Ahh yes. Superman holding Lantern over a war between normie soldier dudes and sea creatures was my favorite part of Last of Us 2.

It's important to note that Jin "Lost" his fighting style for a gameplay reason. Since Kazuya returned, he had to have his original style (which Jin had in Tekken 3 because Kazuya was dead/missing). So when Kazuya came back, they had to change Jin's move-set. The story explanation was just an excuse to keep Jin on the roster without them both playing the same.

Meanwhile in Mortal Kombat: Jacquie: Let's train dad Dad proceeds to rip her leg off and use it to play baseball with her head.

"Frieza should have blocked Videl's mix ups" had me laughing lmao

I like how KOF used to do dream matches, where all canonical characters can just duke it out.

Interaction between characters gives life to a fighting game. Personalized intros, outros and things like taunts or other animations. For example, if Ryu knocks down Ken, would be cool if he helps his friend to get back on his feet for the next round while he hears a snarky "you got lucky" by the defeated. Or if Miguel, who is hellbent on having his revenge against Jin for ordering an army to bomb his sisters wedding, beats him senseless in the winning animation but shows hesitation before the killing blow. Or if Jin wins, he just moves along because he doesn't even know who Miguel is, leaving him more enraged. Now imagine things like this between all the cast. Sounds like a lot of money in animations, but it can be done. Now the fight is telling a story. And now you are using a character instead of a bag of functions.

Speaking of character interactions in fighting games, in KoF 98, Daimon's earthquake move can "hit" the characters on the opposing team who are in the background. They'll all fall on their backs when Daimon does the move, except for Kyo, who jumps to avoid the quake instead.

God I wish capcom would bring back that little touch of related characters having a special intro. Even it's as simple as ken & ryu fist bumping was simple touch that sourly missed

KOF XIII really nails the self-contained narrative thing by having every character in the roster interact with each other before a fight. This sells the idea that all the characters know each other personally. They actually do it better than Injustice 2 and MKX.

Meanwhile Virtua Fighters be like "Story? Just read the manual"

"Dad can you tell me a bed time story?" "Sure thing son, I'll tell you one of my favorite stories ever. It's called Evo Moment 37! I hope you love it as much as I did when I was a kid!"

Arcsys does shit like this a lot more than I think they get credit for: In BBTAG, Teddie's mysterious food X item drop is a status debuff that takes off the health of whoever eats it...except Mai, which RESTORES her health and meter, because canonically she loves terrible food. French Bread does it too; in Under Night, Vatista has a power limiter that slightly nerfs the casts powers, hence why she can't be counter hit by any means. The only one able to do so being Enkidu, who's martial arts allow him to bypass that limitation since he's not using any powers.

I think a big issue with fighting game stories is that due to their being a fixed roster with only so many characters, the heroes often outnumber the villains, meaning you either end up fighting the same guy over and over or you keep having really contrived conflicts between the heroes. A lot of games have found ways around this. Dragon Ball Fighterz had the clones and Injustice had the alternate universe evil versions of the heroes. I will admit Street Fighter 5's solution was pretty decent and must have taken some effort, adding in a bunch of NPC fighters and all... But that just made me annoyed because it felt like we were being denied several more playable characters most of whom have semi complete movesets. Yeah, I'm fine not getting a chance to play as random Shadaloo goon number 4. But what about the Dolls? They have unique animations and moves. Several of them have been playable before. Why not just add them to the roster at that point? Then of course, there's Police Officer Peter, but let's face it, if he were playable, we'd never play as anyone else.

Lol it looks like a bunch of players just unlocked Frost and then called it a day XD

I’m surprised you didn’t SFIV’s “Fight your Rival” mechanic, because many (including me) have pointed out how it’s a good way to integrate both story and gameplay. After 6 matches, the player gets a unique cutscene with their special opponent, and even during the fight, you get to hear certain sound bites among the characters. This means that not only does the player get to fight, but the characters are allowed to naturally interact.

It's an absolute myth to say that character and story doesn't matter in a fighting game. Any good fighting game worth its weight tries to tell you what makes this character an actual character through in-game bios, design, and most importantly the way they fight during gameplay as well as pre and post-fight dialogue. Why do you think we like MK's pre-fight dialogue so much? Why do we get hype for Cell's intro in FighterZ? It's because we all understand that these pixels on the screen aren't just stick figures. They're characters that we have a history with in some way. Who the character is is literally being told to you in a match. Or at least it should be. Possibly my favorite example of this is R.Mika's V-move in Street Fighter V. It's an absolutely ridiculous move in the context of the actual game: a long-winded microphone performance that leaves you completely venerable to your opponent. At best you'll probably only see Mika yell into the mic briefly before immediately tossing it away if you use it in an actual match. So, is the max utility of it practical? Not really, but dammit if that move doesn't tell me everything I need to know about this over-the-top Japanese wrestler, I don't know what else does. And just like in real "real" wrestling, what self-respecting opponent is actually going to let you finish your speech anyway? XD Fighting games have fewer options to tell a story to it's audience for all of the reasons you explained in this video, and even some you didn't like the issue of the player having to play characters they don't know how to play with during the story mode, thus creating artificial difficulty. But that's exactly why we get attached to its characters so much. They've been telling stories to us, practically on their gameplay alone for what, like, around 40 years now? Maybe more.

