The Annotated Symphony of the Night

Hi there.

If you've been following my Twitter feed over the last few days (and you should...?) you may have seen my little advertisement for something of a passion project I've been wanting to do over the last few years: annotating Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I've wimped out of doing it for a thousand different reasons in the past, but now that consumer video recording and editing have become cheap and easy-ish, I've pretty much run out of excuses. So, whenever it gets done, a series of videos going through chunks of the game will hit the internet, and you're going to love it. Promise.

But what does "annotate" mean, anyway? In simple terms, annotations are notes on a given topic, and an annotated guide to, say, a book or a film details and explains small, individual pieces that make the larger whole. Very few games, if any, receive this kind of treatment.

Symphony of the Night, released in NA in 1997, was meant to be something of a swan song for the series to that point as Konami was developing a new 3D game for the Nintendo 64 that would wipe the slate clean and reboot the franchise. Koji Igarashi, the co-director of the game and co-scenario writer, was an unabashed fan of Castlevania from the beginning, and used the limited resources his team had to not only nod at the past entries that came before it, but also cram in as many references to religion, mythology, literature, and folklore as they could. On top of that, Symphony is so loaded down with secrets that, when looking at it in terms of scope, makes it both a masterpiece of design and something of a miracle that it all worked.

I'll be pointing all of these out during a concise playthrough of the game, with a small window embed next to it for additional video. I will be narrating the run of the game, and will add text underneath when necessary. Here is a crude mock-up of what you'll be seeing:

As I've never A: recorded gameplay footage before, and B: never edited video, the first challenges have been finding adequate programs that work on my own limited resources, and learning how to bend them to my will. For now, I'll be recording with a low-rent, but workmanlike program called FRAPS that's fairly common in gaming YouTube circles. It has its downsides --mostly because the files it creates are monstrously huge-- but is very inexpensive to use for the moment, at least for testing and training purposes.

Hurdle #2 is far more of an issue, as you can imagine. Both of the most common free editing options out there for PC, YouTube's onboard program and Windows Movie Maker, don't seem to have the capability of doing exactly what I want (at least, not that I have found so far). Simple as they seem to be for actual editing, I'll probably have to look elsewhere for the multi-windowed approach that I'm gunning for. I'm not super excited to do research for something like this, but that's part of why I'm doing it, so there you go. To the internet!

So here's the actual plan:

1. Record a test run through the game. Even though I've played SotN about 50 times or something, I need to make sure that I can competently play it without too many screw ups, and plan the most efficient path while mapping as much as I can in any given castle location. I'm most of the way through this now, and have already found some problems that I need to address in regard to how I'm recording the video and how I can compensate for it (the worst problem so far is the occasional dropped frame of animation and input lag from the controller. I know, it's not like I'm playing a fighting game, but in regard to how I traditionally fight things like Galamoth in the second castle, a laggy button press is the difference between a steady stream of invincible attacks and the business end of a foot to the face).
2. Start writing scripts. Based on how the test run went, I can start to accurately compile information and map out the text. This includes placing all of the enemies, the weapons found and dropped in each location, any visual cues from past games that come up, and planning on where to place the supplemental video. This is probably going to be the longest part, if not the hardest.
3. Record the master playthrough. This run will be based on the scripts with as little improvisation as possible. We'll see how that goes
4. Finalize scripts, start combing for supplemental video. This is where I lock down the scripts and either look around the internet for usable video from past games and other resources, or start recording them myself.
5. Play through a Luck run, farm everything. If stage 2 was the longest and maybe the hardest part, then this will be the most tedious. I need to find all of the weapons that have special moves in them and the other stuff that make references to outside works (like Tolkien. There's a lot of Tolkien going on in this game). Good thing is that you can play the game with a code that spikes your luck stat, essentially making this a little easier. Regardless, I'm kinda sorta not looking forward to this part, so I might try to dig up a 100% save file on the internet that's got all of this stuff already. Remember, I'm not only farming this junk, I'm recording it, too (but not the actual farming of it, lucky for you). 
6. Lay down the narration. Depending on the editing software I use, I could either do it right on top of the video, which is optimal, or record something via Audacity and embed it into the video, which is not. I've actually done some voice recording before, so I'm confident in my ability to pull this off and the little ticks and quirks of my diction that I need to watch out for. But it's not something I do all the time, so it will take some work. Please keep me in your prayers during this phase.
7. Clean up. Extra video. Extra audio. Figuring out how to put in the audio of that never-produced extra ending. Stuff like that. At this point, I should probably Photoshop some sort of cover image for this thing. I just remembered that I should probably also make a short intro video to explain the thought processes to this whole adventure. Shit.

