size. I love the depiction of Ridley in Smash, he’s practically perfect. Iron Giant though, I think is going to be a very memorable fighter in his own right, because the developers of MultiVersus feel so unrestrained by tradition, while respecting the foundations that were the inception of the genre they’re iterating on.

There’s a lot more to see and learn about MultiVersus. I’m sure there’s an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge yet to be discovered about combo strings, frame data, tier lists, and other such silliness, but on first blush the game is a blast and is doing a commendable job of setting itself apart from obvious comparisons. It’s production values are exceptional, its roster is absolutely wild and it’s free… more or less. My issues with monetization are the biggest sticking point for me. I don’t know if I want to talk about that here, though. At any rate, I’ve had platform fighters on the brain and wanted to get my thoughts out there.

Two Finn(s) The Human, Batman, and Wonder Woman duke it out in a 2D bat-cave themed arena. The Finns slash their swords, Batman throws punches, and Wonder Woman bashes with her shield as gouts of steam erupt from the ground.

Mathematical!

Blazblue: Characterization Through Play

If you’ve ever been in a literature class you may know the basics of how characterization is generally conveyed – how a character acts, how a character speaks, how other characters act and speak in response. Typically this is done through audio and visuals, you can see and hear all these things play out to get an idea of a character’s personality and vibe. Games, of course, have their own interactive advantage. There’s a way to characterized that only games are capable of. The way a character plays, the way the systems and mechanics that make up their utility incentivize and reward certain methods of play can also be tools of characterization. There’s personality in a playstyle.

I’ll be using as a case study Yuuki Terumi from the traditional 2D fighting game Blazblue, as I think this character is a particularly acute example of what I’m talking about. A fighting game, specifically a traditional 2D one, if you didn’t know, is a game about pitting two fighters, each controlled by a player or an AI, against each other in a relatively small arena, with nothing but their fists (or swords) and their wits. First guy to die loses. A game more or less similar to Blazblue you may have heard of is Street Fighter. Fighting games can get pretty heady with strategies and counter-strategies, feints, double-fake-outs, predictions, counter-predictions, etc. There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of interesting player behaviors that go into a fighting game match, so there’s also a lot of room to explore game mechanics to characterize these behaviors.

I’ll try to give the simplest explanation for the rules of fighting games to define our terms here. Each player (or AI) picks a fighter from a roster of unique combatants. They try to hit each other without being hit in return. Landing a hit generates meter, a special resource that can be spent on special, powerful maneuvers. Getting hit also generates meter, but slightly less, while you lose HP. When your HP reaches zero, you’re out.

Just a game about two dudes kickin’ each others asses. There’s a purity in the simplicity of it

Games are defined by their rules, and so it is with playable characters. Even in the most open-ended game one cannot do anything in the play space. You’ll always be limited by what your play avatar or player character is or isn’t capable of. Given this inherent fact, the design of what can or can’t be done in a game defines the game’s character. When you’re assuming the role of Pac-Man, you play a hungry guy who loves fruit, is wary of ghosts, but is also quick to turn the tables on those ghosts when he gets the upper hand. Well, that’s all that Pac-Man is capable of, which is exactly the point. It’s extremely rudimentary in the case of Pac-Man, but this basic idea of characterizing through play can be expanded far in a lot of directions. When a player is incentivized to behave a certain way in a given play space, it characterizes their play, which can reflect on the character they are playing.

So how does Blazblue accomplish this in this case of Yuuki Terumi? Characterization begins with first impressions, and the first you’ll get of Terumi is his appearance, so let’s have a look.

Good God. He looks like a used car salesman half-heartedly dressed in a voldemort costume cobbled together at the last minute from miscellaneous articles found in a party city. He is impossibly cool. I will never achieve a fraction of this man’s sense of style. LOVE this guy. So there’s not a lot to go on here without further context within Blazblue‘s world. Some people might have that context, but many won’t, picking up the game mostly interested in some fun fighting game versus action without delving into the story mode. We get the sense from his posture that Terumi is perhaps a shady, underhanded fellow. He wears a suit, but loosely, maybe it’s just a facade of professionalism. The bright yellow cloak with wicked black patterns on it is a lot more striking and threatening, maybe even villainous.

Terumi is what’s known in fighting game communities as a rushdown character, meaning to succeed he generally wants to get in an opponent’s face, put up an oppressive offense, and not let up. Let’s take a look at some of Terumi’s basic moves to see how they reinforce this playstyle.

Nothing but his fists, his wits, and an absurdly large collection of knives

Basically everything Terumi can do, is either fairly short-ranged, or physically moves his character forward, toward the opponent. The game is trying to gently nudge all Terumi players to behave in a certain way – close in on your foe quickly, and use the tight space to your advantage. “Attack, attack, ATTACK!”, the game seems to say. Playing rushdown is all about keeping your foe guessing to get around any potential defenses they may mount against you. In a word, you’re manipulating your opponent into making mistakes, never giving them a moment to breathe. You want to make them seem stupid. You want to be dancing circles around them. Aggression and manipulation. It’s a pretty elegant abstraction of Terumi’s proclivity for psychological torment. It all paints a pretty vivid picture of a man that thrives off of schadenfreude, who feels superior, who’s powerful and knows it. I mean how often do you see curb stomping as a gameplay mechanic? Absolutely brutal.

