Solving The Reflex Puzzles (A Brief Adventure With SNK Fighting Games)

It's been a bit, hasn't it? The last time we were here, I fired off an almighty something or other out of my brains that had to do with magical girls and hope and all that stuff. Then the world went to absolute hell and kind of messed with my writing motivation. We'll get back to the magical girls, believe me, as there's a whole lot of shit to talk about. As a preview: Mirror girls, and Symphogear actually getting a leg up on Sailor Moon. In the meantime, a funny thing about my procrastination over my year. I keep tabs on every game I beat over a year in a little Notepad file, for my own reference in December when I do a Games Of The Year list. January through April are fairly sparse; I only played either one or two games for each of those months. Some of those are big games, like April's sole venture being the Final Fantasy 7 Remake (and oh, the things I could say about that experience). All of this is to say that, in the first week of May, I cleared as many games as I have throughout the previous third of the year. How is this productivity possible? Easy. I started playing a bunch of FIGHTING GAMES. Four of those six games I cleared in May are SNK fighting games, and they're what I'd like to talk about today (For reference, the other two were Streets Of Rage 4 which is fighting-game adjacent, and my friend Thom's RPG Silus which is not fighting-game adjacent but you should still check out anyway). The clearing of these fighting games creates a strange little narrative arc for me, one that's still in progress but that I feel confident in talking about. So, you know, let's do that. THIS IS GOING TO BE ONE HELL OF A WRITEUP! ROUND 1, FIGHT!



This all began when I happened to notice an upcoming game on the Switch, a little gem called SNK Gals Fighters. Originally released for the Neo Geo Pocket Color 20 years or so ago, it hit all my boxes. Namely that it had that turn of the millennium color handheld aesthetic that I, a child of the Game Boy Color, was nostalgic for. Also a bunch of cute girls fighting the hell out of each other. So, since I was getting Streets Of Rage 4 anyway and this was only 10 bucks, I went for it. It ended up lighting the spark for me in terms of this fighting game odyssey, but otherwise I have little to say about it mechanically. Instead I'd like to use this part of the writeup to preface that the fighting game genre is a bit of a blind spot for me. Oh, sure, I rented things like Super Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat back in the 90's for my SNES. They were fine enough games (and Super SFII is always a fun nostalgic romp for me) but I'm not like... good at them. Living in a small place like I do, you don't really get to play them with humans often. That leaves going through the single-player modes, which can be a bit of an issue. Fighting game CPUs are notorious, as you'll see later on in these words. Not for nothing is there a TV Trope about bullshit unfair bosses named after SNK. SNK Gals Fighters was relatively light on this, but it has its moments. Namely that pulling off a super attack on any difficulty above Level 2 (of 5) is not going to happen on your part because the CPU will block the hell out of it. Maybe if you combo it, but I'm not good at that.


Still, I managed to clear the game and try its variety of characters. It has a certain breezy quality to it, being a quick handheld fighting game. Difficult fights come near the end, of course. There's Whip, a lady with a whip who's just generally tricky. To say nothing of the final boss, Miss X (actually just King Of Fighters mainstay Iori Yagami in a face mask and schoolgirl outfit, which leads to some... shall we say, "yikes" dialogue in some of the routes when you make it to that fight) who can and will block everything and shred your face. As happens in these fighting games. SNK Gals Fighters would have been a curiosity, a simple diversion, had I not found a particular affinity for one of the girls in the game. Out of them all, I liked using the character Nakoruru the best. Gals Fighters pulls together girls from a bunch of SNK fighting games, and Nakoruru hails from a particular set of them called Samurai Shodown. Well, I was intrigued by her series of origin... and wouldn't you know it, the arcade original was available on Switch for just 5 bucks on sale. So I grabbed that too. This, in hindsight, is when the real Dark Souls fighting games began.


Picking Samurai Shodown as my next fighting game experience was a horrific, intriguing, painful, and informative lesson in how these games can roll. One may be used to fighting games being all about chaining combos together, a quick succession of strikes which lead to victory. Samurai Shodown is not that game. If you try to play the game like that, you will get completely shredded (actually, playing the game either way will get you completely shredded, but we are getting ahead of ourselves). Samurai Shodown, as you may guess from the title, is a game about honorable samurai duels and all that jazz. There are some traditional Japanese swordspeople in here, including that Nakoruru lady who brought me here, but you've also got wild characters like this goblin dude with a Freddy Krueger knife glove or a French fencing girl. The point, presumably, of Samurai Shodown is a more slow-paced battle of patience and big strikes. Sword attacks take off a good chunk of your lifebar, so one must be defensive and only strike when it's advantageous. I like the idea of a fighting game like this, a slower game of wits and outthinking your opponent with reads and whatnot. I would imagine that playing Samurai Shodown with another person would be an interesting experience.


Unfortunately for me, we're in the middle of a goddamned crisis and I can't play Samurai Shodown with a human. This left me playing the CPU, and the CPU in Samurai Shodown is a cheating fucker designed to siphon quarters. Look, at first I didn't want to think that was happening. I wanted to say that I was just being salty because I couldn't beat any of these goddamned enemies. After continued play (and even after lowering the difficulty to its lowest) I confirmed that no, that actually is what they're doing. It's simple things like input reading and seemingly frame-perfect reaction. If they move towards you and you swing your sword, it's as if the game is going A BUTTON PRESS DETECTED, ENTER BLOCK COMMAND 1 FRAME LATER. And God help you if you are anywhere near them while blocking an aerial attack, because BEEP BOOP LANDING FRAME DETECTED, EXECUTE THROW COMMAND. Call me salty or a scrub or whatever if you like. They do that. They absolutely do that and it, admittedly, killed my enthusiasm for this version of the game dead. How are you going to have a careful measured game of reaction and countering versus an opponent that actually, literally, perfectly reads your inputs? Well, that's where you just have to get creative and lucky. I did eventually beat Samurai Shodown, somehow. How did I pull that off? I learned it from experience with Samurai Shodown. Oh, I don't mean my experience with the arcade game. I mean Samurai Shodown... on Game Boy.


So it was then, out of sheer frustration and slack-jawed horror at the perfect CPU of the SNK arcade original, that I happened to find myself fiddling around with Samurai Shodown on the Game Boy. A bit of a full circle, then, considering how I started all this with a portable SNK fighting game. Several factors made the Game Boy game quite a lot more fun to play, though. For starters, it's actually much easier to battle the CPU in it. There are still moments of difficulty here and there, but they aren't because a perfect machine mind has predicted your move a sixtieth of a second after your thumb pressed the button. No, here they're using their various ranges and moves against you... but in a way that's possible to learn from. Even predict. The other thing that made things easier was a change of character. Nakoruru was lovely in SNK Gals Fighters, but in Samurai Shodown her blade is quite short. You're meant to be using quick attacks with her, in tandem with special moves involving her hawk companion to do cool anti-air shit. That simply does not work against a perfect foe who will block everything (and the hawk stuff doesn't work for me, who is generally bad at fighting game inputs and only playing on a Switch in portable mode), so a change of character was in order. I chose a samurai guy called Haohmaru, who I gather is basically the Ryu of Samurai Shodown. He's got a nice katana with a half-decent range, and his moves have a variety of trajectories to them. The ones I liked most were his forward standing slash and his ducking heavy attack, the latter of which forms a nice anti-air arc above you.


All of this is leading to a change in perspective that helped me understand Samurai Shodown, in both of its versions, as well as fighting games in general. They're big reflex puzzles. Punch-Out with more buttons. It's all about finding the patterns and exploiting them with the proper moves. In actually fighting a human terms, that would be finding the right read for their fighting style. For my own terms versus the CPU, it's finding their attack ranges, what they do to approach me, and what attacks of mine can beat those. With Haohmaru and his decent range, this was less of an issue than I expected. I managed to clear the Game Boy game, both on Easy and Normal setting! Wow! Opponents who seemed impossible at first due to better attack ranges and strong special moves always had some AI exploit I could use. Hell, in a lot of cases I used the defensive slow-paced nature of Samurai Shodown to just get enough damage on the CPU and then stay back. Often they actually did stay back as well, and I won a fair few of my matches by having more life in time out. So, with my new knowledge of Haohmaru and defensive play, I went back to the arcade version. I won't lie. Sometimes this worked, and sometimes it absolutely did not. The arcade CPU is still an utter, utter bastard. Regardless, after giving SNK more quarters than God, I did eventually clear Samurai Shodown arcade. It's a fascinating game I'd love to play with a friend when the air clears a bit, and one I find myself gently prodding at when I have a spare moment of time to kill. Just one or two fights and then shut it off when the CPU starts becoming a frame-reading fuck. It's a lovely story, but that leads us to our last fighting game I tried. This one is particularly interesting and gives me things to talk about with great passion, so let's talk about it!


In talking about this fighting game journey with my pal John, he offered some very interesting insights and suggestions for my consideration. One of those was recommending another SNK fighting game to me, and on a sheer "the hell with it" whim I went right to it. The game in question, the original Fatal Fury, is absolutely dripping with unique decisions and design choices. From my limited perspective, I can safely say that they don't make 'em like this anymore. Fatal Fury, you see, comes from 1991. It's pre-Street Fighter II, which was the defining changing moment in fighting game DNA and all that. Hell, according to Wikipedia Fatal Fury was even created by the same person who made the original Street Fighter. Now, I've barely fiddled with the original Street Fighter. It's foundational but I don't know if it's, you know, good. Fatal Fury is very good, leagues more fair as an arcade game than Samurai Shodown, and far more interesting in how it's designed. For starters, you've only got three playable characters. Yeah, just three. I've cleared the game with all three, and they have their own strengths and weaknesses and attack styles for you to use as your skillset. It's actually a pretty decent variety, and it provides a different challenge for each of the fighters you have to face. Someone who you can easily beat with jumping kicks as Terry Bogard will require a different approach as Joe Higashi, who has a short-range jumping knee as his aerial attack. Then there's Andy Bogard, who has a really cool charge move that can absolutely shred your foes if you learn to use and abuse it at the right times.


As for your foes, they're a set of eight fighters who you can't play as. Post-Street Fighter II, fighting games ballooned their rosters such that almost everyone you fought was also playable. This makes the roster diverse, of course, but it also detracts a little from the single-player challenge. You can see this a little in the original Street Fighter II, where the bosses are all super-powered and have wild shit they can do. Vega clinging to the cage in the background of his stage comes to mind, and I honestly forget if you can do that or not in the later versions when you play as Vega. Look, I know a Vega main so I offer my apologies to people who like playable boss characters, but the way Fatal Fury can structure its fights by virtue of these being CPU-only opponents is more interesting. Not all of them do this, of course, but enough do that it makes one raise an eyebrow at the interesting design choice. You have Richard Meyer, a kicking master who actually leaps up to grab the rafters above the stage to deliver aerial kicks to you. Then there are fights like Tung Fu Rue or Hwa Jei, which have honest to god phases to them. Damage them enough, and they actually power up and gain new attacks that will shred you if you're not careful. This is really interesting stuff, and it's absolutely impossible to do stuff like this when the entire roster is playable. I've not played or seen any later Fatal Fury games, but I can hardly see how you could give these characters power-up moves they can just do at any time, or pull off like a super or something, without messing with the balance. It all only adds to the reflex puzzle aspect of the game.


Take the penultimate fight against Billy Kane. It seems impossible as he has a great big stick with a massive range, far more range than any non-special move you have... but there's one massive exploit I discovered that makes him almost a breeze. Knocking the stick out of his hands makes him freeze in place until a guy in the background throws him a new one to fight you with. He's immobile and invincible while cowering in wait for his new stick... but you can easily just stand there and time your throw button press (yes, this game has a dedicated throw button, how quaint!) to get him just as he becomes vulnerable again. Holy shit! You mean now I can do the Samurai Shodown bullshit of a perfect throw on this guy? How empowering! Bring it on, I've got this! Oh. Oh dear god. Then we have the final boss himself, the legendary Geese Howard. You want to talk about perfect throws? Geese can not only block your attacks, but he can throw you out of them. Even in mid-air. In our first fight, I sat there mouth agape as he blocked my opening jumpkick and then threw me. "EXCUSE ME???", I said. "IF HE CAN JUST INSTA-THROW ME WHEN HE BLOCKS, HOW THE HELL CAN I WIN THIS?". Well, it was possible. I did it with all three characters, eventually. Really, I'm just impressed that out of eight fights in this arcade game, only two of them gave me the same hassle as... basically any fight in Samurai Shodown. The other one, Raiden, is a big-ass wrestler with massive reach on all his moves and a little bit of that perfect countering shit. I actually beat him first try with Andy Bogard using his charge dash move and learning how to time it right. He's a fucker, but a fucker who I found an exploit for. In the same manner, I actually fought fire with fire to beat Geese. I used throws. It was not easy, as it depended on a lot of luck. Getting in close and blocking one of his kicks and then following up with a throw would work... but he wouldn't always do that. He had a projectile move he loved using which still does chip damage. Oh, and it takes off like a third of your health if you're hit by it without blocking. Oh, and he'll hurl out three or four of the fuckers in quick succession. All of this is to say Geese is hard, yo. He's the final boss, so it's to be expected... but again, SNK got all my quarters. Still, I defeated him in like an hour of trying. An hour is what it would take me to beat a regular fighter like, say, Hanzo in Samurai Shodown. Against a final boss? I'll take that. Fatal Fury the first is wonderful, and it's definitely my favorite fighting game of the ones I've covered here.


I think that will do it for this one! There are many more fighting games I'd love to try, some SNK and some not. There's a reboot of Samurai Shodown that came out last year and it looks legit, but I have so many other fighting games here that I've accumulated over the years. Like, I own Skullgirls. I was fully ready to buy Skullgirls on Switch, but then I checked and I own it on Steam. I legit don't remember buying it, but it's there so... guess I'll install that and give it a go sometime! My approach to fighting games isn't perfect, of course. They're more than likely best when played with people who match your skill level, but I'm locked down and have a bad Internet connection so I'm forced to resort to CPU play. In that regard, you can see my varied success with that. Sometimes they're interesting to exploit, and this is how the game is designed. Sometimes they're frame-perfect nightmares programmed to siphon quarters because this is an arcade game. It doesn't feel good to lose to that, mind, but I still understand it. Even so, I really like my headway into a genre that has otherwise eluded me, and I definitely get the appeal.


Now all I need is a fancy stick for the Switch, and then we're golden.