My ignorant thought is that the power of youthful reactions – “twitch” skill – is somewhat oversold. I’ll be 32 this year and quite honestly I believe I’m playing fighting games the best I’ve ever played them in my life.
Despite whatever reaction decay I can observe, I have just plain dabbled in enough games competitively, gone thru the learning process so many times to get a crash course in how to play a given game – sometimes a very weird one that takes me out of my comfort zone a la Tekken Tag 2 – that my raw experience can pick up the slack.
This is certainly not to say I can hang with the likes of, say, Alex Valle, who combines years of experience with years of playing at a much higher level of competition than I ever did. But I believe that raw physical “twitch” skill will always be subordinate to just gaining the experience and knowledge to understand your own strengths and weaknesses as a player and build a playstyle that maximizes your chance of winning.
I have been able to apply skills and gems of experience across games that I would have thought completely irrelevant to one another. Examples off the top of my head:
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Anime games to KOF: My neutral game struggled for the longest time in KOF because I didn’t actually understand how to zone with jump normals – the idea that a jump back or vertical jump D air-to-air was an end in itself rather than something you just do to stall while fishing for a low jump combo, or that you should wait and react to your opponent doing something before just chucking it out. Building off the robust air-to-air footsies of games like Guilty Gear gave me a better idea of how I could control air space in KOF besides just charging at people bullheaded.
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Tekken/Soul Calibur to 2D games: Tekken and Soul Calibur gave me a better understanding of what it really means to attack from frame disadvantage. You’re almost always minus on block in those games, but you can and often should press your luck from that literal disadvantage if you think you can guess the rock-paper-scissors option to beat your opponent’s “free” response. (Blow up d1 with hopkick! Tech crouch that “free” 5AA in Soul Calibur with your 3B/33_99B! High crush! Low crush! Live a little! Don’t just surrender because of an abstract number! Understand the actual decision trees available from a situation that’s disadvantageous in the abstract, and learn to accept that an action with the best reward might actually require a risk!
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Street Fighter 4/5 to anime games: Yes, you read that right. I would say my footsies in Street Fighter were complete ass up until about, uh…2013. All I knew how to do with Bison was walk to a poke’s max range and hit a button automatically, not reacting to anything. I played him like a sledgehammer and that only took me so far. But once I learned how to actually use his walk speed to walk in and out of a crouch MK range and whiff punish with my own attacks, I began to see much higher results. Even in Guilty Gear, where jumping is less risky and walking for fine positioning less important, I felt like I gained an enhanced sense of how to use minor adjustments in position to make my opponent do something I could whiff punish. The “shimmy” (I’m sorry but I think we’re stuck with that term, it rolls nicely off the tongue & is reasonably descriptive) is a universal technique across pretty much every fighting game where you can move your character. That was a huge revelation for me.
Another big part of my evolution was actually experimenting with radically different playstyles across different games.
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SF4 Bison taught me the very basics of taking advantage of a high walk speed and fast normals to control the ground.
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Playing Lili/Hugo in SFxT (probably the 1st game where I used “the lab” to its full potential) taught me how I could make a strong understanding of anti-air the foundation of a ground game, and how to best capitalize off of basic good zoning/footsie decisions.
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Playing Aquaman in Injustice allowed me to expand on my lessons in SFxT to create a flexible zoning style and understand the significance of “free” actions that don’t immediately result in damage to my opponent. (Sick of Deathstroke gun zoning? You are guaranteed a free forward dash after gunshots get blocked or whiffed. Use that guaranteed advancement to slowly dismantle his zoning.)
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And of all things, playing JoJo All Star Battle taught me how to understand setplay characters (Lisa Lisa and part 1 Dio) and develop my own okizeme, as well as how to learn a game competitively for which very few resources existed except my own human imagination.
My improvement as a player occurred to me suddenly one day when I was playing, of all things, casual KOF 98 at CEO 2015. I picked a team who played to my strengths and who I understood well (Orochi Yashiro/Daimon/Ralf, a team I learned basically by “X-Copying” Japanese player Oogosho). I made better decisions about jump normal zoning, diversifying my pressure, baiting rolls and wakeup moves. I made up a pocket Shermie on the spot based on what I knew about her normals and okizeme and she actually wasn’t too bad! I went even with friggin’ Latin American players and even taught one Mexican(?) guy how to ball cancel with Chang. All of a sudden I was at the top of my game in a game I hadn’t played seriously since 2008 (on a Korean matchmaking service where I got bodied by real KOF players). The only conclusion I could make was that in general, I’d just gotten smarter over the years.
The tl;dr of that long, rambling story is this: Every fighting game can teach you a meaningful skill or pattern. Any time you spend learning the basics of how to play a fighter competitively will teach you something useful you can apply to other fighting games (and sometimes non-fighting games like Dark Souls), even if you’re just not good at/fond of some games you try. (Sorry, BlazBlue.) Learning how to learn is a skill in and of itself – perhaps the most important skill of them all.
If you are willing to risk the humbling experience of losing to try to win at a game that’s foreign to you, you may be very surprised by what games you’re actually good at. If you had told me 2 weeks before Injustice came out that I’d be good at it and enjoy it, I would have laughed in your face. But I gave that game a try for the sheer hell of it, and now it’s one of my all-time favorites and probably the one in which I played at my very best. Always doubt your first impression. Always give a game a sporting try.