I'm surprised some of the animations and stages in Darkstalkers didn't make an appearance in this. I always loved the stage on the side of the skyscraper while they defy gravity; It really gives an awesome context to a duel between the supernatural. Great video nonetheless!

KOF is an exception. The roster is changed or altered because of the last game or current game due to the current story. Not always though.

1:52 - *When you thought the reference was a mistake* but then after a few seconds you finally realize the joke

I've thought about this video the whole time while experiencing the Tekken 8 story because they sure took that one end fight of 7 and expended over the whole duration of 8.

The Touhou fighting games do a really good job with story mode. Fighting a giant catfish and riding a volcanic eruption will always be memorable.

The old DBZ fighters had a really interesting bit of story integration you didnt mention. In the Budomai and Tenkaichi games the story mode follows the plot of the anime. However, there's a lot of unbalanced fights in the anime where the heroes are outclassed. Over the course of the series, this was handled two different ways. In some games they would give the winning fighter massive buffs to their strength, defense, maybe make them immune to flinching and set them to the most vicious AI. In these kinds of fights you're expected to lose and the plot progresses but if you win, you get a small vignette about how the plot would break or the character celebrating how unlikely their win was followed by an extra like a new skill or a side story or even a new character, which is a nice touch. In other games however, the game would just cast you AS the winning party. So if say Recoome was slated to take Krillin to pound town and then break Gohan's neck, you would play as Recoome with a severely nerfed Krillin and Gohan as your opponents. Then Goku shows up to turn the tide and suddenly you're Goku and Recoome is the one who gets nerfed because this match in the anime was to show just how far beyond everyone Goku had gotten. Either way is pretty cool and surprisingly underused in fighting game story modes.

How can you not give KOF it's due in terms of storytelling? A series where the previous installment actually has consequences to the storyline, the characters involved (RIP New Faces team), and even their movesets?

You forgot to mention that Tekken "fixed" Jin having a new martial art style by introduction Devil Jin, who uses the Mishima/Kazama hybrid style. Boom, everyone happy. lol

I loved the way Tekken 5 handled it's story mode. It wasn't anything cinematic with cutscenes between each fight,. It was just a mode where each character has their own reason for being in the game and you follow along in that story until you get to the ending cinematic that suits the character's theme and motivation, ranging from epic to sad to silly. Very simple.

I mean if ya wanna have permanent deaths in stories and still maintain versus mode, just do like Real Bout Fatal Fury Special and give the dead characters a halo on character select so everyone understands "Yeah, they're dead, but we'll still let you play them." Hell, even better, Nightmare Geese, where the logic is literally "You are literally having a nightmare, that's why Geese is here despite being dead." Old SNK was also really good about having characters make dramatic changes to their move set a la T4 Jin, but still let you play the old version. Kyo changes his fighting style completely after fighting Goenitz and realizing his old style isn't going to cut it anymore, but you can still select Kyo by holding start and get his old style.

1:53 Ah yes, my favorite fighting game moment. Laura Bailey did a great job voicing a pinned down Hal Jordan. A really bold decision on Naughty Dogs part that I think paid off.

