Neutral Skips in Fighting Games

so a little over a week ago I sent fighting game Twitter into a frenzy is what I want to say so what do actually me add before we even talk about these tweets don't harass this person uh there was a lot of discourse back and forth already about this so the Tweet reads like this I've noticed that recent fighting games are having a paradigm shift towards aggression mechanics Street Fighter 6 Drive Rush strive wild assault gr blue Rising raging Ching even Tekken Eight's new heat system we are moving past the age of FO and neutral and into an age of anger and as you can see by the replies the retweets there a lot of people had stuff to say about this now the reason why I'm saying I'm involved in this frenzy is because of course I had to say something reading this the first time I replied with nothing but a thinking face emoji and a video this video took me about 10 minutes to make just 5 minutes of find some clips and 5 minutes to put everything together so the point of this video was was to just show that there's always like neutral skips in fighting games I tried to use uh you like quick examples I can think off the top of my head so super toega round start getting J ofun by the way this is my favorite one uh two character I mean people really didn't like Seth but for me these are like two characters in sf4 that are definitely not traditional footsies by any stretch myself doing full screen kis a bunch of Morgan just zoning and um funny enough too that somebody watched this and they were like Chris G wasn't even that good at doing the Morgan suus stuff at this time uh just the voice clip was what really sold this here of Chris Matrix just being like Oh my god he has so much stuff on the screen and I know firsthand marod does not know how to fight anything like this skd doing overdrive into many swords on screen plus teleports again myself exposing myself doing keyi blast assist call into full screen teleport what really struck me about this tweet is that last sentence we're moving past the age of footsy and neutral and into an age of Anga that's what set me off if you've been watching this channel for a while you're familiar with this but if you're new watching me either for the first time recently it's a unique sour spot for me to talk about old fighting games versus new fighting games uniquely so of course I had to say something so first I want to talk about why people care so much about neutral and then like really break just tweak down because again I made sure to emphasize this basically the thing that got me was the last sentence right but there is actually truth in this tweet so I'm referencing my new best friend Lord enil's glossery the fighting in glossery for this so the definition of neutral according to my new best friend Lord infil is the stage of a fight where neither player is blocking or getting hit by anything and you are trying to figure out the best way to either start or continue your game plan there's also a bit of an implicit assumption that the characters are not point blank from each other so there's some wiggle room to move around and use a wide assortment of attacks footsies is one important aspect of playing the neutral game and you'll often hear people talk about the neutral for example Ryu loses the neutral in that matchup means that Rio has a hard time finding a place on the screen where he can start his game plan without putting himself at risk another common use of neutral is just anytime your character is not blocking being hit or knocked down even if you're Point Blank and your character is able to take any action if your opponent attacks you with a string you might say I return to neutral in the middle of that string this implies that there's a gap so you have a chance of trying to evade or trying to attack maybe with a dragon punch as if that's not enough neutral can also mean an attack that's either plus or minus when it's blocked you'll hear the term zero on block even on block and neutral on block for this both characters will recover at the same time and can attack at the same time which might lead to trads Okay so so there's actually more definitions of neutral here than I thought for our use and at least from my experience playing fighting games the first two are far far far far far more commonly used than the last two so we'll be just talking about it from those perspectives so neutral is so important to fighting game players because it actually does a couple of things so as far as the game State it's when both people are actively playing a lot so when you're on offense and the opponent on defense even though the opponent is defending a lot they might not actually be able to do a lot of stuff like straight up attack you back it's a lot of Defending and trying to like get context clues of what you might want to do and things like that if you're knocked down the defender has even less agency than that so most of the game of fighting games is neutral before a hit is actually a hit connects or somebody gets some type of Advantage another reason why neutral is very important to people is that that's where a lot of like the player expression meme I like I shouldn't say meme because it's not a meme but it's not termal like but uh basically different people play neutral differently because people make different choices and and people can be in the same situation and make a different choice so in neutral you get to see the most of these choices because the players don't have a direct Advantage at that time and then finally as far as like what is hard to do in fighting games on the scale of everything right if you have been playing these games for a while combos are pretty easy for you also often is very easy for you and running like knockdown offense especially what we call set play is very easy for you defending is difficult to be honest difficult but there's degrees on like what skills you have what character you're playing things like that neutral is usually one of the main things that people use to be like this player is a good player and that player is not a good player so this is why you'll hear a term like neutral skip and a lot of people will say will use it in a derogatory way they're like oh they used a neutral skip to get in they didn't earn the approach they used a neutral skip to get in if we revisit