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When did your preferred fighting game franchises peak?
Taking it all into account - storyline, presentation, roster, gameplay, etc.
Not sure if there are too many fighting game enthusiasts on here, judging by the posts. I'm not exactly an aficionado myself, as I haven't really been into them since the Neo Geo and PS1 days. I'm probably only really qualified to say Samurai Shodown 4 is the best in the series, although it is remarkable how well Street Fighter 2 still holds up today. For Tekken, Soul Calibur, Marvel vs. Capcom, etc. I didn't play past the first couple entries.
Melee. It’s still the GOAT.
Yeah, I love Brawl and Ultimate but Melee... man, Melee just did everything right. It just can't be beat.
As far as I'm concerned, Melee is The Beautiful Game. You really can watch someone express themselves in the way they play. And it's still getting better - we just had Link vs Luigi in the top 8 of a major!
Took the words right out of my mouth. First of all, it’s astonishing that the game is still so strong more than two decades later, and second, it’s amazing to watch this new generation, with fresh ideas and play styles, rise to the top. RapMonster’s Luigi is my favorite at the moment. He plays the character like the developers intended, I think: chaotic and unpredictable.
Get rid of L canceling as a concept, add a short hop button, and I'd probably love melee. I hate the arbitrary execution it puts on players though that rarely matters.
project m (the brawl mod) gave it a run for it's money before it got shutdown, imo. melee-like movement/tech/speed with a larger roster of characters. must have sunk 1000's of hours into it with friends.
I've never really gotten or been into Smash... I didn't even know which game you were referring to until I read the replies. Is it something you can really enjoy if you don't especially hold a special place in your heart for Nintendo IPs?
I absolutely think you could, though competitive Melee has a steep barrier to entry nowadays. Platform fighters are really something else - the fluidity of movement that you have available can feel more like a precision-platformer speedrun than a "regular" 2D fighting game.
For @culturedleftfoot as well:
On the other hand platform fighters are the first genre to really move fighters towards being more intuitive at a casual level.
While the melee execution barrier is STEEP, the skills and concepts you're intuitively learning just by screwing around actually scale, and there's a lot less "unlearn everything you thought was important" and more "okay yes that was good, but also here's why falling off a ledge is the most important thing you can do..."
Smash bros would not be as big if it was only "oh look nintendo characters", but instead launched a genre and brought in an entire new generation of players because it finally tweaked the curve to at least go in the right direction.
It might be easier to get to intermediate levels of say, SF, because you don't have things like SHFFL, but at the same time if you want to anti air in platform fighters you jump/hit up. You want to do it in a standard fighter you do down + HP or a DP motion.
All that said, I think RoA is one of the best at expanding on what melee started, and even though I don't like 2 as much as 1, it's still probably one of the best entry points into the genre.
Couldn’t have said it better. An attachment to Nintendo’s IPs is not necessary by the way. I think that many high-level players don’t care much for whatever else Nintendo has to offer. This game stands on its own.
So many hours spent in this game playing with friends. I had friends that got in to competitive smash during university, and it was always cool seeing the things that they could do their and them going to local tournaments.
My fraternity kept a Game Cube (and I think still does) in the living room that was/is almost exclusively used for Smash. Waiting for literally anything, why not play some smash with whoever is around.
Soul Caliber peaked in 1999 when it was ported to Dreamcast. Smash Bros peaked on N64 not GameCube. I can’t defend these positions, but I feel strongly about them.
I've played subsequent SC games since the one I had on DC but it's just not the same for some reason. Identical move sets, I can still perform a ton of automatic things like parries and dodges and moves that reach a third or better across the screen, but... I dunno, it just doesn't amuse me the way the one did 25 years ago.
100% on Soul Calibur. We still have a Dreamcast just for that and Toy Commander.
I preferred Soul Blade on PS1, but Soul Caliber on DC is second best. Soul Blade had this awesome adventure mode that told way more story and had you going around a world map doing different fights with wacky rules like only winning by ring out, or you are poisoned the entire time.
