Please Select Your Character! - A Piece on Playstyles and Useful Terminology

On Playstyles and Useful Terminology

Based on the number of threads about the topic, the character select screen seems to represent the bulk of the challenge and angst people face when playing Guilty Gear. In the community in general, we talk a lot about character playstyles, but people mostly seem to be talking through each other. For example, I'm aware everyone seems to have a vague sense of what a "rushdown" character is, but I’d argue that this term, which manages to describe just about every character depending on who you ask, is fuzzy to the point of being useless.

This is a problem with our terminology in general: The words people use to talk about complex concepts like the flow of a match or the playstyle of a character are themselves defined in pretty loose, semantically ambiguous ways, and so we end up spending a lot of effort talking about nothing, trying to convey concepts that we’ve gotten a vague sense of in our heads that probably differ a lot from person to person, rather than talking about fighting games in any useful way.

So I'm going to make an effort right now to nail down some actual metrics we can use to talk about this stuff, because it's more productive than finding every “character playstyle” or “how do I character select screen” topic vaguely annoying every time they pop up.

Fighting Game Arithmetic: Advantage and Disadvantage

You often hear fighting games discussed in terms like "frame advantage" or "+/- x on block". There's a section in the frame data that's called static difference (or SD). This concept is more obvious in 3D fighters and old-school-style 2D fighters (IE not airdashers) than it is in Guilty Gear and the like, because new-school 2D fighters tend to have mechanics like chaining normals and dynamic movement options that make matches seem less like “taking turns.” Because of this, you hear intermediate airdasher players talking about it (and in my opinion understanding it) less than intermediate Street Fighter players.

Make no mistake, this is a major problem in the American airdasher scene. Advantage and Disadvantage is exactly as important a concept to understand in Guilty Gear as it is in Virtua Fighter. The same kind of exchanges are taking place, but faster and often with different kinds of variables. Since things are happening quickly, it’s hard to stop and think about why something didn’t work, and so inexperienced players conclude that they were simply not fast enough, or worse, that they lost because their opponent was merely better somehow. Either of these things may be entirely true, but they’re also entirely meaningless in and of themselves.

Being "at frame advantage" means, at its simplest, being able to act in fewer frames than the opponent. In frame data this is applied to how many frames of stun a move puts the other player in if blocked compared to how many recovery frames it has. Everyone knows this. But the broader concept of being "at advantage" has a few more variables. Being atmore or less frame advantage will determine if you’re punishable or not. Range matters. Your character’s tools matter. In Guilty Gear, you have 0-frame throws. If you're in throw range, the opponent being at even -1 after you block a move means you get to punish them. If you’re not, -1 is barely anything, and the situation can probably be considered effectively neutral.

This is a big chunk of what is referred to as “fundamentals” when talking about fighting games. It is also the most quantifiable and arguably the most important part of what makes a character play the way they do in Guilty Gear, and I think all our playstyle terms can and should be defined from aspects and implications of the concept of advantage.

Static Difference is a great term for talking about the specific situation of advantage or disadvantage after a specific move is blocked. But in a broader sense, situational advantage - the ability to act more freely than the opponent - isn't static, nor is it monotonically deterministic. Games between good players don't always end with one player getting frame advantage and then keeping it and winning. A lot of the interplay of fighting games comes from people playing from disadvantage, or changing the situation by maneuvering.

Having a faster attack than the opponent has puts you at advantage from neutral, all else being equal. Having a faster attack at the range at which you're currently fighting puts you at advantage, all else being equal. It's hard to quantify everything, but with this powerful concept, we can actually do math and figure out who is at an advantage at any given point in a match, if we wanted to. If we paused the match at a given point and looked at all the frame data and checked some hitboxes and did some calculations, we could figure out, at that point, who is at advantage at any given time. After a hit, or at “neutral”. At any range. Obviously you're not going to do this for every match, but it's an interesting and informative way to watch one if you have some time on your hands.

Being at disadvantage doesn’t mean you can’t attack, but it does mean you have to predict or option-select through what the opponent is doing to attack. Knowledge of the enemy and knowledge of your own tools allows you to fight from disadvantage, or at least force the game back to neutral. Similarly, being at situational advantage doesn’t mean you should always attack. It just means you can act more freely than your opponent, and that attacking is less risky.

If you're playing fighting games and don't know this concept, you're doing it wrong. If you do know it, you probably don't think about it enough when you're playing. I know I probably don't. It's very important.

