Why We Like to Play HARD Games

After grabbing my first burst in Xrd
.....I...I see the light. I see what you mean now....

I've played a lot of fighting games over the years and I gotta say the 2 hardest games are Guilty Gear and Tekken. Even thought they are completely different in style and overall mechanics, they are still the hardest games in their respective category. The only differences of the 2 games other than mechanics is that one is 3D and the other is 2D, both are very balanced in various ways and most of the good characters that deal crazy damage are locked behind execution. Similar to -Strive-, Tekken 8 is gonna be simplifying a lot of the core mechanics everyone grew to get used to and it's going to drive some of the players away from the game and continue with playing the previous installments.

not so smart using fighting games as an example

From my brief experience with xXrd, it actually seems like you can defend more in Strive just because the combos are so short and you don't have something like the shown 40 hit Zato Combo or when I played, my friend as Jam stunlocked me hard.

to be honest i cant really add that much to the conversation since i wasn't a hardcore fighting game player before and currently am trying to get better in strive (sure you've heard that a lot by now lol)
but i really appreciate how civilized and open the comment section here is, with everyone giving their own perspectives on this type of stuff and being respectful about it, it's pretty nice to see people talk about it like this cuz i feel like theres a bit of nuance to it yknow (and just a nice change of pace from some other places where people just kinda take everything way too personally)

Killer Instinct wins again

I personally prefer strive because in total with fighting games I only have around 600 hours and xrd is a lot to get used to, but at its best I do think that xrd is more fun, it’s just got a way steeper learning curve imo

strive is fun, but man. +R and Xrd are just WAY COOLER games.
something feels so insanely good about those two games, between movement and game feel.

though strive has some of the best super animations, they look great.
but man, +R hit different

I suck, so I do appreciate some accessibility features like making combos more consistent across the cast and buffers to make execution a little less tight are things I appreciate and speaking of Xrd I honestly really like how the roman cancel system is looser and you can do more silly stuff with it even if ACPR is sillier in general. Trying out Strive with a friend just made me sad in how much less silly it was though. I play May in Xrd and she has so much stupid nonsense in that game while in Strive she has like two special moves.

When I tried learning Skullgirls I just could not do Eliza's bnb, I tried for like 30 minutes and I couldn't do it and I felt like if I had to put all that effort into the game for what should be a simple bnb I'd rather just do something else. In GG you can at least survive on knockdown into oki for a couple hours.

Also this is barely related but I honestly really don't like things like Actress Again moon system, I'd rather just have a complete character.

Do I have a point? Uh... I can't run SF6 so I'm not playing it but I do really like how it seems to juice all the characters up with moves and stuff they can do while at the same time doing things to keep the game accessible. Of course the skill floor and the skill ceiling are not completely independent of each other, but they should be as far apart as possible.

I would not classify the games you mentioned as "hard". I classify a fighting game as "hard" when it is difficult to start playing with intentionality, and i personally think guilty gear, blazblue, melty blood actress again etc does not have this issue. Instead, i would call them complex games. They simply have more depth that can be learned. You don't need to know the character specific potemkin combos to get good damage out of him, but it's there if you want to. You don't need to know how to do slayers air BnB because you center your gameplan around doing other things to consistently get damage. You don't need to know how to FRC every move in chipps move list to be effective, but it helps. You don't need to learn every cursed war criminal like mixup C-roa has, or need to know how to do the fucking half a minute long combos that F-Pciel has, but if you wanna use them, it's there. I could go on and on. All of these aren't necessary to play. They may be necessary to play at a high level, but playing at a high level isn't the goal for most people. Most people wanna have fun, and it's not very hard to get fun out of complex games.

this video slaps but my man you need to speak with more confidence, volume and clarity so everyone will listen to you and take it seriously

As a Strive player who somewhat recently tried Xrd Chipp combo trials, the reward of pulling those off is so good. I personally love Strive but I do wish they could keep what's different about strive without just simplifying it or making it do more damage.

great video - I really like the way you present your points and don't try to demean other players. I've got a small issue though - you say that by making burst throwable, it opens up all these mindgames. However, these mindgames still exist in Strive. Its not like the attacker suddenly just isnt thinking about bursts anymore, or that the person getting comboed is no longer looking for burst points. All of that interplay still exists. Burst throw OSes may not exist anymore, but the guy getting comboed still has to think about where a safe burst point is, when the opponent may be baiting their burst, whether they should save or spend burst, all of this is still happening in strive - and I'm going to be honest, I have no idea how making bursts not throwable reduces any of this interplay, except for making baiting bursts possibly harder.