2002 with the release of Soul Calibur 2, specifically for Xbox as Spawn was easily the coolest guest character. It's also a simple fact that Xbox had the more powerful hardware between it, the ps2, and the GameCube, meaning the game ran and looked better on the Xbox.
I continued to buy every SC entry out of misplaced hope and today I own them all except for SC3 because for some strange reason it was a PlayStation exclusive. The last 2 entries were especially terrible, for many of the reasons that other modern fighters mostly suck but also for other series-specific things like the single player modes being completely half-assed.
Edit: I thought I should clarify that I still played a lot of SC3 at my friend's house and it was generally a pretty good game and had one of the best story modes, which really solidifies SC2 as the "peak" as it was a gradual descent into the dumpster afterward.
Hahaha damn, I had this thread open to talk about Soul Caliber 2, and in the time I took to help somebody move some furniture quick, you beat me to it!
On the Nintendo side of things, the bait-and-switch of the realistic tech demo for Legend of Zelda on the Gamecube meant that Link's inclusion in Soul Caliber 2 was the closest execution to a realistic Zelda game we ever got. I used to joke as a kid that if you pretended SC2 was really just Zelda II: Adventure of Link 2 that Nintendo hadn't dropped the ball.
Side tangent aside, Link really amped SC2 for anyone on the Gamecube. Having not played with Spawn ever, was he as incredibly broken as Link was? You could Ring Out 90% of the matches with Link, not sure if Spawn's move set was as cheesed...
Oh yeah, Spawn was also extremely overpowered. He had a eye-laser move that outranged any other attack and it could come out quick or be charged for huge damage. He could also sort of fly for a bit and you could unleash the laser from there as well. The rest of his moveset was crazy strong too.
Just as trivia more than anything else, but spawn is really quite weak. Bottom 5 to memory (link was bottom 2 and heihachi was actually decent, but it's been forever since i looked)
SC2 had that incredible Weapon Master mode. I'll always remember it!
I won't copy-paste my thoughts from just above your comment, but yeah, Souls was one of my two franchises and the one I was best at. I've played pretty much all of them, but I think for me I peaked at SC2 (that was the last one on Dreamcast, right?) The fun tapered off after SC2 for me, though I had a PlayStation 2 and I recall disliking SC3 enough that I sold my PlayStation and didn't get another video game console for about 5 years. I think own SC6 on my Xbox account, but it feels hollow and not enjoyable for some reason.
SCVI is great for competitive palyers like me who never touch story mode, EXCEPT they dropped the ball on netplay JUST BEFORE COVID.
SC3 has the best create a soul by miles which sucks because it's utterly broken by 22G otherwise.
SC2 is nice but the higher level gameplay is built around the 22G glitch which isn't that fun imo (but not utterly destroyed by it like 3).
SC really is always on the edge of being a slam dunk and its sooooo frustrating that there's always some "oops it fucking sucks" issue.
My favourite fighting game “series” is Rivals of Aether, which is a platform fighter (AKA Super Smash Bros-like game). IMO, Rivals 1 was peak, and Rivals 2 was/is comparatively less good.
The reason why I think the original Rivals of Aether was so good is that it had several limitations that in my opinion made it more interesting as a game. It lacked ledges and grabs (in general, though some moves acted as command grabs), and featured a parry system instead of a shield. The lack of shields made the game fast and aggressive in a way that I thought was really fun, and the lack of ledges actually made recovery/edge guarding much more interesting. It also had extremely fluid combos that I haven’t found in any other fighting game including its sequel.
By comparison, Rivals 2 is lacking in a few ways:
It’s also a shame that Rivals 2 didn’t manage to retain a good player base. One possible reason for this is that it launched as a fully featured competitive game, but without many important features for casual players (in particular no tutorial!) A lack of a large enough, healthy player base is terrible for a fighting game because if you are new to the game and you go online, you can basically only be matched with players who are much more skilled than you.
PS: sorry for going on a rant about a pretty niche platform fighter if you were only looking for discussion of regular fighting games.