My biggest issue with fighting game stories is that the developers allow the story mode to dictate character roster. Like, "This character died in the last game, or we can't think of a way to included them in the narrative, so we'll just exclude them." Or worse, when a character HAS to be included because of fan demand, so they toss them in story mode in such an awkward and pointless way. Like, "This character died in the last game, but people like him so I guess he's a zombie now, or that scene is a flashback, or whatever." And that's why NRS story modes can get fucked. Joker is dead in the world where Injustice 2 takes place but they MUST include him since it would be weird to have Batman and Harley without Joker, I guess, so they can say the one you play in versus is from the other universe (which they do say), but in the story he appears in one scene and it's a hallucination (and he looks completely different). Green Arrow is dead in that universe, but they bring the one in the game over from a THIRD universe. Meanwhile, Shazam is dead only in that universe and just gone from the game. Then you have MKX making the kombat kids out to be the new guard, yet 50% of them don't even appear in MK11 at all. SF5 added Necali to the story as a puddle of mud that attacks Ryu because they couldn't think of any better way to shoehorn him in, but they made the character sooooo... And then there's zombie Nash. And the game doesn't have those little pre-fight scenes that really set the tone for the self-contained narrative like in almost every SF before it. It does have post-fight dialog, but most are just completely out of context. I think Jin's fighting style change worked out for the better because it allowed them to bring back Kazuya and Devil Jin and you didn't end up with a bunch of clones while still having the characters in the games. SNK has also tweaked characters a lot so their moveset is gone, like Terry in MotW or Robert in every KoF, so you have to pick between sticking with the "character" or finding a new "function" to play. And that's why they will sometimes include EX versions of characters, like All the Kyo clones, which they sometimes even fit into the narrative.

As a kid I would create my own stories using fighting games, and would redo the same fight over and over just to get a version that I was satisfied with. This video made me understand why I loved doing that, and is one of the best breakdowns of narrative in gaming I have seen. Seriously, great work!

You never get to defeat Geese in Real Bout Special: the game treats the event as a "nightmare" and even if you defeat him he stands up and starts laughing at you. You should do more research on SNK games.

What about SNK? What about the Art of fighting - Garou mark of the wolves or the alternative universe of KOF? In my opinion at least in the 90s SNK was the king of stories

I don’t think that removing story mode and just having character interactions should be the way to convey storytelling in fighting games. Instead the interactions should be made apart of the story alongside character dynamics with each other like rivalries or friendships which help flesh out the characters more. Though I like the idea of having story based events that weakens or strengthens the characters based on the current situation which makes them unable to use their abilities which makes the fight harder for the player. My personal favourite example of this in story modes would be Ragna vs Hazama in blazblue continuum shift where Ragna is unable to use the blazblue due Hazama using he own stronger blazblue to deactivate his soul eater, in this fight you have to take on unlimited Hazama without the use of your powers and can only use your punches and kicks while he can use all of his attacks and new ones exclusive to his unlimited form, his drive is also consistently active throughout the fight and allows him to not only have complete control of the battlefield with his chains allowing him to close the gap between him and Ragna but also give him the ability to steal your health slowly whenever he is close to you. Making it impossible for the player to do any lasting damage to him. It gives a sense of powerlessness to the player that is portrayed not only by the story but also by the gameplay and makes the dynamic with the characters apart of the story and the story apart of the actual game without having it be only in a cutscene.

there's something special about aerith getting skewered with Marvel 2 music in the background...

I severely doubt NRS meant to do the final example. It's probably a broken clock is right twice a day. That said, it is an excellent example. Fighting games could use that matchup mechanic with a prefight animation (not cutscene) of Raiden teleporting behind an attempted cheap shot. That would be a willful hint that 'Hey, teleport owns this guy!'

I always liked in the kof games when I saw some unique pre fight animation (Mai tricking Andy into thinking she had a child or Chizuru showing some sort of mirror to Kyo). It adds some personality to the fight, and establishes relationships in a very cool way

To me, a really illuminating quote was in a rapid fire interview with Ed Boon: Interviewer: Which MK characters can survive a bullet? Ed Boon: All characters can take a bullet, as we see whenever they get shot and then get up... Interviewer: Yeah, but, like, a cutscene bullet? Ed Boon: Only Raiden. I mean, he forgot Geras, but more importantly, it's an interesting look into how the game mechanics have so little impact on the story. And yes, there are equivalents in other games, and I don't think it's the central issue (if there is one), but I thought it said a lot about how little the fights have to do with the plot, because by design the characters can easily do stuff in the fights, over and over, that would be pretty major plot moments in the story itself.

Guilty Gear, Soulcalibur, Blazblue... There's good stories out there, even back in the day. The problem is that people didn't give a shit, but developers did.

Personalize interaction between characters adds a lot of flavor to the game, but I think it's a bit of an over exaggeration to say that it's the better way to tell the story because it's more natural. Imagine you're a creator, you want your game to actually have a conical story because you spent so much time creating this world and it's characters. Not giving them an actual storyline seems like a waste. From a gameplay perspective, people wants something other than versus mode. Fighting games get blasted all the time for their single player content because just playing versus all day isn't fun for some people. Thing like story, arcade, and challenge modes keep the game fresh

I like how Jojo Heritage for the Future’s PS1 port has a full adaptation of part 3 Stardust Crusaders, and some of the Dragon Ball fighting games retell the original story of the anime and manga.