I want to evilly cackle just watching this

One of Blazblue‘s primary mechanics is drive. It’s a special form of magic attack unique to each fighter, providing a unique mechanic that individualizes each character’s play style. Differentiation like this is great for making each fighter feel different, which is further great for your game’s variety and long term interest. It’s also excellent for characterization, with each drive mechanic reflecting on the characters’ various personalities. In Terumi’s case, his drive is called Force Eater, and its unique mechanic is as follows. Normally, as I mentioned earlier, each of the two fighters on screen build up meter when they deal or receive damage – more meter in the case of the dealer than the receiver. However, when Terumi deals damage with his Force Eater, he steals all of the meter his opponent would have generated through received damage, for himself.

It’s pretty intuitive that taking anything from a player that feels rightfully theirs makes things personal, and that’s the idea. Terumi breaks the almost sacrosanct understanding that taking damage refunds a resource as a consolation, but nothing is sacred to Terumi. It’s a subtle thing. Your opponent may not even notice that you’re stealing from them, but as a Terumi player you’ll know. You feel like an absolute bastard for doing this and it’s great. This is your primary method of generating meter, and how you fuel your play as Terumi. To be Yuuki Terumi means taking from others to survive. If you follow the game world’s narrative definitions that meter = magic = the soul, then Terumi eats away at his opponents’ souls to fight them. Pretty apt. The end result of all this is that Yuuki Terumi can generate a dizzying amount of meter in a very short amount of time, which further reinforces the next point I want to discuss, his supers.

Watch the respective fighters’ **meter** (the number in each bottom corner) when Terumi just kicks his opponent vs. when he uses his green **drive** attack

In traditional fighting games like Blazblue, a super is a big, stylish, spectacle-rich attack that deals a lot of damage at the cost of some of your meter. It’s the big haymaker attack that you gradually build up to. Most characters in Blazblue have two normal supers to choose from, sometimes three, and rarely even four. Terumi has SIX. In fact, most of his versatility as a fighter comes from his supers. Tools that some more specialized characters might have, like counters and and ranged attacks, are only available to Terumi through his supers, requiring him to spend meter to use them. So not only is Terumi a power-hungry soul eater, but he also delights in spending enormous amounts of that magical energy he siphons, burning through it like it’s nothing, unleashing a deluge of power other characters struggle to scratch the surface of. Because Terumi can generate so much meter so easily, you as a Terumi player are almost always flooded with the stuff. You cap out at 100 meter, and money in the bank does nothing for you, so it’s most efficient to be spending it frequently. This promotes an extremely aggressive playstyle, which is good, because Terumi is an aggressive guy.

Terumi’s words drip with venom, and also everything else he does

You’ll notice a lot of growling, sneering, and jeering coming from Terumi. He’s constantly berating, insulting, and taunting his opponents. He clearly doesn’t think much of them and wants them to know it. Gameplay is the core of what we’re talking about here, but gameplay has to work in concert with audio and visuals – all three are essential to the overall experience. The animation does a lot of heavy lifting here too, as you may have noticed. It can communicate some nuances of Terumi’s character that don’t quite come out through gameplay alone, such as the elegant yet slippery, almost dance-like way he moves, like a snake. There’s also a lot of snake imagery here. Okay yes, the snake thing isn’t all that subtle. Terumi = snake.

Yes, this is a thing you can actually do to people in this game. You monster

Feeling superior isn’t just a kick for this guy, it’s like an obsession, or a need. It’s as if he’d disappear in a puff of green smoke if ever a single person in a room with him wasn’t made to feel lower than a worm. He’s powerful, and he knows it. From his unassuming form he can unleash a torrent of magic that puts others to shame, and he loves doing it. He’s cruel, sadistic, and aggressive. He doesn’t want to just stomp you into the dirt, he wants to machine-gun stomp you a thousand times per minute until you’re a red paste on the ground. The game treats you like a bloodthirsty sadist, so that’s what you become to play Terumi. Blazblue is so effective at this, I often find myself repeating caught up in Terumi’s rapturous celebration of his own ability when I land a particularly nasty combo. It’s all in good fun, of course. Of course. Is this that “role playing” I’ve heard so much about? They should make games about that kind of thing.

So how do you make your player feel like Spiderman.. or Batman, or Pac-Man or whoever? Build systems that incentivize behaviors reflective of Spiderman. Construct your gameplay mechanics around these behaviors so that a player will naturally be inclined toward doing things that Spiderman would do, and back up these behaviors with coordinated audio and visuals that promote feeling the way that Spiderman would feel. If your gameplay mechanics are built well, if they’re fun, you can even give players a reason to have fun roleplaying. Becoming a character within a narrative is something you can only do with a game, so make it fun to become your game characters for a time and make an experience players can’t have anywhere else.

Stand up! I’m not satisfied yet…