I like how they pulled in characters from other indie games to round out the roster. Shame they couldn't get the official Drifter from Hyper Light Drifter... I imagine Heart Machine would have gotten more money licensing him for Brawlout but I don't know if that was more successful than Rivals.
I was so sad they added ledge and shield mechanics to 2. I hoped they'd handle it in such a way as to keep the pace/identity of 1, but they really did just kinda "copy melee" in that regard and matches suffer for it.
Sonic the Fighters peaked with Sonic the Fighters. (Kidding, but I've seen some competitive matches of this game in the balance-patched community edition that were cool to watch)
In seriousness, I probably played the Dragon Ball fighting games the most. I think Raging Blast 2 was the peak. Not as many characters and not quite as cinematic as BT3 (some models and animations weren't great), the customization was a lot of fun; you got way more variety in super attacks than the Tenkaichi series, you got character-specific normal attacks, and overall I found the fighting more fun.
BT3 definitely clears in terms of roster and side content though.
Sonic the Fighters was my favorite waterpark arcade cabinet.
For Honor is a third person medieval-era fighting game that takes its cues from Chivalry and the Dark Souls franchise. Its player count peaked on its release week in February 2017; the game at that stage was heavily flawed.
There were many questionable development decisions on release: certain weapons only became available after significant grinding or pay-to-win loot boxes offered significant damage increases. Basic fast attacks were reactable. The "revenge" mechanic, meant to help you comeback when outnumbered in a 1v2 scenario, favored the defender rather than the attackers. Oh, and the pacing of the fight encouraged a passive playstyle where blocking everything until an opening arose was considered optimal.
The most notorious drama arose during that same year during a community tournament. The For Honor devs put up a 10k prize pool. Competitors had previously discovered they could manually unlock the camera during your character's widest range attack. By doing this, they bypassed the game's attack tracking and forced the weapon hitbox to hit multiple times in a fraction of a second. (see for yourself here).
Needless to say, the game is incredibly frustrating to play, but I have found it a rewarding one to master. If you have a chance to pick it up, play with a friend! Playing this game solo was a challenging experience when your teammates were lacking. If you do end up playing, I highly recommend the Siege game mode, which offers beautiful maps and immersive sound design.
I remember playing a demo of some sort, maybe a multiplayer beta, and how cool it felt at the time to beat a real person with directional attacks and reactive blocking and stuff. Then I realized what an insane grind it was to do anything at all and lost interest pretty quickly.
Did they ever fix it? I was into the game at release but saw a lot of that stuff and just the passive gameplay plus unlocking zone attacks were broken and I didn't feel like I wanted to invest any further in learning the game. So many years later what is the state of it, is it more balanced around playing the game or still breaking animations and mechanics?
It is so much more balanced I'm pleased to say! They've really polished the rough corners. Or at least, it seemed that way before I deleted my Ubisoft account in 2020.
For Honor still receives regular updates. The biggest problem these days is more symptomatic of multiplayer live service games i.e. devs are in the habit of intentionally releasing new overpowered characters to incentivize you to grind/spend money, then nerfing them later. I suspect the game is also still corroding from another problem someone else mentioned in this thread—not enough new players are joining at a consistent pace. You are fairly likely to run into an experienced veteran who will give you a hard time within the first 10 hours or so.
I played In beta and launch and it blew my mind they basically made half the cast unplayable.
Many people pointed out that if lights and throws are on reaction defendable then there’s no mixup unless you have something like Conq shield bash.
I enjoyed playing for a bit but you’d eventually hit someone else who knew what they were doing and it literally could devolve into a stalemate of neither player attacking.
I’ve kept an eye on how they’ve “fixed” it over the years but it still seems wild to me that the CORE mechanic of position switching is still not much of the built in mixup.
Thank you for the info! I was looking at my older game videos the other day and had some for honor stuff and was wondering what a few years had done to it. I probably won't quite install again but maybe worth a YouTube drive by to see how it's doing.
Pit Fighter in the arcade at Mazzio's Pizza every Sunday after church. That was the last fighting game I was any good at.