At this point, I still don't have any idea how I'm going to split the videos and where those will take place. While I'd like to just make this one giant 5 hour affair, that would be a big, stuffed video, and I think getting them out in small chunks is probably more palatable for you the viewer and me that producer. Plus, this is a learn-as-you-go thing for me, so we should expect the quality of them to get better over time (right?). I'd like to have at least one of these out in the next month or two, so we'll see.

I hope you like Symphony of the Night, but that's a dumb thing to say because of course you like Symphony of the Night. That's all I'm going to be thinking about over the next few months, so I guess I hope I like Symphony of the Night. Which I do, or else I would never tackle something like this. Send me your tips on recording and editing, if you have them, and if you know a guy named Jeremy Blaustein, let him know I'm looking for him. I have to ask him about the Silmarillion.

See you soon.

Right Where It Should Be

As you might expect, I've been playing as much Street Fighter V as I possibly can lately. This means that, in reality, I'm playing as much Street Fighter V as I possibly can between the hours of 9:30pm and whenever I go to bed, M-F, when the kid is asleep enough that loud button presses won't wake her and my wife has had enough of television for the night and wanders off to read. Lucky for me, this tends to be prime time for the online fighting game crowd, so I can be soundly shown the business end of a fireball to the face like The Jesus intended.

But my League Point woes aren't what I'm getting at today, nor is this going to be some sort of poor man's review of the new game (but I like it!). Think of this more as an apology for an insult I never actually made.

See, Street Fighter V has come under a lot of flack over the past two weeks since its release for being shoved out the door in something of an "unfinished" state. For God's sake, reviewers have found, there's no Arcade mode in it, and the main reason for one to play it is to willingly subject yourself into the online meat grinder of Ranked matches which, for many of us, is like throwing your 9 year old sister into an NFL training camp. As the betas have gone on over the past few months, I was getting the sinking feeling that it was going to be a pretty bare bones package myself, and when it finally came out, it was hard not to felt a little let down on how thin the content was from a single-player perspective.

After two weeks of it, though, I'm switching my stance on this, and feel that the internet has been looking at this incorrectly. Not wrongheadedly, though, because there are definitely niceties that one could say should have been included in a retail release of a brand new Street Fighter game. But really, everything you need is right there, in as unobtrusive and unpretentious a manner as possible. It's, actually, straight to the point with almost zero filler, which most big budget games can't claim themselves.

Mode by mode, it's actually very easy to break this down. First, the main complaint is that there isn't a robust Story mode in the game yet, and that the included Story mode is laughable shallow. Now, in 2004, I played Guilty Gear XX and was downright flabbergasted at how complex and compelling it's dopey anime Story mode was, and wished that every fighting game from then on would have something so compelling. But this was still a side interest to me playing against other people and getting better at the game. Sure, I found myself as into Guilty's mythology at the time as I was any given Final Fantasy, but not so deep down, I wanted to learn the game and learn how to play it well, not learn how to cheese the computer so I could get the next phase of text boxes. There's a really big difference there. I get that there are people interested in playing a Street Fighter game so they can finally learn how Nash came back from the dead or to vindicate their Ryu/ Ken slash fiction dreams, but as Street Fighter IV was such a tournament success over the last few years has shown, this crowd seems more of a niche of a niche when it comes to this genre.

The Story mode that we're given, then, cuts through the bullshit. People that are into this stuff don't want to have complex nail-biting bouts with smart AI opponents, they want to beat the next guy to see the next story beat, and SFV gives them just that: idiotic computer opposition that a new player can pound on and an old hat to practice combos with. They don't need to be hard, they just need to be there, and they need to match up with the still art and dialog that bookends the fight. Though this isn't much a consolation to someone used to current Mortal Kombats or the Persona fighting games' Story modes, but the amount of art/ dialog that SFV is giving is at least that much or more than any and all versions of Street Fighter II and Street Fighter III. If anything, it should act as the appetizer that it is for the Story mode update that's coming in June, giving people incentive to return to the game later, as their revenue model for the game clearly shows they want them to.

