Picking and Sticking to a Fighting Game Character
How to find your main, and the metagame around secondaries
When I first started competing in Pokkén Tournament, it was the Wii U version of the game that released around 2015–2016. This early console version had 16 characters and would not receive the DLC characters that the Japanese arcade release got until the Switch port launched in 2017. Between the release history and the difficulty in running it at local events (you needed two Wii Us for a single LAN setup, which no tournament organizer was willing to sacrifice when Smash 4 was so popular,) I didn’t compete in it as much as I would have liked. My main during Pokkén Wii U was Blaziken, an easy to pick up rushdown character who fit my typical playstyle and happened to be one of my favorite Pokémon in general.
The problem was that Blaziken was bad. He was one of two characters who spent HP on his EX special moves, and unlike the other one, Shadow Mewtwo, he couldn’t heal it back without relying on system mechanics or an assist. Blaziken also had very poor neutral and a nearly non-existent fireball game, which mattered a lot when characters like Chandelure, Braixen, and the Mewtwos were very strong, and you spent half of the game in the projectile-oriented Field Phase. While he still had great block pressure and explosive damage, he was outclassed in basically every other way, and he remained a bottom tier character until Pokkén DX for Switch.
When I started competing in Pokkén DX, which received a much larger playerbase due to the popularity of the Switch, the inclusion of previously arcade-exclusive content, and totally new characters, I switched mains from Blaziken to Scizor despite having invested a ton of time into the former while playing the previous version. It was a difficult learning curve, since Scizor had many more options than Blaziken and I also had to break out of some muscle memory, but it ended up being worth it. Scizor ended up being a mid-to-high tier character throughout the game’s lifespan, and my fellow Scizor player TEC has been dominating online (and, recently, newly reopened offline) brackets with the Pincer Pokémon. I likewise caused huge upsets at locals and majors with Scizor, which culminated in the first time I had ever made a top 8 in a major for any game.
Picking your character in a fighting game is always a tough decision. When making recommendations, it’s easy to just link the Sanford Kelly interview and insist that you should ‘pick a fuckin’ top tier,’ and it’s honestly not even advice I can dismiss outright. I personally have played top tier characters, or at least characters with consistent Top 8 showings, in nearly every game I’ve played competitively with one exception (Ridley in Smash Ultimate.) There are obviously several reasons why top tiers are attractive to players, especially professional competitors.
- Top tier characters tend to be highly balanced, and some are finely tuned or even overtuned. Their exceptional matchup spread and their wide variety of tools allows them to find counterplay in situations where some other characters may struggle. They may have lots of reliable answers to most common circumstances and can even have unique options that no one else has or are incontestable.
- Because they have so many tools, top tier characters lend themselves to high amounts of player expression. Being able to play the character in different and unique ways while accessing a bunch of different tools with creative uses allows the players’ personal playstyle to come through better in the game. Letting players run wild and unrestricted with a game’s system, especially if the systems themselves are also very freeform, makes the game (and the character) more fun.
- While not every top tier character is easy to play, the ones that fit those criteria usually hit a sweet spot where strong characters that are easily piloted will stand out above those with a sharper learning curve. Even the ‘easier’ top tiers still require a lot of practice and lab time before their stronger, high-level technology can be accessed, but if the lower levels of the character can be understood in a shorter amount of time, it definitely helps a lot.
Of course, despite everything, that doesn’t stop players from picking characters that are perceived as weaker. Maybe there’s something about them that reminds you of a different character from another game and that playstyle fits you better. Maybe it’s a legacy factor where you played that character in an older version, but you can’t quit playing them even though they’ve been rebalanced substantially. Maybe you feel like your character is strong and you want to be one of the people who gets to explore them and overcome their flaws. It could even be as simple and abstract as the low-tier character feeling more fun than their stronger counterparts on the roster. For whatever reason it may be, some players will naturally gravitate towards roster slots outside of the top-tier.
The main issues that come up are when a player can’t figure out which character they want to play. We often colloquially refer to this as a ‘character crisis,’ and while it sounds silly, it can often be more important than others looking on may think. If the roster doesn’t offer a wide variety of playstyles, or if a specific character that you like has some flaws that are difficult to address, it may be hard to find something you like playing. If absolutely none of the characters in a roster appeal to you, you may end up dropping the game entirely, which can be upsetting if it was something you looked forward to trying out (or if you dropped $50 on it.)
I recently went through this experience myself with Melty Blood Type Lumina. I never played a whole lot of Actress Again Current Code, but I enjoyed playing F-Aoko in what little bit of it I tried. Unfortunately, Aoko didn’t make the cut to the Type Lumina base roster in any form, so I had to try out other characters. After going through basically the entire roster, I finally decided that both versions of Arcueid had the type of things I like in a character. Arcueid was easy to play, very aggressive and gorilla-like, featured easy-bake mixups on her Increase buttons and rekkas, and even had strong defense that exploited a lot of what makes new Melty defense so hard to open up. On the other hand, Red Arcueid had cool movement, decent setplay without being a pure zoner, and had combos that were big damage and satisfying to execute. But they weren’t free of their flaws: Arc didn’t have the setplay that other stronger Melty characters seemed to have, while Warc didn’t have as many tools, or a reliable reversal out of her metered or Moon Drive options.
Playing multiple characters can be very difficult and is not often something I recommend, especially for newer players or if you’re picking up a game for the first time. (Obviously exceptions are made for situations like team fighters or tag fighters, which we’ll discuss further down the page.) The biggest reason for this, and one of the main reasons why I try to convince myself to stick to a single character, is time. The sunk cost fallacy is very real when picking up a fighting game character, and every little bit of time is important when learning them. While you should try a bunch of characters at the start to get a feel for the basics and see who you like the most, once you pick a character, it’s best to stick to them and invest most of your time into them. Picking two characters and splitting your time between them, when you could just be putting all your time into a single character instead, will put you at a disadvantage against other dedicated mains.
