Note: This article was originally published on Second Quest.


The videogame culture has become so obsessed with the storytelling elements of games that what it seeks out to analyze no longer falls under the expansive umbrella that is videogames. This longing for story to drive the gameplay has trickled over into one genre where videogame stories are traditionally irrelevant and cursory elements â€" the fighting genre. As videogame journalists and critics, we should strive to review videogames based on the expectations of the genre. We wouldn’t, for instance, review a puzzle game with the same criticisms we would levy against an MMORPG. So why then do we review games in the fighting genre as if they are anything other than fighting games? There’s a fragmentation at play and a flawed genre-bending mentality that affects the way fighting games are reviewed.

As far as storytelling in its traditional narrative function is concerned, developers of fighting games do the player an injustice by minimizing the core focus of the fighting genre with any narrative focused too outwardly from the ludic aspects of the game. It’s not necessarily the developers fault, but rather the diverse group of videogame players that make up the market today. Though, when we market to everyone, we market to no one. It’s an adage that seems to be lost on all sides of the fighting genre.



This isn’t to say that the story of any genre where combat is at the core should be dismissed as unnecessary. First-person shooters, for instance, require a reason to care about the characters enough to see the single player mode all the way through to the goal of saving the Earth or whatever the hero needs to accomplish. A fighting game such as the recently-released Soulcalibur V does not. The player’s only intrinsic goal is to simply win the match. Their motivations are their own and not those of the character as dictated by the developer’s story. This is not to say that single player modes shouldn’t be addressed at all in Soulcalibur V reviews, but that we should be asking deeper questions about what could be done to improve the core experience of the game.

GamesTM’s review of Soul Calibur V compares it to the Virtua Fighter series in order to highlight Soulcalibur‘s style over substance approach. “Yes, many may see it as a fighting game, but the truth is that Soulcalibur has never really been a fighting game,” reads the review. Given the benefit of the doubt, I’ll conclude the reviewer means that Soulcalibur has never really been a simulation type of fighting game. While Soulcalibur, when played at a high level, is an amazing display of combat, the flair admittedly overshadows the technique. But many martial arts styles, too, exude flair over practicality. That doesn’t make them any less of a type of fighting style, just as it doesn’t make Soulcalibur any less of a fighting game.. It wasn’t until Bruce Lee rejuvenated the martial arts with his more practical approach to fighting that we came to have the mixed martial arts scene where basic techniques are more vital than flashy techniques. Rather than lambasting a fighting game for having a shallow story modeâ€"which is really just a flashy extraâ€"the reviewer should look to these core concepts as his baseline for reviewing the game.

Stephen Lambrecht’s review for IGN called the fighting “great” and the graphics “beautiful.” But the meat of his review focused on the “disappointing” lack of modes, even while conceding there is “plenty of depth in its combat.” It’s a review filled with empty adjectives, one which does nothing to address the true nature of the game. When we think of fighting games we must think in terms of the way a martial artist approaches combat. In this sense, Soulcalibur, and all other fighting games like it, requires an “emotional content” to enhance the narrative as it may be. From a ludic standpoint, the player approaches fighting games the same way a martial artist approaches his opponent. Fighting is a matter of balance â€" there is an action followed by a reaction, an expansion preceding a contraction. The Dead or Alive series raised the bar when it introduced an engine where characters seemed to actually fight with each other rather than perform static moves, but the emotional content wasn’t quite there. Paste Magazine’s Stu Horvath, a dedicated if not wearied fan of Soulcalibur, was one of the few reviewers to come close to capturing the core essentials of Soulcalibur into a succinct review. But even he neglected the one thing that is important, perhaps most so, to the fighting genre for improving the combat narrative â€" sound design. The sound design of a fighter is vital toward subsidizing emotional content. And sound, an area Soulcalibur in particular does exceptionally well, happens to be neglected in every major review of Soulcalibur V. Instead we’re left with reviews that discuss wanting a more expansive story mode more than they discuss the actual fighting mechanics and the modes and design aspects that compliment or detract from it.

Tom Chick’s review for Quarter To Three, “The Capcoming of Soulcalibur V“, claims that Soulcalibur V tries too hard to be like Street Fighter. He even admits to failing to master the fighting well enough to even block correctly. “After no small amount of frustration in the training room, I’ve just accepted that blocking in Soulcalibur V is beyond my ken,” he says. Chick makes no attempt to explain why blocking is difficult other than comparisons to Street Fighter’s method of blocking. “Nothing makes you quite so lazy as Capcom’s move-backwards-to-block system,” Chick said.. “I had a hard enough time forcing myself to press a guard button in Soulcalibur IV.” He uses the rest of the review to criticize Soulcalibur V for being too much like a Capcom fighter and complains about the emphasis on online play, chastising Namco for leaving casual players behind: “This stuff might be grand for anyone who wants his Soulcalibur to be more an online esport. But for us casual fighting fans who felt like Namco was one of the few companies still making games for us, Soulcalibur V is a disappointing Dear John letter.” His review misinterprets the core of what fighting games are, and even more so what Soulcalibur V is, and berates it for basically being too competitive and both not enough and too much like Street Fighter. The reality is that the online and versus modes offer more narrative than single player modes. The true story in the fighting genre is in the fighting itself and the competitive modes and audio design are the most important factors to discuss in respect to the combat. If you don’t want to fight or learn how to, then why the hell are you playing a fighting game anyway?

The fighting genre is not and has never been a genre where story is the driving force behind the game. When we look at a game to review, we must look at the core: What is it? How do its overlaying functions compliment it? I may lose a few people at this grand conclusion I’m about to come to, but my research shows that the core of the fighting genre is, gasp, combat. Who would’ve guessed? A player squares off against his foe and the story unfolds with a beautiful brutality that is never twice the same. The player doesn’t necessarily need to know a character’s motivation, we only need to know ours, which is to conquer the foe who stands before us. We smash his flesh and let him smash ours. His bones break, our bones shatter. A victor is declared. At the center of combat is competition. If the player thinks he’s the best then he will never improve, so he should at all times know there is someone out there waiting to kick his ass. Competition is a direct current flowing from the primitivism of combat, so it is more important to dissect online and versus modes than single player modes, which players should simply see as training modes for their next big encounter with their rival.