So many quarters lost to Pit Fighter! Imagine my surprise when I looked it up in the present day only to find people trashing it as the worst fighting game ever. No accounting for taste, I guess.
Power Stone.
It peaked a long long time ago. :(
RIP Dreamcast
I already discussed Soul Calibur in two earlier comments (basically, I tapered off with SC2 which was from a long time ago) but the other franchise I played a lot of was Street Fighter. Although I have played the original Street Fighter, I started on Street Fighter II and the last one I truly enjoyed was Street Fighter Alpha, where they were still trying to balance things. Starting at about Street Fighter III the fun tapered off, and I've never played IV or V. I did play 6 and I liked its new control scheme, however the game was nearly unplayable on Linux at launch for me and I'm not sure it ever got any better.
(The live action movie tie-in video game nearly killed my love of the franchise from how bad it was, but I actually liked the movie and I had the little 3.75" toys that were just remolded GI JOE figures from the era, and I'd play with those with my JOEs.)
Somewhere around the time they added the parry system in Street Fighter III, I dipped out on the franchise as a whole.
Skullgirls got me into fighting games when I was in college. Someone had it running at Otakon on the best TV I'd ever seen in my life, and I was absolutely hypnotized by it. Yeah, by the artstyle. Like - yeah. No. Yeah, no, I - alright, yeah. But I figured if I was gonna be obsessed anyway I wanted to be good, and thankfully its tutorial was absurdly good at the time at FGC fundies. Something about the genre finally clicked; that mixed with the release of the Smash Doc made me suddenly into the FGC around 2012. It felt nice to suddenly get a whole new genre.
I'm glad the game got its little renaissance in this decade. The whole Lab Zero thing seems to have been unceremoniously settled, so I hope it un-dies another time or two...
Drives me fucking nuts how fighting games STILL treat learning the actual game as this side quest you can go on. I wish they'd make single player content that elegantly got the player to understand the basic triangle of attack/throw/block and things like advantage (literally enemies who only block low, or guys who always wake up dp, etc).
You don't have to force it, but it would be nice if people who enjoy singleplayer at least were learning SOME transition-able skills for multiplayer rather than most if it just being flat out wrong due to how AI behaves vs a player.
Skullgirls and Street Fighter 6 are the ones I've always heard have great tutorials. But I see a bunch of problems to overcome with them, at least IMO:
Teams are just resource-bound. Skullgirls was a passion project and they probably figured having the sweaty team-based form of the sweaty anime subset of a sweaty niche genre needed an ambassador; they sound so strung-out it's a miracle they did it. On the other side, SF6 is the biggest dog; they want the community to grow, so they need to cover every base. But they've got Capcom money to invest in it.
Like you said, there are a lot of people who will glaze over this. Some people were buying Skullgirls for the tutorial. If yours sucks, then people just won't interact with it and go somewhere else with a better one as an entry point. If you spend too much time/money, that takes away from the core base who isn't going to interact with this at all. It's a gamble. Kind of a prisoner's dilemma, too, to let someone else do it; no one does it and the genre dies, or someone really tries but that's less dev time for their own core game.
Likewise, structuring these is hard. Anyone new to a game, experienced or not, needs to know how unique mechanics work. Something like Guilty Gear with a slew of options on burst alone needs to figure out where along the line of "this is what this does" and "this is how you use it" can be really difficult to balance for thousands to millions of people. Some experienced players will just ignore a tutorial and try to figure it out themselves anyway or wait for the meta to sort itself out. Some intermediate players who get basic things like hitstun, crossovers, or the different flavors of burst will still struggle with what that means to a character's kit. (it me! hi!)
It's hard to teach a genre about yomi with an AI that isn't responding like an equal-level, or very patient and higher-class, player.
You learn a lot by fucking up, and fucking up doesn't feel good. It's hard to either make that sexy or respond to the billions of ways someone will fuck up.
A lot of the problems that plague the genre's growth likewise cause trouble for a good tutorial entry point, I think.
