I've been recently playing a hell of a lot of Persona 4: Arena, having gained access to a PS3. I'll review the game in full when I finish all of the story stuff, which I'm about 65% through, according to the game itself, but there's an interesting point that I feel it brings up.
A lot of people (myself included) thought that the continuation of Persona 4's story being a fighting game seemed mighty odd. Indeed, the fighting game genre is a one that's not very well regarded when it comes to story. I struggle to think of a fighting game that's had a story more in-depth than "Big fight tournament happen. Strong men, women, gods, mutants and other beat crap out of each other for reason", present company excluded.
This is understandable. There just isn't much place for story in a fighting game: matches are generally really quick (the maximum they can possibly last is just under three-hundred seconds on default settings), which means story will either be very minimalistic or take over completely. Even in Arena, the story mode is more a visual novel with occasional fights than a fighting game. As such, it's understandable that you'd shy away from putting money into story when you already have the delicate task of crafting a fighting game, arguably the game genre that requires the most finely-tuned mechanics.
But let's examine what a fighting game entails: Two characters with a series of moves and abilities, fighting in single combat. There's no doubt that there's a high degree of skill involved, but mechanically every match is an exploration of how the two systems that these characters represent interact and interlock. Traditionally, the character is secondary to the system, and is visually a representation of the system itself: We've got a character who moves around and jumps a lot, and specializes in fast, long strikes before moving away, so let's make it the "nimble Chinese fighter woman" stereotype and call it Chun-Li, because that kind of fits. You then build a stage around the character, and give them a tune that fits with the stereotype you've molded them into.
This is perfectly fine, and is the more practical way of designing a fighter. I'm sure if you work this way you'll end up with a deeper and more rewarding fighting game. But there's an alternative, and I'm sure you already know where I'm going but I'm going to spell it out anyway: You can explore characters by abstracting them into systems rather than viceversa. This works great if these characters come from another game, say, where there's already pre-established moves from them to have.
If you didn't see this coming you must be blind, but this is exactly what Persona 4: Arena does in a really interesting way. Every character feels like they were built to play the way that character would play, over systemic interaction with other characters in mind. Yu is very straight-forward and versatile, Yosuke is fast but somewhat unreliable, Teddie very much feels like you're kind of doing random shit and it happens to be working... Every character's representation within the game feels like an abstraction of their personality in a very direct sense. A fight between two characters can go drastically different between the players, but one gets an impression that, in a way, it's still very much an interaction between characters rather than systems. Play the game and tell me you don't pale in front of Akihiko's bulldog-like persistence, or that Naoto's unrelentingly logical playstyle doesn't overwhelm you. A match between Teddie and Kanji will result in either Teddie outspeeding Kanji and exhausting his resources, or Kanji's anger blowing Teddie completely out of the water, two scenarios very familiar to anyone who's journeyed through Persona 4.
In a way, fighting games are the most in-depth exploration of character that videogames can offer. Literature and film have long explored characters in the traditional sense. Much like in other areas, videogames offer a completely new way of thinking about character interaction, and I believe that fighting games are an absolutely phenomenal way of doing so. As ridiculous as it sounds, the time spent fooling around in fights in Persona 4: Arena gave me a very different but just as valid understanding of the characters I'd grown to love so much during Persona 4. As such, I do something that I didn't think I would when I was sneering at the idea of Arena and picking it up almost out of pity: I throw my vote in for more fighting-game spin-offs for mostly character-driven stories. I understand that it's never going to become common practice, and that few companies get the resources or freedom that ATLUS had in order to make Arena, but I believe the fighting game as an exploration of pre-established characters has much potential.
(Of course, creating complex, in the literary sense, characters and putting a story mode in your brand-new IP of a fighting game is also an option, though one that seems even more unlikely and quite difficult to pull off).
A lot of people (myself included) thought that the continuation of Persona 4's story being a fighting game seemed mighty odd. Indeed, the fighting game genre is a one that's not very well regarded when it comes to story. I struggle to think of a fighting game that's had a story more in-depth than "Big fight tournament happen. Strong men, women, gods, mutants and other beat crap out of each other for reason", present company excluded.
This is understandable. There just isn't much place for story in a fighting game: matches are generally really quick (the maximum they can possibly last is just under three-hundred seconds on default settings), which means story will either be very minimalistic or take over completely. Even in Arena, the story mode is more a visual novel with occasional fights than a fighting game. As such, it's understandable that you'd shy away from putting money into story when you already have the delicate task of crafting a fighting game, arguably the game genre that requires the most finely-tuned mechanics.
But let's examine what a fighting game entails: Two characters with a series of moves and abilities, fighting in single combat. There's no doubt that there's a high degree of skill involved, but mechanically every match is an exploration of how the two systems that these characters represent interact and interlock. Traditionally, the character is secondary to the system, and is visually a representation of the system itself: We've got a character who moves around and jumps a lot, and specializes in fast, long strikes before moving away, so let's make it the "nimble Chinese fighter woman" stereotype and call it Chun-Li, because that kind of fits. You then build a stage around the character, and give them a tune that fits with the stereotype you've molded them into.
This is perfectly fine, and is the more practical way of designing a fighter. I'm sure if you work this way you'll end up with a deeper and more rewarding fighting game. But there's an alternative, and I'm sure you already know where I'm going but I'm going to spell it out anyway: You can explore characters by abstracting them into systems rather than viceversa. This works great if these characters come from another game, say, where there's already pre-established moves from them to have.
If you didn't see this coming you must be blind, but this is exactly what Persona 4: Arena does in a really interesting way. Every character feels like they were built to play the way that character would play, over systemic interaction with other characters in mind. Yu is very straight-forward and versatile, Yosuke is fast but somewhat unreliable, Teddie very much feels like you're kind of doing random shit and it happens to be working... Every character's representation within the game feels like an abstraction of their personality in a very direct sense. A fight between two characters can go drastically different between the players, but one gets an impression that, in a way, it's still very much an interaction between characters rather than systems. Play the game and tell me you don't pale in front of Akihiko's bulldog-like persistence, or that Naoto's unrelentingly logical playstyle doesn't overwhelm you. A match between Teddie and Kanji will result in either Teddie outspeeding Kanji and exhausting his resources, or Kanji's anger blowing Teddie completely out of the water, two scenarios very familiar to anyone who's journeyed through Persona 4.
In a way, fighting games are the most in-depth exploration of character that videogames can offer. Literature and film have long explored characters in the traditional sense. Much like in other areas, videogames offer a completely new way of thinking about character interaction, and I believe that fighting games are an absolutely phenomenal way of doing so. As ridiculous as it sounds, the time spent fooling around in fights in Persona 4: Arena gave me a very different but just as valid understanding of the characters I'd grown to love so much during Persona 4. As such, I do something that I didn't think I would when I was sneering at the idea of Arena and picking it up almost out of pity: I throw my vote in for more fighting-game spin-offs for mostly character-driven stories. I understand that it's never going to become common practice, and that few companies get the resources or freedom that ATLUS had in order to make Arena, but I believe the fighting game as an exploration of pre-established characters has much potential.
(Of course, creating complex, in the literary sense, characters and putting a story mode in your brand-new IP of a fighting game is also an option, though one that seems even more unlikely and quite difficult to pull off).
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