And it’s also their largest project ever
What exactly defines what a fighting game is? Well the answers are a bit more complicated than you may initially believe, and there’s one group out there we can trust to get into the nitty gritty details.
Gerald Lee with Core-A Gaming just dropped their first new documentary / analysis-style video in almost two years since ‘The Miracle of Pakistani Tekken,’ and it’s quite a doozy.
With fighting games now being at arguably their highest peak since the early ’90s, this new ‘Every Fighting Game Type Explained’ video sets out to delve back through the history of the genre to analyze how fighters evolved, branched out and went their own ways to define something very different than the blueprint laid out.
Instead of the usual 5–15 minute affair you’d typically expect out of Core-A Gaming, however, this is the channel’s largest project to date clocking in at one hour (though it is split into chapters).
Things start out with something of a comparison of rock music to fighting games.
Sure, they include a number of the same building blocks like guitars and drums versus health bars and multiple attack buttons, but it breaks down further and further into sub-genres and sub-genres of sub-genres that appear to be quite different at face value.
We’re then taken back in time to be given a closer look as to how those building blocks came to be with many concepts we likely just accept as fact without ever putting much thought into now like why do we hold back to block in so many titles?
From Street Fighter 2, Core-A Gaming leads us down the path as it splits off into multiple different directions that add something new like a third dimension for movement or change something close to the core that then creates even more branches down the line.
That includes the trajectory of SNK’s early fighters and others outside of Capcom into the creation of “anime” fighting games, tag-based series and beyond while Virtua Fighter and then Tekken lead the charge to construct their own foundations of what makes a 3D fighting game.
And then there’s what Lee describes as “5D fighting games” that combine the traditional building blocks of both 2D and 3D titles like Rival Schools, Fighting Layer and King of Fighters Maximum Impact.
Of course, this all also leads to the paths that created Super Smash Bros. and other platform fighters, arena fighters and other hybrids that each get their on sections.
We highly recommend checking out Core-A Gaming’s latest venture below where even fighting game “experts” are sure to learn some interesting new facts while seeing how our expansive genre came to grow into what it is after almost 35 years.