Ask most people if they want to start playing a fighting game, and the response you’re gonna get will be something between a polite but clearly uncomfortable chuckle to horrified shrieks, assaulted by memories of 200 hit combos.

This is a result of quite a few things - the amount of different attack buttons, the unintuitive nature of motion inputs, the fact that you can’t really easily connect two attacks together in most games - but I think the central barrier that makes people run and cower at the sight of Street Fighter 3 is the community’s fetish with overcomplexity. Fighting game players are notorious for refusing to ever make anything simple: Tutorials? Nonexistent, and if they exist they’re the driest, most boring thing on planet earth. Terminology? Half of it is in japanese for no good reason.¹ Resources? You better believe most of it is on some obscure discord server you’re just expected to magically divine the existence of.

One of the many ways this complexity surfaces in is the character archetypes - the various ways people discuss and categorize a character’s functionality and appeal. In a community already known for making things convoluted, a video explaining what archetypes exist will take about 30 minutes to go through, which would be confusing enough as is, but almost every resource you pick up will give you a different definition as to what the archetypes are.

That is not necessarily bad. If the categorization is convoluted but fundamentally correct, we can have solace in assuming that this is simply a complex subject that requires some thought put into. However, there is one small frayed thread in these definitions that, if you pull too hard on it, shows how poorly the entire carpet was woven.

Woe, Command Grab Be Upon You

The Grappler is a character archetype that the fighting game glossary neatly describes as:

A character whose primary offensive tools are throws and command throws.

Makes sense - a grappler is someone who grapples, and therefore any character that grapples a bunch is a grappler. But for such a fundamental archetype of fighting games, this description is very unusual, as the descriptions of the others tend to be described in very broad strokes. For example, the Rushdown archetype is described as:

A style of play that focuses on getting close to your opponent and relentlessly attacking them until they die.

Meanwhile a Zoner (and zoning) is described as:

A character whose main gameplan involves zoning their opponent to death.

The act of using long-range attacks to try and prevent your opponent from coming closer, typically by using long-distance normals, fireballs, and backwards movement.

The Zoner isn’t described as “a character who throws a lot of projectiles”, they’re described by the appeal of zoning. A rushdown isn’t described as “a character with strong close range attacks”, they’re described by the appeal of rushdown. So why do Grapplers get the short end of the stick?

Come to think of it - what’s up with Grapplers in team games? In 1v1 fighting games, you can only² grab someone when they’re on the ground and able to act, so a grappler’s appeal comes in conditioning the opponent to stay on the floor even as you approach them. In team games though, they just… don’t do that. The most successful grapplers are ones that use their grabs mostly mid-combos or mid-mixup³; they don’t play at all like their 1v1 counterparts. The rest of the cast seems to act pretty 1:1, why do the wrestlers don’t?

Are they… actually grapplers?

Fighting Games’ Janken

In Krackatoa’s video Neutral.mp4⁴, he goes over what he describes as “the three structure” of fighting game neutral; a method of analyzing what’s going on in a match and quickly adapting to it. The structure presents any maneuver as belonging to one of three possible categories:

• Passive Play, maneuvers which focus around reacting to an action by the opponent and not initiating yourself.
• Establishing Play, maneuvers which are guaranteed to have benefit once executed, but tend to be very committal to initiate.
• Preemptive Play, maneuvers which involve some level of guesswork by only really being successful if the other player does what you expect them to.

These three styles of play each contest eachother like rock paper scissors:

• Passive players will be afraid to react to an Establishing player’s offense until it’s too late.

• Establishing players will be too set in their ways to notice they’re walking into a Preemptive player’s offense.

• Preemptive players will open themselves up for a Passive player to capitalize on.

As the video shows, by reducing all fighting game options to these three categories, you can more easily respond to the changing tides of battle: instead of choosing between 16 different situations and responses, you choose between 3 and autofire. Simplifies a lot of the jank.

Personally, I found this to be a very efficient and convenient way to look at fighting games and proceeded to recommend it to every friend I had who picked up one to try. Rewatching the video I realized these three styles of play very neatly fit into the three “big” fighting game archetypes: The Zoner, The Rushdown, and The Grappler.

• The Zoner plays passively, staying away from the opponent and reacting to how they try to approach them. While the zoner tends to throw out projectiles and attacks to keep the enemy at bay, they generally wait to see what the opponent will do and change their gameplan appropriately.

• The Rushdown wants to be up in your face as much as possible, so they use moves that help establish their position for as long as possible. While they have to reset their aggression eventually (it’s just how the games are designed), they’ll force the opponent to play by their rules as long as they can.