this tweet and my tweet there are things in fighting games for a long time that either skip neutral or have like you just have like way more of an advantage of neutral than people might realize old Fighting is romanticized probably the better way of putting it so Street Fighter the classic is Rio and K walking back and forth and whing crouching medium kick Guilty Gear is to be honest I don't know when I asked people when strive was coming out who played exer what they thought real Guilty Gear is I got so many different answers that I didn't think I was playing the same game as some people I thought Guilty Gear was a fighting game with high paced neutral where most of the standard characters at least don't convert off their all this stuff you Vive for Advantage and then once you get your big Advantage you run your game plan really really really hard Bas blue while beloved game has had plenty of meme characters in the past Falcon hind can with punish you from like full screen for example new 13 exists Arun exists so even though I use character specific examples what I was trying to say was that these things have just been around but the main point about this tweet is about about this thing happening at a system mechanic level so they talk about Drive Rush stre 6 wild assault which uh I mentioned cuz by the way there's a lot actually a lot of back and forth I talked to various people in this tweet Thread about these ideas strive wild assault uh you would have to talk about white wild assault specifically because the other two you don't really use for neutral they're kind of like offense combo things where white wild assault specifically has a neutral application and not a lot of characters have this specifically Nord Yuki gold Lewis Dickerson bedman and patkin Grand blue Rising they listed raging chain which most people would say I guess basically anyone who plays the game I don't even play the game and I know this at the time of this recording I haven't even picked up the game I'm waiting for 2B cuz I'm educated but raging chain wouldn't really be the one uh it'll probably be 66l the universal dashing plus move I have heard many jokes and if you play Grand blue let me know if this joke is accurate at all cuz I will not know until 2B drops that 66l is basically everyone has Soul far slash and for teeken I can't really comment cuz I don't play it so I don't really know what the heat system is in my opinion I would I would drop the discussion of heat and actually mention super Dash which I'm pretty surprised they did not mention at all so if you're talking about these things from a systemat perspective honestly it's pretty true so there is certainly a trend of fighting games all kind of trying the same ideas so I want to say like from 2009 to like Street Fighter 5 like Street Fighter 4 Street Fighter 5 sign note we this was also something that I mentioned in this thread and I mentioned this in videos before I tend to see like Street Fighter do something and then a bunch of other fighting games try like their Twist on like the main thing Street Fighter is trying to do so like let's take Street Fighter 4 right so there's Focus so there's like a neutral mechanic and then an emphasis on comebacks and just making controls easier right so you see this in a bunch of other games so like I play Blaze Bo for example so Blaze Bo has advanced inputs it's not really like a comeback mechanic but there's definitely a focus on making things easier to execute and making Oki weaker which I think blaze blue is was a little bit ahead of the game even though Oki is good in blaze blue it was kind of ahead of the game of this like we don't want people to just get knocked down and die even though again there are definitely characters who were good at knocking you down and killing you in blaze blue it's not super straightforward to do compared to a game where you just hard knock down somebody and just go as for C 5 it was definitely like kind of like forced neutral knockdowns are not that good making it so people can like vary their wake up not giving you a lot of Advantage balancing things among minus frames and then other games would do that too it's actually a really common thing in modern fighting games right now that many characters just don't have Advantage very easily compared to older games and making combos generally generally easier so so this neutral thing really holds and the main thing is you know some people will be like skill issue check this check the thing you know neutral skips is part of fighting games I would definitely say that thing is part of fighting games but I do think you got to address the system mechanic thing because I think it's kind of done on purpose like many other people have said it's kind of done on purpose but it's tied to something that people haven't really been paying attention to so the bigger thing even bigger than a neutral thing is you might have noticed that many highle players continuously if they use like letter rankings continuously have moved the lowest rank up so like in the past you might have seen like maybe F tiers definitely D tiers maybe F tiers But as time has gone on you'll see like the lowest tier being like B+ or a minus or something like that for a while I was like oh well devs had gotten better at me fighting games devs had gotten better at making characters so even like the weakest character still has good aspects and this is true but I also past couple years I've been thinking a little bit of this does have to do with the actual mechanics of the game so this neutral aspect thing really ties into this let's use Dragon Ball as an example cuz I have a lot of experience in that game imagine dbfz with no super Dash right and how different a game that would have been on Lodge how much better beerus would have been how much better freeza would have been how much better trunks would have been how much better top tiers would have been like Kid Buu for example how much better he would be if there was no super Dash why am I saying it like that most people see super Dash and they're like this is enabling this is really really enabling scrubs can just get on me get in on me for free from anywhere my actual most despised Dragon Ball mechanics are the variable knockdown and reflecting into tag those are the things that actually bother me the FL super Dash actually