A few years ago I wrote a feature about why fighting games need to abandon arcane, needlessly complicated control schemes like quarter-circle motions and dragon punches. It’s a belief I’ve held onto for years but felt inspired to bring up again in the wake of Arms, Nintendo’s Switch fighting game that proves arbitrarily high levels of technical execution aren’t needed to make a good and deep fighting game, just as Super Smash Bros. does.
Naturally, not everyone agreed with me. And I get. If you spent years and years getting good at a thing, you don’t like to hear that the skill you’ve gained shouldn’t be necessary, even if it’s true. However, along with the yelling I also kept hearing about a game called Fantasy Strike which apparently addressed most of my complaints with current fighting game dogma. Even when I first played it in its unfinished state, I could already tell that Fantasy Strike is a fighting game that understands what really matters. And that’s still the case in the final PC, PS4, and Nintendo Switch release.
Certain issues I had with the preview have been ironed out. Controls are now as snappy and responsive as you want from a fast-paced fighting games. Other issues still remain. The limited roster consists of colorful but somewhat generic characters. My main might be a panda with a gambling problem. But that’s endemic to fighting games starting from scratch and don’t have years of prior entries to draw from. The handful of modes, from regular and team battles to survival gauntlets and boss rushes, are straight out of an early (albeit online) arcade cabinet.
What matters is Fantasy Strike’s shining and sound core design full of radical potential first teased in 2017. In Fantasy Strike, every move is performed by pressing a single button. Want to do an attack? Press a button. Special attack? Press a button. Perform a throw or super move? You understand. Some moves can be modified by jumping, pressing buttons in a sequence, or holding the stick in a direction, but none of the difficulty comes from simply or consistently executing a move in time.
And thank god because fretting over whether or not you can just do a move should never be the thing that matters. Fantasy Strike puts the emphasis on theory where it belongs. Just because the moves are easy to perform doesn’t mean the game is brainless. I still got stomped playing online. If anything it’s even harder because more rounds and shorter health bars make each wrong or right decision even more important in a Samurai Shodown kind of way. It’s the difference between “can you do this move?” and “should you do this move?”
You still have to study each character’s moveset, paying attention to properties like range and speed, to know what situation calls for what move. You can’t use an arrow projectile the same way you use a giant paintbrush. This is the kind of satisfying high-level fighting game thinking Fantasy Strike wants to teach you, zoning and mix-ups and rush-downs, and it smartly recognizes that complicated moves just get in the way.
Fantasy Strike’s philosophy is crystallized by its Yomi Counter system. In fighting games, “Yomi” refers to your ability to read your opponent, anticipate their next move, and punish them for it. Yomi Counters let you reverse throws, and you perform them by pressing no buttons whatsoever. How perfect is that? Obviously pressing no buttons leave you vulnerable to other attacks, but if you let go and trust your ability to read your opponent (not pull off some silly combo string) you’ll be rewarded. It’s like using the Force.
Fantasy Strike is about the buttons you’re not pressing. It’s almost like jazz, and unsurprisingly, it’s coming from a developer with a knowledge of fighting games so complete they can break them like this. David Sirlin was the lead designer of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. In fact, this whole wave of accessible fighting games, from Divekick to Rising Thunder (RIP), are coming from masters of the genre like Adam Heart and Seth Killian. It’s almost as if people with a true understanding of fighting games know that complex execution isn’t the point. What a crazy thought.
For more on fighting games read about the entire history of the genre as well as our guide to every character in Mortal Kombat 11.
1.
Fantasy Strike is an upcoming fighting game that abandons pointlessly complicated controls.
2.
Every move can be performed with little more than a button press.
3.
The Yomi Counter system rewards you for knowing when to push no buttons at all.
4.
However, the game is still plenty deep. Playing online demonstrates how it’s about knowing when to use a move, not how to use it.
5.
Since it’s unfinished, Fantasy Strike is still a little rough, but it shows a ton of radical potential.