Hey ABI! Your old college buddy here. A few thoughts here. Re: Vs. Mode; Your understanding of this is exactly how pro wrestling works. Each match is a self contained narrative. As someone that's worked in pro wrestling, the wrestlers are aware of this and when taking through their matches backstage one main question that they ask themselves is "What is the story are we are telling?" As for Story Modes, part of the problem is the arcade roots of fighting games, which ties into your competitive game argument. Sadly, I do think that SNK has been slacking on their story, considering that they were among the first to implement a narrative.

You went over continum shift story mode. Every story in continum shift is canon since its a possibility. Making the (maybe) only game where every character can win against anyone and have it canon.

I think the solution to the "vast ensemble story" problem is just to tell more than one story. By having multiple unrelated plotlines you have a reason for someone like Zangeif, a guy who's in it for sport, to remain in the game when the story is about a team of Interpol agents seeks to undermine the efforts of an evil dictator and has nothing to do with a fighting tournament. If you've got a fighting tournament story, you don't need to contrive a reason for R.Mika to go off to a secret base and deal with the "save the world" plot. If you do it right, you can have events in one story effect the other, since they're happening concurrently. Maybe Balrog and Ed are in the tournament, but something happens in a different plotline and they have to drop from the tournament at an unexpected moment. Such like that.

Them's Fightin Herds has a godlike story mode and I was surprised not to see it mentioned. Instead of being a bunch of cutscenes with fights thrown in in between, the story segments take place on an RPG-like overworld, and most fights are against basic enemies that are mostly defined by their fighting style: wolves attack by pouncing, teaching you to use anti-air attacks, snakes zone by spitting poison projectiles and extending their body, teaching you how to deal with zoning, among others. Doing this allows the fights against the actual characters to be high points in narrative, and the characters are given unique attacks and patterns to help them serve as boss fights to test what you've learned against the basic baddies. The boss fight against Velvet, the game's zoner, at the end of chapter 2 was my favorite: the battle is built around the challenge of dealing with zoning as a rushdown character. The first phase is a regular fight, which is already a tougher challenge than the basic enemies, but once you empty her lifebar once, the second phase begins, where wind is constantly blowing towards you, making her zoning even more effective, and the third and final phase changes the battle completely, as Velvet covers herself in a tornado which blows you all the way to the other side of the screen and shoots ice projectiles from inside it. Plus, just because it's a fighting game doesn't mean all you do in the story mode is fight: there are platforming, exploration and even puzzle-solving segments, and while from the outside it may seem like these are just a distraction from the fighting bits, they allow you to truly experience the entire story through gameplay and not through cutscenes, which is something I don't think any other fighting game does right, and is what makes Them's Fightin' Herds' story mode one of the most memorable of any fighting game.

tekken was kind of a good point the story was really boring, but the moment that final showdown came together, the fight felt like it had so much weight because throughout the last 7 games you've seen how much these two want to kill each other, the health bar trick at the end scared me at first till I realised heihachi wasn't going to go down that easily, and the extra touches like cut scene punches taking actual damage in the fight made it feel more believable

I think garou: mark of the wolves has a pretty great story, even though it is very small and to be honest not well translated. This is because each character has their own reason for being in southtown at that time and it generally goes beyond just wanting to be the strongest fighter or whatever. The characters are all interesting, despite being a completely new cast outside of Terry Bogard, and everybody has a memorable and unique ending sequence after they have defeated the final boss. This is probably because the game only contains a paltry fourteen characters, but I think it is a good example of a story that is told well through its characters.

I find the story telling of the Killer Instinct reboot interesting. I admit that it wasn't great in Season 1. Every character had 3 different Arcade ending of which it was unclear what is canon, as most contradict each other. Then in Season 2 it started with the character trailer. Every Season 2 trailer tells you something about the character, mostly narrated by the character himself (exceptions are Aganos and Riptor) and they also show relations to other characters and progress their stories. Then after all characters released we got an Arcade mode for them, but they were different. Every Arcade tower had an Intro cutscene, one right before you fight your rival (every character has a rival) and one when you finished it. This time every story mode is 100% canon, and they all tie into each other and lead into the Season 3 story mode. And then Season 3 introduced Shadow Lords. I'm disappointed that none of the Season 3 characters have a traditional arcade mode, but what we have here is so much better! The closest thing I can compare Shadow Lords to is Towers of Time, but it's actually fun and every consumable is explained and canon in the story. How difficult the Boss Character Gargos is, depends on how well you did on reducing his corruption all over the globe. And if you're good enough, you may never fight him. Which is ironic because you have to fight him to finish the story. You said in the video that it's not good if character play styles change in between games because of story reasons, but for a new Killer Instinct, I hope that's exactly what will happen. For example: - Make Jago and Shadow Jago one character. Explanation: Jago learned how to control the power of his dark self without succumbing to it. - Make Eagle and Thunder into one character. Explanation: Thunder's reason for fighting was to find his lost brother. Since Eagle returned, there is no reason for Thunder to keep fighting, so he doesn't. Eagle takes Thunder's Tomahawks. This cleans the roster and makes place for new characters.