And, on the topic of ceilings - let me ask you a question. Do you think basketball, for example, has a skill ceiling? I mean, yeah, there is a certain point where mechanical execution basically levels out except for the exceptional, but all of the rest of the game - beyond the initial layer of 'can I shoot the ball from this distance' - still have to be considered. Because once you get past execution you get into the human element - the teamwork, the coordination. Fighting games are like this too. There is a mechanical skill ceiling, but there is also the person-to-person aspect of it - because you're not in a competition where you're just seeing who can do the most damage in one combo. You're playing against a person, playing neutral, trying to read them, varying your options to bait certain things. I absolutely agree that strive has a lower execution ceiling than other games. but the mental aspect is still very much there and thriving.

I miss sidewinder alot

I honestly really like having both. I love Xrd because I'm still on that "learning something new every match" curve, and it feels like both me and my opponents are scrambling to piece together our game plans once something goes wrong. I love Strive because while I feel like I've stopped improving on my main, I can still pick up a character, remember what people did to me using them, and string something together. That, and my less fighting game brainrotted friends can pick it up and become competent way sooner without tremendous effort.

Sometimes I don't feel like performing a concert on my fightstick just to run my game, sometimes I decide it's time to learn Kum Kickloops and experience nirvana as I drain the opponent's healthbar.

I love these games, man.

Another game that has that join into replays and play what could have been is rivals of aether.

I just like both honestly. Strive is my main fg alongside fighterz and while I adore and feel most at home in strive, xrd rev2 and AC+R are just super fun and honestly so wacky. The second my friends get them im making them suffer with BED and Order Sol. Ill be doing that similar with BED 2: Electric Boogaloo in Strive pretty soon too. Anyway, I definitely see the points made and fully understand. Im just chillin and playing whatever honestly.

So having strive be my first fighting game I'm fully coming too and trying out xrd I just hate how low the damage is like look at pot buster when you hit pot buster it's so satisfying and watching that health just drain is so beautiful but in xrd it feels like a slap on the wrist
(and pot buster looks wayyyy cooler in strive)

And as a jack-o main i love learning each little intricate niece setup depending on every factor and the pay off is so good like you said learning complicated things and then pulling them off is amazing but in xrd it doesn't feel the same like I learned Kum heayun combos but they never hit the same because of he low damage,
oh and when it comes to the feeling of hitting , the way strive shows counter hits is amazing it feels so dramatic because it is, counter hit combos are so big and damaging in each game but in the older games it's just text that popped up on screen like wow
Plus ngl xrd just looks like shit ugly ass game

minecraft dungeons something something diablo

well i decided to main jam in xrd and now i'm learning her

Where can i find people to play +r? I'd like to invest time in it but i'm not sure if there would be more than 2 persons to play it with

Literally everything in this video is objectively correct
As a platform fighting game enjoyer, I'll add another example, smash bros melee is the +R to smash ultimate's Strive

Subbed when I saw 100 hours on Strive LOL

i wish i had the time and energy to get into these more complicated games. I would just like a fighting game thats not too hard too learn and or get into and have debth

Strive for me is like mk11 i don't hate it for being a toned down version of the previous games but its not for me I'll take mkx and rev 2 any day

Lol now I feel bad for liking strive. I'll probably try to get good at xrd now that it has rollback

Fuck the frame one throws tho. Im so glad they got rid of those. I love all of xrds harder mechanics but that one was genuinely bullshit

The funny part about Strive specifically and why I had to go through an attitude shift in order to start clicking with it was because despite being simplified for the sake of accessibility, that process actually made the game feel less welcoming to me starting off. Because high damage was easier to obtain, because the game's universal mechanics had less for both offense and defence, it made it feel like there was less room to breathe. When your opponent gets going, I don't have reversal mechanics like Dead Angle and Blitz to consider and when hit by a combo, I have less hope that they'd drop a difficult combo and give me my second wind. I've always leaned harder on fighters being more of a social experience, so I have been able to get more fun out of Strive. However, I can't really say I have alot of interest in it as far as mastering it is concerned, because the game's more competitive side feels so bitter to me and usually just makes me feel like garbage, because it feels like I have so much less I can do outside of not fucking up in the first place.