(EDIT: the kids these days with their crossups and mixovers)
Virtua Fighter 2.
VF1 was great, but it was a little bit ahead of its time. The 3D models were clunky and the graphics weren't that great, but the gameplay was solid.
Then VF2 came along and blew it out of the water. The upgrade in graphics brought so much more "personality" to the fighters, the gameplay was still solid, but it also got very deep. Music, stages, everything was improved for the better. They also added a few new characters to round out the roster, and they were really cool.
The rest of the series was just graphics bumps, and a few new characters, but there was little room for improvement after VF2, that's where it peaked.
Fighters Megamix was a Sega Saturn gem, and I'd argue, among the first mascot fighters to take itself seriously.
I longed for a sequel, but since 1998 is almost 30 years ago now, I'll just quietly give up.
I came here to post this! I’m not a big fan of fighting games in general but Virtua Fighter and VF2 were arcade juggernauts when I was a kid. Being able to have a roughly equivalent experience at home, no quarters necessary, was the dream. But Fighters Megamix was the PEAK. I’d never conceived of such a huge cast of playable characters in a game. Also it looked incredible, even compared to the console ports of VF and VF2, and ran at a very smooth frame rate.
I had a blast unlocking all the special characters. Some of them were just delightfully wacky. I loved all the little cameos from other Sega properties too. It also had fun new gameplay elements like destructible armor, weapons, and cages (borrowed from Fighting Vipers IIRC, but I’ve never played that one). Also other modes like team battles and survival mode. For its time it felt unbelievably full-featured.
Oh wow, I've really never met another enthusiast for this game before. For my pals, hyper mode was the best. Super fast juggling with the VF2 move set was next level.
Frankly, I'm sad that Sega didn't see mascot stuff as a path to money back then. They're trying at it now but in 2026, who remembers NiGHTS and Samba De Amigo?
all fighting games peaked with Divekick.
Rising Thunder……:(
Made it to top 60ish though.
I wanted to insert a joke about how you could play 2XKO since it was built upon that game's bones, but then it's kinda just sad to think about.
Wow, I expected more responses about longer franchises like Tekken, King of Fighters, Dead or Alive, even Virtua Fighter.
Well Tekken obviously peaked with the bowling minigame in Tekken Tag Tournament.
I liked the side scrolling beat em up mode in Tekken 3 myself.
Hey, there were a handful. It's just reality that arena fighters and platform fighters are more popular though. Oh well, I guess.
Oh, since you mentioned Samsho 4 being the best....
I've only every played 5sp and 7, so those are my only (and very different from each other) frames of reference. I'm going to guess 4 is a lot like 5sp; what makes it the best?
They’re actually pretty different. Personally 5sp is the best.
4 introduced Bust and Slash variations of each character (Enja and Suija are the bust versions of Kazuki and Sogetsu for example. ) and also had an odd dial a combo system that if pulled off would give immediate rage.
It’s mostly just a better version of 3 but had some pretty big balance issues for the competitive scene.
Edit-
I lied. 3 introduced slash/bust. Dial a combo was the new mechanic for 4, but it still has slash/bust being almost an expansion to 3
It's funny, I recently tried getting into 5sp again just this year and bounced off in part because I just detest some of the... Texture... Of the game. Namely the need to bind an A+B macro to consistently get heavy attacks, and the goofiness of the throws in this game. The hoption select just felt too "stupid," for lack of better word, to me. I thought the State of Nothingness vs Rage mechanics were really fun and thematic, though.
The a+b thing is pretty classic SNK (only 3/4/7 don’t do that I think and plenty of other snks like their dual inputs).
To me there’s just so many great ways the game interacts with a WILD amount of play styles among the cast. It’s not perfectly balanced but almost all the kits are good enough that if you learn your character and the matchup you’re not going to notice outside of the highest levels.