Often, players will learn (or suggest learning) a secondary character to deal with bad matchups, but the issue here is once again a matter of time. The time spent learning a new character- getting all their fundamentals and BnBs down, their advanced tools, and then bringing your level of comfort with them up to that of your main- just to deal with a problematic situation could have been spent learning counterplay for that same situation with your main, which would likely be more productive in the long run. This is usually why some players end up trying to play their way through losing matchups with their main even when it’s incredibly difficult to do so. From their perspective, instead of dedicating their time to a second character and ‘redoing’ or ‘undoing’ the progress they’ve made learning their main, it’s better to learn unique techniques or specific skills in order to overcome the difficult matchup… or you may just want to start out playing a top-tier in the first place.
Another major reason why learning multiple characters to get around bad matchups is less effective in the long run is because other players can play around the counterpick meta in the same, or better ways. While switching to a stronger, or more obscure, character to defeat an opponent with a better matchup than you might earn you wins occasionally, it’s also a strategy that loses its efficacy at higher levels of play. Counterpicking exploits two major weaknesses in your opponent’s skillset: the lopsidedness of the matchup itself, along with your opponent’s lack of familiarity with the character you switched to. However, especially experienced or knowledgeable players may be familiar with the counterpicked matchup, and will thus punish you for switching to a character you have less time invested into, or they may even counterpick you themselves. When described this way, you can see how complicated and time-consuming the counterpick meta becomes, which is why it’s usually better to stick to a single character for the whole set.
Of course, there are exceptions and special circumstances where learning multiple characters can be fine.
- The first of these is obviously tag and team games, where you often have no choice but to play multiple characters. Picking a reliable shell and then swapping out a single character for certain matchups is often the way to go in 3v3 games like Marvel vs. Capcom or Dragon Ball FighterZ. Even in games like Capcom vs. SNK 2 or Skullgirls, which feature ratio systems, you’re often handicapping yourself if you don’t pick at least one teammate for your point character. Players of team fighters often develop the ability to switch between characters on the fly, as well as learn new characters quickly. Of course, this is due to the specific skill sets that team games encourage, so naturally if you do want to learn multiple characters (as well as learn how to learn multiple characters and juggle those kits all at once) you should try one of those games out.
- The second is DLC characters. As is often the case, a character may arrive for a game post-launch that may be more appealing to you than any of the base roster offerings. (This was the case in my earlier anecdote.) You may rationalize your time spent with the earlier character as you becoming familiar with the game’s fundamentals, and then spend your time taking the new character more seriously. This is also often how players expand their repertoire of understood characters, since the skills learnt previously never go away. As a bonus, patches in the future may even make your old character more relevant to you.
- If there are character clones or multiple characters who otherwise share similarities, the groundwork for learning more than two such characters is decidedly less. Shotoclones are an obvious example of this, but there are also some situations in team games or even solo games where there happen to be a lot of similarities between roster. Alternatively, if a game is simply fundamentally easy to pick up for the whole cast, then it may also be worth your time to play a bunch of characters. The Smash Bros. games are prime examples of this, where multiple characters exist that have core similarities even outside of predesignated ‘Echo Fighters’ and the game itself is very simple to learn.
So, let’s go over what we know now about picking characters. We know that it’s easy to gravitate towards picking top-tier characters due to their versatility and high levels of character expression. However, after trying out the roster for yourself, you may find that a certain character may be more fun for you anyway even if they’re not popular or strong, in which case there’s no harm in playing them so long as you recognize the inherent uphill struggle. We’ve also established that, with some exceptions, it is often unwise or inefficient to play multiple characters due to the sunk cost fallacy and the difficulties when playing the counterpick meta. What are some other methods we can use to discover our main when exploring a new fighting game?
- As we’ve said before, trying every character at least once, even for only a minute or so, can help you get a feel for whether you like them. If something doesn’t feel natural at first, you can probably just switch to a different character, or even come back to a character you didn’t like once you understand the game better.
- Think about archetypes or similarities that you tend to consistently enjoy throughout the genre. If you like playing simple, easy to understand characters, you can usually gravitate towards protagonist archetypes or shotoclones very well. Likewise, if you like playing big bodies or highly mobile characters, you can look through the cast for someone who fits the bill and then try them out.
- In fact, starting out with a beginner-friendly character is often very effective in itself. Shotoclones and similar types of characters tend to have well-rounded kits that are suitable for a variety of situations. Being able to play safely on offense, defense, through other characters’ offense, and in neutral, makes beginner-friendly characters highly versatile and can also help you understand those scenarios better. It’s especially useful since these characters often remain relevant even at higher levels of play, like Sakura in SFV or Sol in GGST.
- Try to stay away from difficult or unorthodox characters until you’ve gotten more familiar with the genre or the game. Puppet characters, characters with unique stance cancels, or other examples that wildly defy the normal rules of the game usually have a lot going on and can be hard to grasp when just starting out. Try to get a feel for the game by playing an easier character first, and then pick out the harder character you wanted to play after building up an amount of familiarity.
The fighting game genre is booming, with old games being revitalized by their developers and new ones highly anticipated. Picking a new character is the first, hardest, and most important choice when you’re picking up a new game, and recognizing how to make those decisions is just as crucial. Being able to sort through rosters large and small alike, and finding the character that will, with no exaggeration, become a major part of your identity during the time you play the game, is an important skill to have. While I ultimately can’t tell you what exactly to do or how to hone your playstyle- you’re even free to play the whole roster if you have the time and passion to commit to such an endeavor- these lessons here have been helpful for me when navigating the character select screen after booting up a game for the first time.