The Flow of Fighting Games is about Situational Advantage

Once you've got a solid idea of what advantage and disadvantage are, then we can start to really talk about situations that arise in fighting games. I'm going to argue that there are only two meaningful kinds of situations, and the rest are just specific cases of them. There are neutral situations, and there are non-neutral situations. There's a lot of variety in how these situations work and how they can play out, but they come down to the same fundamental two games. This sounds like an oversimplification, but it's a very useful simplification. I'll rattle off some examples so you believe me, and to establish context for some other terms people use.

A pressure game is a non-neutral game where one character is at advantage and the other character is in blockstun. For the player at advantage, pressure games consist of keeping that advantage, using ambiguity to keep the opponent from recognizing or at least capitalizing on the situation when the player loses advantage ("a pressure reset"), and trying to break the opponent's defense and get their damage ("mixup").

Zoning is a neutral game where players use the threat of the attacks they can do at a given range to keep the opponent from attacking. Zoning can also involve characters moving around trying to get into a position where they're at advantage, or trying to bait the opponent into attacking at a bad time or predictably, and then throwing out something that will stuff their attack (“footsies”). In a game with chains and good movement options, zoning games are fast and dynamic, sometimes happening in the blink of an eye. This does not mean they aren't an important part of how those games work.

Okizeme is a non-neutral game where one player is at disadvantage because they're knocked down, giving the other player somewhere around 30-40 frames to set up an attack. This is a huge disadvantage for the downed player, even if they have good reversals.

A clash is a neutral game where hitboxes collide and both players have equal opportunity to use any attack from the clash. Note that the game is neutral because neither player is at frame advantage. Depending on the matchup and the distance at which it happened, one player may still have situational advantage.

A combo is a non-neutral game where one player has landed a hit and is doing "guaranteed" damage to an opponent (You know, unless they have a burst). Getting around or baiting bursts, baiting out techs, attempting combo resets, and choosing between knockdown, pressure, and damage are important considerations in combos, and involve interplay between opponents.

You get the idea. I think this is a useful way to think about fighting games. It's especially useful for defining play styles in ways that are meaningful instead of vague and stupid.

Character Playstyles are about Dealing With These Situations:

There are only two fundamental kinds of situation in fighting games, but there are three kinds of situations a character can be in. At advantage, at disadvantage, and at neutral. Almost any fighting game that's any good has characters dealing with these situations all the time. Guilty Gear in particular has a lot of situational fluidity, with tools like the different blocks, bursts, fast throws, and DAAs to change up the situation at unexpected times.

People like to talk about “zoning characters” or “rushdown characters,” but most characters don't neatly fit into these buckets. In reality everyone plays pressure games, everyone blocks, everyone plays okizeme, everyone plays wakeup, everyone zones. Being bad at any of these things will hurt you no matter what character you're playing. To get an idea of how a character plays, the main thing to talk about is when they are in these situations, which they are good at being in, and which they are in most of the time.

It’s also important that these assessments are compared to other characters in the game. The mere fact that someone can play a pressure game or zone or force the game to neutral is unsurprising. I can’t think of a character that can’t. This tells you nothing. The ability to do it significantly better than other characters tells you something about the character.

For example:

A character with an invincible move is usually better at fighting from disadvantage than a character without one. They have a tool that can more easily be used to exploit a small gap between at an unpredictable time. It doesn't mean they should always try to reversal, but it does mean that they have that option.

A character with fast, chainable, jump-cancellable normals and gap closers tends to be good at keeping an advantage. Note that in most airdashers, this describes a lot if not all of the characters. It’s only significant if they’re able to do it better than most characters. Guilty Gear specifically rewards keeping up a long pressure game into a good hit confirm. Doing this tends to net you extra damage, because of the guard bar. The fact that a character can do this makes them a character in Guilty Gear, and says nothing specifically about them.

A character with fast, visually-ambiguous mixup tends to be good at fighting from an advantage. Millia isn't great at keeping up pressure for a long time compared to a lot of characters, but when she has advantage, she is very hard to read

A character with good hitboxes from different ranges, or with fast moves, or with pseudo-invulnerable moves like a good 6P are good at winning neutral games. Faust has a lot of big, disjointed hitboxes, weird invulnerability, and basically ways to beat things he's predicted or has time to react to.