"A fight is a story." Too bad not many fighting games these days realise that.

6:10 Except for King of FIghters, in which dead characters only return in dream matches, which are the games that have no story whatsoever.

Honestly I fucking love fighting game stories because of the immense amount of characters and wacky/convoluted plots (BlazBlue and Guilty Gear being my favorite video game stories ever).

I like Blazblue and guilty gear’s story even if it’s convoluted as hell. Edit. I really wish there was subtitles or an english dub on central fiction as love the interactions

SNK has great stories for fighting games more than any developers.

11:32 “This doesn’t mean that Videl is now stronger canonically than Frieza, it’s that in this instance she managed to beat him” (I’m paraphrasing here). YES!! This extends to when a weaker character manages to doge an attack or land a hit. Suddenly the fanbase goes all “ugh! They ignoring the power scaling now! How can Krillin stand up to (insert character here)?” It’s not that he can beat the guy, that’s not what the show is implying...

Top tier fighting game players could care less about single player content. It's sad because older games of the genre used to come packed with it day one on the disc. I've come to respect Smash Bros. more due to the fact they don't neglect this part of the game and don't launch so bare bones.

I actually love the idea behind _BlazBlue's_ visual novel-inspired story modes. Yes, they're convoluted and a bit hard to follow, but they're also meticulously planned out and intentionally integrate and lampshade the various perceived fighting game story drawbacks. The characters are caught in a time loop, and so all story paths and endings are technically canon, as minor variations in the loop arising from the laws of probability, until the true ending actually breaks the loop. The sequel then progresses the story forward and introduces alternate timelines, which serve the same function; at one point Hakumen even cuts through spacetime and observes one of his own alternate endings. As the series goes on, they continue toying with these concepts and the overall presentation as necessary. Is it a perfect story? No. But there is a lot to dig into, and it all generally holds up under scrutiny.

"And maybe Freiza should've been blocking Videl's mixups" SENDS ME

So I get what you're trying to say with the achievement completion rates, but achievment stats are always kinda crazy low. For Example, as of today, the PS4 achievement rate for playing a ranked or casual match in Dragon Ball Fighterz is 23.9% and 21.3% respectively. That means more people are playing MK11's story mode than are doing the actual fucking point of Dragon Ball Fighterz

I've played Rachel Alucard for a short while and I never noticed she doesn't directly take a hit ever. That's funny.

Background music doesn't sound right without hearing "Spidey Sting" "Venom Fang" or "Goodnight Sugah".

I'm still trying to figure out how Jade & Kotal were a thing. lol

Honestly, one fighting game with a story I liked was BlazBlue: Central Fiction. Sure there's tons of anime bullshit and overcomplicated concepts, lots of things that could and should be explained aren't, and many characters aren't that great... But, goddammit, that story has an emotional core with Ragna. Seeing him try so so goddamn hard despite nothing in his life going right, leading to its heartbreaking conclusion was a rollercoaster. Also Kagura vs Azrael was surprisingly badass.

I actually loved Blazblue Calamity Trigger story. Branching paths with different timelines meant everything was both canon and not, while the gameplay was actually a strong part of the narrative. Unfortunately it both created the Nu-13/Lambda-11 problem and became unfeasible with the ever growing cast of characters in later instalments

I think story mode is still a good way to tell the character lore. In BlazeBlue you choose a single character and get a narrative of the relationship between characters you met. If I don't know the relationship of the characters that met in a "simple" vs battle, how could the fight be a good story? They would only some weirdos beating each other. On KZfaq Accented Cinema made a video "How to Structure a Fight Scene" it's about fights in movies, but I think you need exactly the same things in a fight from a fighting game and for that you need some lore/context. I don't like the idear before playing to read 5 or more pages of bio for each character to understand there relationships. Of course the small interactions at the start of the fight is cool and I love it, but can only tell only a few things. Did they like each other or not. Arcade Mode is also, for me, a good way to just tell the character lore. Meet the rivale with a short dialog and a short ending is enough to establish the relationship between some characters. Even how the end boss is introduced help. But story mode is the only way to made some kind of world building. Did you need to know there was a giant black beast, that was slain by some legendary heros, but the beast was only a failed experiment (some of BlazeBlue lore, that get maby too far)? No. :D But with it you can build more complex character lore, even it got just toooooooooo crazy.