When so many games are giving everyone invincible DPs and what not it’s awesome to see a game with a huge grappler, bow user, literally “just good buttons” guy, flying old man, weird moving water guy, mixup blender ninja, mixup blender dog ninja, and soooo much else and they all feel different and fun
KOFXIII, VF5/most recent, tekken is whatever in my eyes, and DOA is one of those “always close but never right” series of me
Street Fighter Alpha 2.
Alpha 1 wasn't all there, 3 had some weird stuff. Street Fighter 3 is good but third strike has some weird competitive stuff. Not a fan of SF4 and onwards.
Mortal Kombat with MK11. I get that they wrote themselves into a corner with Kronika and the New Era stuff but MK1 (the new game, not OG Mortal Kombat) is so shit.
It's a sidegrade graphically, Liu Kang sucks as "the chosen one" and all the what ifs end up following the OG timeline anyway I.e. Bi-Han becoming Noob Saibot anyway, Baraka and Mileena having heavily spiked skin not because the Tarkatans are a separate species in Outworld but because the condition that causes them to grow bone spikes like Tarkatans is an incurable disease...
I completely agree that MK1 sucked all around, but I also thought MKX was better than MK11. I think that might just be I preferred the story and characters better in MKX, because I think they're pretty much the same game mechanically.
I think the character intros and overall presentation of MK11 was better than X. But MKX is still a really great game.
Just to confirm do you mean X and 11? Not a judgement but also curious how others perceive this.
Yes I meant those two, but to be honest I didn't play them that much, just enough to finish the story mode. I don't really like what modern fighting games have become in general.
Fair enough.
Im obviously very into fighters but generally one of the people pointing out that…well people like you exist.
I don’t mean that as an insult but at the same time calling X and 11 basically the same would be like melee and SF the same game to fighter fans. I think better communicating the mechanics so everyone enjoys them is a massively important and something the entire FG genre fails miserably on.
It’s also worth noting that despite this “failure” MK is one of the most consistently profitable brands in the genre (well since Mk9 at least). It’s just interesting to me
I'd be curious to know what makes them so different mechanically. It's obvious for anyone with eyes to spot the differences between SSB and SF, but I feel like what you're talking about must be more subtle competitive tech type stuff that the average player wouldn't even use.
MKX has a run button. 11 does not. This majorly changes how you approach in the game.
The entire auto meter system in 11 is different and affects quite a few things.
Breaker is actually very different in that in mk 11 breaking a combo at the right time can let you punish the person who hit you and thus certain combo routes are very rare.
Overall MK X is very aggressive. Lots of get hit, setup a mixup, repeat. Much higher power level on each kit. 11 is in theory more about spacing and whiff punishing (although how true that wound up is arguable).
Oh and Krushing Blows and some of the defensive mechanics from 11 heavily changed how you approach, since a callout uppercut KB could erase your life bar.
That said outside of KBs 11s damage is mostly more “normalized”. Most of the cast gets the same damage off the same resources. X has a lot more variety there.
Entire staple playstyles just don’t exist in 11. Sub zeros ice clone, although first appearing in mk3, is basically as iconic as Ryus dragon punch. He doesn’t have it in 11, and the custom special that’s kiiinda like it doesn’t work at all in the same way and is instead awful. Most of the cast has issues like this where their most flavorful and iconic moves/play patterns just don’t exist.
I have such heavy biases toward the games that I really got into fighting games with... But anyway, the Guilty Gear series peaked with Xrd Rev2, and Street Fighter peaked with the final season of SFV :)
I loved final SFV season and it’s BY FAR my favorite version of dictator. Felt almost perfectly on point.
For gg did you play the older ones? Does seem to be that each series fans didn’t like the others as much
Yes, SFV was SO GOOD at the very end. It was so satisfying comparing where it started with where it ended!
As for GG, I first played #Reload, but got into fighting games and the FGC starting with Xrd.
I played AC+R for about a month when it got rollback netcode retrofitted and enjoyed it, but Xrd hits the sweet spot of mechanical complexity for me. I might feel differently if I had picked, say, Order Sol, but playing Dizzy and having to internalise several different FRC timings for ice spike was just so annoying in an unsatisfying (to me) way.