One of the reasons why I got into fg was because of shoot em ups weirdly enough. Both of the communities feel a bit similar in some ways and probably one of the reasons for that is how they both had their origins from the arcade scene.

It really is a drug. That's why we cal the hard/good games "crack."

This video basically sums up my experience between +R, Rev2, and Strive. It something I found a bit hard to convey to some of my friends who started playing serious on Strive and my overall frustration/lack of motivation to put forth the same effort that my friends were. Is Strive fun? Yes absolutely, but it always was missing something and it didn't really truly hit me until I went back to play +R for a bit when it literally hit me both figuratively and literally (by a Pot player). I was missing all of my choices, both offensively and defensively. Ultimately tho I resettled on Rev2 simply cause its a better balance of ease of play vs learning and one of my friends that picked up Rev2 for the rollback, that used to only play Strive almost immediately understood my frustrations after he got the general basics of Rev 2. He was basically flabbergasted at how much more he could do with Leo in Rev 2 compared to Strive and how much more he could push himself.

it is an absolute sin that this video only have 40k views, absolutely lovely video start to finish, much love lucid <3 u made me wanna play xrd again

Too many options just turn a fight into a frustrating dice roll (っ °Д °;)っ a godlike player in Strive might lose a round to a good player if they get too cocky but in xrd and xx they'll never lose a round and stomp so hard neither side will want a rematch, not to mention old games don't get patched and have broken stuff like mentioned 25 tension cancels, instant grabs and resets that are totally unfair

I love this

As weird as it sounds, you should try For Honor.

And then, ofc, Soul Calibur and Tekken.
Crazy rewarding games for the exact same reasons you've mentioned in this vid!

i think strive is better, atleast for new player, it is my first fighting game and i had trouble learning some mecanique, i think i woudn't have played that much of other game if ther wher more mecanique

bc most fighting game arn't really noobs friendly

I agree with the general concept but I hate when the opponent can do things while getting hit. Why I don’t play smash much.

i like strive because at higher levels it focuses a lot on neutral, its slower, and i think the joy comes some from combos but also each hit alone and the absolute most visceral, brutal and impactful counter animation ive ever seen nor experienced. also the whole game is beautiful and has a perfect balance from easy to learn and hard to master without over simplifying it.

i understand how it was disappointing how much they changed the gameplay, but tbh they kinda just made a gateway from the slower fighters and dbfz to the older guilty gears

edit/side note: amount of options doesnt necessarily equate to depth, i mean tekken has like a billion moves per character and i wouldnt say it has more depth than other games, tbh i personally dont like tekken because of how much is knowledge checks (i dont hate knowledge checks but jeez it shouldnt be the whole game)

oh also arcsys adds tons of stuff like moves to the game after release anyways so maybe in like a year we'll get super guilty gear: strive turbo rev core 3.5 + cos x^6 so chipp can have super crazy shit

Beautiful, more videos like this please! Highlight reals are great, but you really have something in the fighting vidya essays department. Good job, keep it going :)

what music did you use first?

as someone new to fighting games i chose strive over xrd and xx (because it's easier to pick up obviously) but also because the scene is still new and theres dlc characters coming out and its still run on evo main stage its like easier to be motivated to pla when its all new and exciting ig

I do appreciate you acknowledge the other side, lots of more toxic people just call newer players like myself babies for playing simplified fighting games; I personally have tried to get into more complex fighting games (Namely +R and Melee), but their overwhelming amount of effort to get to a playable level felt incredibly unfun. The sheer mechanical depth and years of experience for the playerbase make the games difficult to approach, and while it may be worth the time investment to really learn the games, I'm not sure I'm willing to spend the upwards of hundreds of hours to get to get to a point where I MIGHT have fun and be able to win some amount of the time. So, I play Strive and Ultimate, their simplification makes the game more approachable and makes it easier for me to feel like I'm getting better.

At the end of the day, it's personal preference, and I'm glad that the conversation can stay civil.

Good video

fuck yall strive taught me xrd