KOF is the King for unique interactions between characters About moveset change, Kyo the main protagonist got a lot variation play style from balanced to rush down, Iori Yagami flame or no flame, Ralf and Clark, etc I started thinking their game just basically bunch of experiments but it works and I actually like it 😅

I remembered when I first played KOF 98. Seeing a unique intro with Iori against Kyo, with the normal Team Japan theme changing to a different song to emphasize the rivalry (same thing happens vice versa.) was an amazing surpirse for the first time.

Fighting games are interesting because outside of RPG's, you are not getting a better genre for lore. the problem is fighting games don't know how to tell you that lore. it's like having the best idea for a painting ever but having broken fingers, it doesnt matter how great the vision or how good you are at conveying visions outside of this context, it will always come out wrong in this situation. One of my longest fighting game mains has been Paul phoenix, solely because of 2 bits of trivia. 1. He tied Kazuya for first place in tekken 1 after an hour of fighting. 2. He technically is the winner of 3 but king of iron fist tournaments have stupid rules to force the narrative to let a Mishima win without any sense of urgency. To me growing up that was the thing that made me pick fighting game characters and play the games more. Paul can fight toe to toe with all of the devil powered (and Heihachi) Mishama's and a war god? hell yeah i wanna play him. Ralf Jones is punching you with grenades in his hands and somehow this normal dude is so tough the grenades blow you up and not his fingers? why would i not main him?! This basically naked ninja girl beat a ghost pirate powered by an evil blade? I think i'm gonna main Taki. And come on. Did anyone really not play Akuma at least once after learning this living devil who turned to a dark force for power, kills multiple people in the series and can destroy islands with a single strike's main career is a casual street vendor who sells people home grown fruits? These character's are really engaging and have plenty of opportunities to expand upon their characters. the problem is when they do it usually feels half assed or ruins the character. Paul Phoenix despite his insane out of universe popularity is treated in universe as a complete loser. Taki is never allowed to do anything significant anymore despite being better than the main hero because they can't naturally write her into a story mode because she's not the focus Siegfried is. Akuma despite being....Akuma has very mediocre interactions with everyone he interacts with, and because he's so strong he can't interact with that many people without making everyone irrelevant for the story. and Ralf...is actually well handled in all things and has been shown to a lot deeper than he appears...guess they can't all prove my point, but you get the idea. I think the best stories are the Guilty Gear XX stories. they just take us into events of an individual and we get to see how things turn out for them. And the fights matter. If you lose once in Sol's Accent core story you get the bad ending. This adds replayability to the campaign because there's alternate paths that give you different fights. In one dialogue you can choose to have a friendly bout with slayer, the strongest character in the series who's so strong his KO animation is laying there bored and uninterested throwing the fight for you. this is just a normal fight. You can also choose to go all out. Which makes you fight a super powered boss mode of him where he's got regenerating health/meter, 4x damage, 6x defense, and combo options you don't see normally. It lets you shape your own narrative through the actions you take. And you can build off the lore of these characters well with these options. Sol LOVES a good fight so it would make sense and fit his character if the player chooses to go all out on slayer because Sol is so strong these opportunities never come up. But Sol is INCREDIBLY lazy and hates hard work as well, so him just saying "Look let's just get this over with..." halfheartedly and not getting a real match from a guy way stronger than him is very in character and because it's self contained you don't have to have people interact with each other who don't need to because you need to make a story mode where everyone gets together. Ryu taking down Bison is the most forced BS in SF history because it's not his story arc to resolve but he does anyway because main character vs main villain has to be the ending. but in XX plenty of major characters don't interact and that;s fine because it wouldn't make sense for the dutiful soldier Potemkin to be interacting with the sneaky assassins' guild characters during his public investigations on Zepp security matters without major conflict happening that would derail their plots or get one of them killed, so he interacts with characters more befitting of his straight forward approach to things like chipp Ky etc. and doesn't interact to much with the cloak and dagger characters. the writers knew their roles and let them stay in them and fleshed them out there instead of trying to make one big party where everyone interacts.

The Jin fights in BlazBlue are probably my favorite story fights. After the agonizing fight where you cant even draw your sword going to then fight in unlimited mode was amazing, I loved the feeling of power you got from that transformation.

I actually really liked the story modes in Soul Calibur 6. Each character has their own narrative path shown on a timeline, and the Libra of Soul mode used the context of a custom character to frame a lot of the story. The dialogue choices, and inclination towards Soul Edge or Soul Calibur helps a lot, and because the fights against canon characters are started outside of the fight within the story, it lets the characters shine a lot more.

