Annotated Appendix: Alex

Whew, here we are. Want to know what's hard? Fighting game videos.

Honestly, that's part of the reason I'm doing this game as a series. The SOTN stuff was all straightforward; once I plotted out the correct course through the game, it was just a matter of getting from points A to B in each video. Fighting games aren't like that, though, and I took this on as a challenge to myself to become a better editor. You could say it's been a learning process.

First, going through movesets for characters is a bit bland, and I feel as though this video in particular didn't make it any better. I miscalculated how much varied footage I should have gotten for move examples, which is why you're seeing a lot of repeated clips of moves here. As the time allows, this should change going forward.

Second, I can do all of the moveset stuff on my own with a training dummy, but actual match footage is another story. I recorded everything that bookends the videos in May because that was the only time I could get together with other 3S players I know to have some legit footage. I don't want to pull random match footage from online games. Not only are they unpredictable from a quality standpoint, part of me (and I know that it's probably all in my head) doesn't think that's fair to the other players that I'm essentially using them without their knowledge. I know there are tons of YouTube videos that do nothing but pull online matches and replay them, but that's not me, and not the point of what I'm trying to do here.

The nasty byproduct of that is, well, I don't have a good Alex, and neither do many of my friends, so the actual match footage is pretty lousy. Sure, there are some nice parry moments and a few situations that I come back around to in the VO later in the video, but it's pretty mid- and low-tier stuff. I'm sorry to say that you're just going to have to get used to that as we move ahead. Between the three or four guys that are going to help me with record matches, our knowledge of the roster is fairly wide and varied, but it's not all-encompassing for high level play. Hopefully, the stuff in the VO and the side window will make you forget that none of us have an Ibuki in a few weeks.

This brings up a good point about this particular video: there just wasn't that much to say about Alex. I mean, sure, I found some nice tidbits for the guy from the usual sources, but he couldn't possibly have as much meat to him as series regulars like Ryu and Ken (you can expect those videos to be on the long side). It did, however, dip our toes into what makes this game --and fighting games in general-- so fascinating to me on a character level. Most characters in this genre tend to be cobbled together cultural forces. By that, I mean that we have representations of folk heroes, of pop culture icons, of mythic figures. In some characters' cases, it's a lot of that stuff cobbled together. Yes, this can get very speculative. I've found no concrete evidence that Alex is named after Alexander the Great. However, when we get to other characters in the game, particularly those that have a relationship with Alex, we'll see that possible references like this fit contextually when we step back and take it as a whole. I think you'll know what I mean as I get deeper into the cast.

From a more practical side, the movest footage is still windowed because I needed to make references to other stuff on the side, but it winds up sitting in front of lots of empty space. Curious what your thoughts are because this might evolve, but future videos might do away with that format in the second half so there isn't so much dead real estate.

Sorry that this took so long to develop. I'm still working out some of the kinks here, and the VO on this particular episode is straight up bad, and these are things I'm actively working to fix. If I ever find the time to circle back to some of these for any kind of remastering, this will be the first video on the list. We'll see.

Thanks again for watching. Your feedback is always appreciated if you have a second. I'm already hard at work on the next episode, so I'll hopefully have another one up in a week or so.