• The Grappler relies heavily on preemptively guessing what their opponent will do. Their gameplan revolves around improving their chances of landing their beloved grab by scaring the opponent from jumping, from attacking, from standing there not doing anything. They will scare you into blocking passively, not moving an inch, and only then will they go for their grab. They manage risk.

This seemed to make sense to me, both from an appeal perspective and matchup perspective: Zoners do well against grapplers because they can react, while the grappler has nothing to guess against most of the match. A rushdown will demolish a zoner because they can close in before the zoner gets started. But any seasoned fighting game player will probably have reached this point thinking “wait, so why don’t grapplers beat rushdowns? Grapplers usually suck.”

While this is a correct observation in modern times, this is not a universal truth, as there are many times where Grapplers do fit their spot on the triangle - for example, Guilty Gear XX’s Potemkin. However, as you may slowly be starting to figure out, grapplers never tend to stay long in those positions. Grapplers get nerfed to kingdom come the moment they scrap even an inch of viability⁵ and don’t get a lot of representation in most games, having only one character who grapples if they’re lucky.

This ties into a longer rant I have about grapplers which I’ll spare you from, but in short: Fighting games appeal incredibly heavily towards the more aggressive crowd; the rushdowns. As such, it makes sense that their “natural predator” is being underfed and undershown, whether intentionally or just accidentally. But by our new metric, we can see that our pseudo-grapplers do manage to sneak in, just not in the ways we expect.

The Part Where I Get FGC Aficionados to Put Me On The Cross

If we look at Grapplers as “characters who’s gameplan revolves around preemptive play” rather than “characters with good command grabs,” a few epiphanies reveal themselves:

Firstly, team-combat grapplers aren’t actually grapplers, they’re rushdowns. With a few notable exceptions, such as Cerebella, most team based grapplers don’t actually try to minimize risk, but rather close you down with strong offense and don’t let you breathe.

Secondly, we can more neatly slot previously “unorthodox” characters into understandable definitions using this format. I’ll be using Guilty Gear as an example because that’s what I play the most:

• Faust is a character who’s gameplan revolves around tossing random items around the screen, forcing both players into a chaos, and winning by appropriately reacting to what he pulls. While this character is traditionally seen as “unorthodox” due to this very unusual mechanic, we can now more accurately slot him as being a “zoner”, or more correctly, a “passive” character. Now so much of his design suddenly fits a known and comfortable archetype instead of being a wildcard, with his long reaching buttons and focus on reacting to the opponent’s mistakes.

• Slayer is a close-ranged character who’s gameplan revolves around his Dandy Step, a move that allows him to dodge attacks and follow up with a verity of devastating punishes. His goal is to score a counterhit⁶, leading to devastating combos. Slayer is one of the most popular characters in the entire series, and has long been categorized as a “boxer rushdown”, a category which… I am going to be honest here, just means “similar to Dudley from Street Fighter”. Under our new definition however… Slayer is much more similar to a grappler than a rushdown.

We could keep going here⁷, but I think you understand my point. Suddenly a lot of poorly defined characters with unorthodox archetypes slot cleanly and neatly into something we can understand and work around. It wasn’t the characters being too unique, it was our categorization method being shit.

There’s a lot more I could say about the new definition system of “Passive Characters”, “Preemptive Characters”, and “Establishing Characters” (which we will most certainly need a better naming scheme for), but if you made it this far in I’m more than sure you’re waiting for me to wrap things up.

So, to close things off, let’s talk about a commonly clowned-on fighting game personality.

No, not LTG.

In Defense of Leon Massey

In the video Archetypes in Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2, Leon Massey makes the now infamous statement that every single guilty gear character is a rushdown. This isn’t what he actually said, he argued that guilty gear is a more aggressively-focused series and so its relationship with archetypes is different, but the point he makes is much more understandable when we look at it with a Three Structure approach to archetypes.

When he says everyone “becomes a rushdown”, it’s just him pointing out the fact that most characters start playing in an establishing gameplan once they knock the opponent down. They become a rushdown because we intuitively associate the rushdown archetype with establishing maneuvers. He was entirely right, just worded himself poorly, but the video also points out a larger issue.

The way we use and categorize archetypes in the FGC is very poor because we just kept adding ideas to our system, while never looking back and wondering if our basis was ever correct. As more games came out with more unique characters, rather than go back and patch the holes of our original definitions, we just kept hammering more nails into our system while trying to shove more conflicting ideas into it. We added so many bandaids and shortcuts that our current system is an incomprehensible mess that every new release refuses to touch with a 20 foot pole, instead calling characters “One-Shot” or “Power” characters.

Hopefully, by using these more simplified and form-accurate definitions, we could better discuss characters, gameplans, and ideas in the fighting game space.

Or we can just start naming everything in japanese again. Either goes, really.