I was hoping to hear Raven's "orgasmic paralyzation" referenced along with the characters that are too strong to lose. "You didn't win, you just hurt him... to completion."

One aspect of storytelling that goes unnoticed a lot of the time: Stages! Character-specific stages can tell you a lot about the character it represents. You wouldn't guess Guile was an Air Force pilot if his stage didn't have a plane. Same for King in Tekken 2 and his church stage. Sakura's home from Alpha 2 shows that she lives a lower-middle class life. Vega's cage dropping down changes the fight from a fair brawl to a sudden dirty fight where the player is handicapped. Seeing your teammates in KOF games cheer you on or lick their wounds makes the fights feel more meaningful and adds a nice way to characterize these personalities further. One of my favourite stages in fighting games is the final boss stage for Tekken 2. It starts out with just an endless black void and a luxurious carpet, setting a creepy stage for the fight with the now-antagonist Kazuya. And then, in round 2 it goes balls-to-the-walls with these infinite mirrors and Devil Jin and the music getting more dramatic: it was a revolutionary technique for the times but it still carries the impact to this day!

I remember a fight in Blazblue Continuum Shift pretty well. It was during Tsubaki's mission to take down Jin and Noel. The whole time she was dreading seeing either of them, but that plot is left for a little bit. Later on you're playing as Noel, and you encounter Tsubaki. You as the player know why she's here, but Noel doesn't and you see them talk for a bit. The reason though that this fight is so cool, if if you hadn't sat in VS or Training mode forever, it was the first time you'd seen the rainy stage and heard Memory of Tears, a very lovely and melancholy song. Maybe it was just me, but I think that particular framing was excellent.

Sean's ending from Third Strike was also just him dreaming he won against the cast

Imo Calamity Trigger's story was the best fighting game story. There's little exposition or explanation of the world, so it is entirely up to the player to piece together the mysteries of what's happening, be it the central plot and the reason behind the time loops, to small elements like the Blazblue being Ragna's arm. And because the plot is about time loops with small differences between them, it allowed any match-up to be cannon, and to get the true character endings, you had to do unorthodox solutions like intentionally lose fights. Admittedly, while this style was great at telling small contained stories that fit into a greater whole, it wasn't very good at actually moving the plot along, which is probably why CP dropped it.

3:05 I get the point that story completion is a pretty low percentage of the player base, but 3.8M players to complete a story mode in a genre where story is at the bottom of the list of desired features is pretty damn good, when most fighting games would kill to have 3.8M in sales in their first year. I understand the point of the video, and I agree whole heartedly, especially when considering MK11 is the current best-case scenario. I'm just saying I was actually pleasant surprised to see those numbers.

Dude, you're gonna regret not mentioning SNK fighters lol. But I do believe that Fatal Fury has the best story, even though it is told in an arcade style. And KOFs team system makes it plausible that most teams can beat each other. Maybe Chang and Choi are really stupid crooks that can't beat anyone but Kim is a very skilled fighter and he can cary his team. And their anime saga style is also pretty cool.

"Now go home and be a family man!" I don't care what this video says, Guile's ending is all the storyline I need!

SNK teleports behind you nothing personal kid...

Compared to an over-arcing mode that might feature some of the cast, I prefer the classic individual story approach. Like in Skullgirls, when you pick a character, they become the protagonist for that playthrough.

If I could swap story mode for interactions between EVERY character, I'd do so in a heartbeat. It's way more interesting seeing Cooler call out Frieza or for Rachel to tease Ragna when they're on the same team then to see a large amount of exposition for an all powerful evil I don't care about too much outside their personality, design and motivations which are all present in good movesets anyway. Cross tag battle is the best at this and the reason I love it. So many team ups that bring me so much joy

Cross over Fighting games in a nutshell Villains: Let's work together Other Villains: K Heroes: Those guys are Strangers, Let's beat em up Other Heroes: *OH YOU WANNA GO!*

I don't know if that franchise is a "fighting game one" in the traditional sense. But I really love how the Puyo Puyo games tell their stories (At least in 20th anniversary since the other games are either, everyone as his own version of the story or you can only play as these three for the story). First of all every stories of the franchise is based around character interactions and character driven narrative. And basically in 20th anniversary, every characters get their own self-contained story that can happen at any moment and since the game they play (Puyo) needs wits instead of raw power, anyone can beat everyone if they are in a good condition. (I just regret the fact that the editor stopped every attempts of the developper at making a serious story... ^^')

I know the memes about smash not being a "true fighting game", but i think brawl's story mode could have been a good addition to this video

for me ''arcade mode'' is the right way to incorporate cutscenes and a narrative for all characters of the roster, one cutscene at the start for showing characters motivations and goals, and one at the end to show what they learned/win on their journey.

I recall that someone complained about the absurdity of Mortal Kombat, specially MK 11's story and that scene with Sonya Blade and Cassie Cage. Cassie is about to get promoted, her mother Sonya is proud of her and that shows. Just one last spar, give the troops a show and Cassie gets to prove herself. It feels heartwarming. Then the battle starts and Cassie puts a few bullets in her mother's heart, and Sonya retaliates with a chainsaw from the environment. And that's why MK 11's combat felt forgettable between the movie cutscenes. It's too over the top. A lot of actions that should've finished the battle are taken, and thus you don't pay much more attention to it than to a progress bar, because you know that even if you were to constantly snap Skorpion's arm, it wouldn't matter until the post-battle cutscene said otherwise..

Or you can make the Arcade mode a separeted story for each character, where all are canon and not canon at the same time like in skullgirls, but it's still a solution if it's gonna be just one game without sequels.

But kof tho!! how can you not mention kof it has 3 big arcs finished and the 4th is just starting, each arc has its own protagonist and each villain has a reason for their motives. When it comes to guilty gear the way they tell the story may not be the best but the story itself is actually good with some depth to it. P.S I might be bias because these two games are my very first into the fighting game genre but i still believe the stories are good compared to other fighting games

Umm dude.. what’s the average completion rate of story mode in most games period?

i know people here hate NRS but my god the character intros is something every fighter should do

I may be in the minority here but I actually thing Guilty Gear Xrd and Strive got it right with story. I think too much is done to try and integrate the fighting game mechanics into the lore of the characters. At the end of the day, all I want is background and some extra material to form attachments to my characters with. I care about the characters in fighting games. There are many characters I don't play because I don't like their story. My biggest issue with MK's story is how cheap the combat felt. It was unnecessary. So just cut it out and give me the cutscenes because as the video pointed out, many of us just want to see the "movie" that comes with the game.

One thing i liked about them's fighthin herds story mode is how they repurposed the engine to make a platform game that teaches the new players small mechanics like short hop, super jump, etc... And how they made the normal characters into bosses by giving them 2-3 health bars as well as some extra moves/super moves. Like how velvet phase 2 is just her using a infinite version of her wind-push move and phase 3 is her inside her own lv1 zoning you alway with projectiles, essentially teaching the player that velvet is a bi... a zoner and how to get near her by avoiding her projectiles. (Even though she's shooting bigger versions of her normal projectiles) Or like when you beat paprikas phase 1, the screen goes black to make a fake loading screen as if the fight has ended, them her phase 2 starts without any warning as she comes flying at you, giving emphasys to her crazy personality. Also if you get hit, arizona will say "hey not fair", but if you evade her attack, arizona will say "nice try".

Glad KOF is the one known for its good stories, specially the Orochi saga, and SNK fans actually cares about the lore in KOF

I think MK is the best and worst at selfcontained story, their intro dialouges are great! Two characters with deep connections can acknowledge that and build upon their story. Two rivals will trashtalk, two friends will talk about sparring etc etc. But they also break this hardcore when after the fight, one of the two best friends can decide to brutally murder their friend lol

I like how Blazblue Calamity Trigger (and only Calamity Trigger) has the "every fight is canon" mentality in its story mode because of the time loop, and that every win and every loss has a cutscene related to it (even if some repeat themselves). It honestly felt refreshing, and I was disheartened that the rest of the franchise didn't follow it up.

Makes me honestly glad Smash Ultimate didn't put too much effort in making a full blown story mode with a roster that massive. I agree a fight itself is more than enough.

Three words: Them's Fightin Herds. Really, im not joking, the story mode does exatcly what you say it should be done, a story withing the fight.

What about the cvs2 player select announcer? He basically tells a story every time you select a team

32% seems like a decent amount of players who actually finished the story mode to me. Especially in a fighting game where some players are only in it for the versus modes. I'd like to see this statistic compared to other fighting games, as well as other more story-driven games in general. I know personally, I finish the story mode of less than 10% of all games I purchase unfortunately.

12:12 ...but the story explains why they can. Nappa techinally can't remotely touch anyone on the roster but he can because of the story in the game which applies to the canon of the roster

What about Skullgirls? Each fighter there has their own self-contained story mode and the story itself isn’t that big.

I love this! I always subscribed to the "the matches themselves tell the better story" and I love how you articulated that and gave even more context for why this is the case.

I really hope I'm not going to have to reply to this comment by the end of this video with a "Play Them's Fightin' Herds Story Mode! it's actually super good!" comment.