Let’s try talking about characters using useful terms. These analyses may be dead wrong, but hopefully I’ve used the terms I’ve already mentioned in concise ways, so that we can argue meaningfully about why:

Jam is a very solid character. While her mixup isn't super-ambiguous compared to E.G. Millia, she has a lot of ways to keep her pressure up or hide the points where she is no longer at advantage. Her neutral game is also very solid compared to similarly low-range characters, because she can keep people scared of her attacks, stopping their approach with moves like 2S, FB puffball, and her 6P. She's not terrible at fighting from disadvantage either, with tools like a parry, a decent (not great) DP, and sometimes FB puffball again. These give her some options to beat other moves she’s predicted. She's not as dangerous in any of these situations as some characters. Her DP isn’t as long-range and invulnerable as Sol’s, and she can’t keep up pressure as reliably as ABA, and she can’t win neutral games as well as Faust, but she has ways to do each of them more effectively than a lot of characters who don’t specialize in those games. In terms of situational advantage, Jam is a jack of all trades.

Venom is a very appropriate model for what Melty Blood players call a morphing character, meaning a character who needs to set up to transition into fighting from advantage well. Actually most characters in Guilty Gear fit the criteria for that term, so at least in the context of Guilty Gear, the term is probably not a significant difference in playstyle from other characters, but Venom is an unusually stark example of the described archetype. Venom will often play defensively and fish for neutral hits until he can win a neutral game, get some balls set up, and then he will stick to the opponent and keep up pressure. In other words, moreso than E.G. Jam or Millia, Venom needs to win a few exchanges to get to the point where he's good at fighting from advantage, but once he gets going his pressure game is difficult and risky to break out of. Venom is a morphing character among morphing characters.

Baiken doesn't so much fight from disadvantage as change what it means for her to be at disadvantage. Many of her moves are available instantly from blockstun, and their startup happens in hitpause, meaning that in many situations she is actually fighting at advantage after blocking. As such, Baiken doesn’t really deal with pressure games as often as other characters. Her zoning game is above-average too, because she has tools like tatami, claw, j.H, and j.S, which have large, disjointed hitboxes. This makes it hard to approach her from neutral, but the amount and power of the tools she can do this with make her want to play this game less of the time than, say, Ky, who has a larger amount of good neutral tools that operate effectively from more ranges. Baiken is kind of her own animal.

If anyone is having trouble picking a character, understanding how to read situational advantage, reading frame data, watching matches, and best of all, actually trying a few characters out against good players, will tell you actual information, if you have the patience to actually figure it out. Fuzzy words like "rushdown character" will not. But we like talking about fighting games, and an explanation is much easier to get than experience, so maybe we can make words be more useful.

Operational Definitions for Fighting Game Terms

So let’s get to the point. The way people talk about characters in airdash fighters has a lot of problems. We have a lot of terms people use because they’ve heard them before and they sound vaguely right. This vagueness means that the same arguments get played out a lot, produce no meaningful information, and worse, train people to think about the games in fuzzy, non-useful ways.

If we want to convey meaningful information, we should use concise terms that mean a specific thing. An operational definition is an attempt to tie a word to something measurable, agreed on by people in a field for the purpose of having meaningful discourse. If there are disagreements, an operational definition can be used to argue with math, observable, falsifiable facts, or at least some kind of pseudo-objective measure, rather than just saying words at each other that mean different things to different people.

Basically, I'm proposing a way to talk about fighting games and characters therein that's clear and uses operational definitions that everyone can agree on. I’d like the community to weigh in on this, and I’d like us to agree on concise terminology we can use to have meaningful discourse about fighting games.

For example:

I’ve talked a lot of shit about the term rushdown. I think the way people use it, it’s pretty much meaningless, referring to anything from running forward to playing pressure games to having an aggressive mentality in some ethereal, purely mental way. We can make the term rushdown useful by making it mean a specific thing. I propose that we use it to talk about a specific kind of transition, from a neutral game to a pressure game. In other words, you are “rushing down” if you are, in a neutral game, just trying to make your opponent block something, rather than, for example, fishing for a hit by trying to beat their move.

I like the term beat as used in theater. Since I’m going mad with power here and just making up operational definitions for words, I’m going to propose that we co-opt the word beat to mean any time a non-neutral game transitions into a neutral game in a fighting game context. This could happen as a pressure reset (Where pressure game stops briefly and the characters are technically at neutral), or a situation where two characters whiff while trying to zone each other, or a clash, or after a successful burst, or at the end of a combo that doesn’t knock down or get reset. In high-level play in an airdasher, a beat usually comes and goes in the course of a fraction of a second. Looking out for them is a very useful tool, allowing people to learn to recognize when you’re in neutral and when you’re not, and act appropriately, rather than just swinging at random times and dying like a scrub, which is why I think we should have a specific word to describe that class of situations.

EDIT: I made a thread for discussion of operational terms we can use. Please contribute if you have an opinion at all. I think this will make Dustloop a better source of information if we do it right.