doesn't bother me that much one all the characters are made to interact with this mechanic and two it kind of democratizes the neutral a little bit so so like like the young example I used earlier for example if you play third strike you know a ton about how stupid genen is right even though everyone has supers and everyone uses super meter y uniquely even though gen Jen is one bar it's a very very short bar so you have to deal with it all the time so these modern mechanics are the same so for Dragon Ball super Dash looks the same like everyone presses the two buttons and you just super Dash but different characters have different super dashes hm what do I mean characters both do stuff differently after super dashing you will use super Dash plus assist differently depending on what assist you uniquely pick and your characters will defend super dashes differently depending on what you pick so even though the mechanic is universal it works the same way when you just press the button once you're actually in a situation it actually varies a lot by character how you actually deal with it drive Rush kind of similar right so everyone has Drive Rush Drive Rush is when I hear about people talking about and complaining about Drive rush I really feel like they're talking about the stupid ones and we're talking about like the fast ones right talk about like DJ's teleport honestly come on teleport jury teleport things like that the mixup Drive rushes are also quite strong to my understanding right so like Manan for example strike throw character you get to pull up as a Grappler you get an immediate strike foro CU your button is plus so despite the mechanic being Universal it's applied differently by character and understandably at a base level and I understand why so much more why people have these complaints but at a base level you will feel like characters feel the same you will definitely feel like characters feel the same if you don't really dig dig dig into the roots of the game or into the dirt into the hole if you don't hop down the robit hole of the game you'll think that characters are very similar now I made a a video a couple years ago when Strife came out about kind of about like how some fighting games feel heavy-handed because of this especially when you fighting games come out because over time they do learn how people actually interact with mechanics and then they make new interesting characters blah blah blah the thing that I ended up not liking about this tweet despite there being some truth in it because uh you know it's talking about mechanics is not just my traditional sour spot of I don't like it when people just go old game good new game bad new game un new game stupid is that I think it kind of undercuts that these mechanics by these mechanics being Universal mechanics it's like everyone has a chance of doing these things so it's like and by the way this is definitely pick your poison do you want a game where only like five or characters by the way I'm definitely this is a hypothetical hyperbolic hyper hypothetical hyperbolic Dragon Ball would you rather have a game with like 25 characters but like only six real characters because they just have these things that other characters don't have if you don't have these things you don't exist or would you rather have a game that has 25 characters but it has like 18ish charact like there's like s to 10 winners but then there's like an additional 10 pretty good like if someone busts their ass or have like has like a really good day they could do it too because a lot of the mechanics are Universal to use Dragon Ball again of course is a team game but uh to use Dragon Ball again I really like referencing this but I really like talking about ax I there's a player from New York named ax I and in Dragon Ball Fighter season 2 he was really known for playing a bad team he was playing Android 21 who was a good character by the way jiren on launch who was pretty bad when he came out for a few reasons and Goku black who the basically the entire Community flush Goku black of really early in season 1 despite playing these characters he performed pretty well why so actually two reasons one just the game itself again because you're never like really locked out position wise like everyone has some type of projectile to be key blast everyone has key blast everyone has the 2H antier everyone can super Dash everyone has their own assist that helps with them right and specifically the assist he was playing because he was playing a point character with very good mixup level three a pressure assist right because jiren had the had an assist that had very high frame Advantage he could do 50-50s with Android 21 a bunch of his and he had a character his anchor character Goku black not only had good solo neutral and people didn't know how to fight the character but was also a beam assist which was very very very valuable at that time so even though he was using unpopular characters he was still using common strategies and I think that's kind of a theme of modern games if you if you're looking at it in like a like a happy like oh things are going well type of thing but yeah let me know what you guys think um this people some people got pretty heated about this uh I'm very much as far a play from a play perspective which probably makes some people mad I'm very much you got to do what you got to do especially like once we're in a couple years into the game if the thing that I've been trying hasn't been working I I'll definitely go to establish meta top tier things right like right now I'm ramal and guilty here to help some bikon match ups so that that should tell you like I'm a very I'll do what I have to do type thing uh but I definitely think it's an interesting discussion and um I actually want to do a video just talking about neutral skip like fun stupid neutral skips with someone uh in the next couple weeks or a month or so as usual if you have any questions or comments definitely feel free to leave those in the comment section below like And subscribe if you guys feel like it YouTube really likes it when you watch other videos so please do that and I'll see you next time and peace out

Channel: LordKnight

Views: 19,287

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Id: 2PyG8U7fjzI

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2024