2305: Fighting Talk

I spent a bit of time playing some Dead or Alive 5 Last Round online with a friend from Final Fantasy XIV earlier. (Hi, Neon!) I’ve never really played a fighting game online before — it’s a genre that has something of a reputation as being brutally unforgiving to newcomers, and with good reason, since the fighting game genre is one that attracts significant numbers of people good enough to actually get paid to play these games.

Thankfully, my friend Neon appears to be of a roughly equal level of skill to me, since we had a series of matches and we both came out roughly equal in terms of victories and losses.

So far in Dead or Alive 5 I’d been focusing on the Training mode, attempting to learn some combos and moves for characters I liked the look of, because I’d love to get past the “button mashing” phase that everyone goes through when they first pick up a fighting game. As such, I was a bit hesitant to even jump into the story mode, because I didn’t feel like I knew any characters well enough. But I thought I’d give fighting another person a go — and I’m glad I did.

Fighting Neon gave me a potent reminder of exactly why I’ve always liked the Dead or Alive series in preference to perhaps more established, popular fare like Capcom’s Street Fighter series. It’s kind of hard to describe the exact feeling, but I think it’s best described as the game feels instinctive, almost primal. You can spend hours learning the specific button combinations to pull off specific moves at the right time — and doubtless the really good players do that — but at a fairly rudimentary level, which is where I’d generously put myself, the fighting system works in such a way that you can look at what’s going on on the screen, push directions and attack buttons and have something that “feels” right unfold in front of you. Opponent blocking high blows? Get in there with some low kicks. Taunting you? Charge in and tackle them with a running throw. Knocking you off balance with a flurry of blows? Block, block, block dammit, oh for fuck’s sake. (I never have quite mastered blocking in fighting games; given how important and helpful — and tied to the series’ iconic countering system — it is in Dead or Alive, I should probably do something about that.)

I haven’t yet picked a “main” to play with. I will almost certainly end up going with Kasumi, at least initially, because Kasumi is hot and I vaguely know some of her effective moves. Today I also particularly enjoyed playing as Hitomi (who appears to have wonderful reach with her kicks) and Momiji (though I haven’t done any training with her yet, so I was taking wild stabs at her moves). I also discovered that, as I previously thought, I want to steer clear of slower, heavy-hitting characters, because I very obviously don’t know how to handle them effectively and tend to get my ass handed to me if I try and fight with them in the same way as the Kasumis and company of the world.

My few games today were an eye-opening experience, then. I’m definitely up for playing some more; if you, too, suck at fighting games and would like a punching bag to play with, feel free to hit me up on PSN under the ID Angry_Jedi.