The latest fighting game video exploration from Theory Fighter hones in on one of the most awkward situations in the genre: the mirror match.
Theory Fighter starts out by explaining how terrible mirror matches (when your opponent plays the same character as you) can be, but then transitions over to one in particular that happens to offer a near perfect setting for two players to simply display their match up knowledge and fighting game skill.
Your first reaction to the claim that mirror matches tend to be terrible might be “But don’t they just matter of fact show who the better player of a particular character is?” It’s easy to intuit this, but as strange as it might seem history has shown these types of stand offs tend to be anything but symmetrical.
Yes, both players have access to the same exact tools to begin with, but said tools can get immediately lost in general strategy once one player scores even a single hit.
“When you have more extreme archetypes fighting each other,” says Theory Fighter, “they don’t often have the tools to defeat their own gameplay.” He highlights the E. Honda mirror in early versions of Street Fighter 4 as an example.
Honda is very much a turtle character in SF4, and requires a down+back charge to be at his best. When Honda doesn’t have to approach, he’s at his best, utilizing his top tier tools that aim to thwart any and all attempts at opening him up while he stays in defensive positions.
In the Honda mirror, however, as soon as one character hits the other they have an extreme advantage. Honda’s abilities flow in one direction a lot better than the other, and when the onus to open up his opponent (especially when it’s a fellow Honda) he’s at his worst.
This mirror match tends to devolve into a wait-fest or into a quickly one-sided bout instead of an interesting back and forth where both players have the opportunity to thwart the other with clever approaches to interactions. That’s still technically there, but the scales so quickly tip that the competition drops off hard.
We’ll let Theory Fighter explain the mirror match he feels avoids these kinds of pitfalls in a glorious fashion in the full video here: