The world’s most celebrated competitive fighting game player, Daigo “The Beast” Umehara, has a special mind. We can’t know for sure, but it doesn’t feel all that bold to suppose that if Daigo had applied himself to some other form of creative competition, which could have easily been Tetris or Mahjong, he likely would have excelled and very well might’ve brought to fruition some kind of Moment 37 equivalent.
He chose fighting games, though, and in a recent question and answer video posted to The Beast’s YouTube, he articulated why this particular genre of gaming and approach to competing caught his fancy over others.
A viewer compares fighting games to card games as they lay the foundations for their question, ultimately saying they feel as though once you get high enough level in a given fighter, it becomes more rote and planned as opposed to free form and unpredictable.
Another way of saying this might be that there are a series of right answers that you simply need to be able to identify and choose in order to win consistently; Daigo doesn’t seem to really agree.
Daigo resorts to a little personal history to set up his answer, sharing how he was fascinated with a few different types of games as a child. Fighting games, Mahjong (a Japanese tile game extremely similar to Rummy) and Tetris all interested The Beast in his earlier years, but only one checked all the right boxes for him.
Speed is important, first and foremost, as having to rapidly analyze and execute in real time makes for exciting back and forth as far as Daigo is concerned. Both Tetris and Street Fighter have this component, but as fast as the former is, there are more conspicuous “right answers” in it.
Daigo ultimately feels like while fighting games may technically have a lot of “right answers” on paper, there’s enough chaos generated by all the different kinds of characters that choosing the right tool at the right time tends to be a lot less obvious.
Indeed, one of the components of Daigo’s play that’s made him most famous is his propensity to find peculiar solutions.
Frame data and hit boxes surely inform a ton of the decisions made in games like Street Fighter, but the force of player expression is especially powerful, and thinking around corners to find and thwart less obvious patterns (which I’d argue is a quality shared with Mahjong) means there’s virtually never a definitive “right answer.”
Daigo goes into more detail in his talk within the full video below. Give it a watch and let us know why it is that you love fighting games in the comments after.