If the loose "plot" of the game is made to get through as quickly as possible, then, it's clear as day that SFV was developed for people to play competitively (and probably, as the speculation has gone, to make it more of an eSport draw), which means that it's going to have to send you online. But what does someone do between matches? Well, for now, it's a fair assumption that players will be sitting in the Training mode practicing combos and testing situations to be ready for the inevitable fight request, and if you've been playing like I have, you'll know that these can happen anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes apart, making the Training mode the ideal spot. Soon enough, though, and I have already felt this, the average player is going to get sick of hitting a punching bag, and will want something with some stakes involved, even if they're fairly low.

I ask you, would an Arcade mode really suffice? If you've already seen your character's story, which is mostly what Arcade modes are for in these games, then be honest with yourself and say no. Arcade mode is just there to pass the time between matches, and will loose their teeth the second you see the credits roll once. A Survival mode, though, with various levels of difficulty, is a better answer. Most nights so far, I'll fire up the game, head into Survival on Hard difficulty (which I still haven't completed, by the way), and see how far I get in the two or so hours that I'll play the game. Hard Survival mode has 50 opponents to get through, which means that I'll plow through a dumb AI opponent, cater to a fight request with an actual online player, and then go back to another AI opponent or two. Either the whole few hours have gone by and I'm too tired to keep it up, or Hard mode finally wins this war of attrition and my Ryu poops out around fight 30. Either way, I'm covering both bases: waiting for and then playing online competitors --why I'm playing to begin with-- and ultimately working toward a long term endgame in a 50-man kumite. 10-12 fights in Third Strike's Arcade mode doesn't fill that same void, and when I was playing SFIV, I would just spam focus attacks in the Arcade mode until someone pulled me out of the monotony with a fight request. Survival mode is much more fulfilling.

But yes, there are problems with all of this, and problems that are squarely on Capcom. For the first week, the servers were an overloaded shit show, which really hampers all of my enjoyment under this kind of mindset. This makes things especially lousy since you can't earn any in-game currency if the servers are down, making playing Survival and finishing it on any difficulty setting feel anticlimactic. I wish there were better combo training modes, too, like the ones found in Street Fighter IV. I have a feeling that stuff is going to come eventually.

The tools are there, though. If the servers are running well, everything is right where it should be. I'm not going to call anyone out online or talk shit about a review outlet for dogging on the game as a complete package; their opinions are their own. But as a Guy The Plays Fighting Games, this enough for me, because what's there is everything that I would be doing with any other game. Man, if only the entire universe just knew that I was so right about this and everything else, knowaddamsayin'?

[For All] The Good It's Done

If you're going to read this, you need to be ready to excuse the frothing temper tantrum of an old man...

So, the last time we talked, we got into some of the main reasons Street Fighter IV was not only good for fighting games, but good for the games business as a whole.

Today will be different. Today, we get some things off our chest.

I am not a Street Fighter IV hater, but over the course of the last seven years, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that I never want to play it again. In fact, at my normal weekly Street Fighter gathering, a guy convinced me to jump off of Third Strike to play him in SF4. Fair enough, I thought; you took your beatings from me, so I'll give you that same courtesy. The second the menu screens faded into memory, I knew that this was not the experience that I wanted to re-live. Going through them piecemeal will help to explain things a bit more clearly.

First, get a load of this:

What you're seeing is a roster of 44 characters, many of whom share a distinctly similar method of playing the game at its core level. This is a bloated mess. I give Capcom its due credit in that it balanced a roster of such preposterous size well enough so that more than only a fourth of the cast is viable (like in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2), but for a one-on-one game like a mainline Street Fighter, this is straight up too much. A glut like this will scare off new players, while more the more seasoned are only apt to find one or two main characters and stick with them over time. Sure, that policy isn't exactly new or bad for pro-level competitors, but smaller rosters give more incentive to become skilled with a larger section of the cast, making tournaments more enjoyable for spectators to both watch and participate in for the hope of a counterpick overcoming impossible odds. The best we really got with SF4 was this, which is honestly pretty great, but this is about as rare as finding a turtle that shits out solid gold ingots on your front porch.

On a more fundamental level, SF4 had a real problem with movement. Dashing was slow and didn't cover very much ground, and matches tended to feel like a crawl going from previous Street Fighters to this. I personally cannot stand it, but I give SF4 a pass here. The reason here is purely speculative, but after reading an interview with the Soul Caliber people a few years ago about how they slowed down SCV's gameplay to accommodate for the advent of network play, I got the feeling that Ono and the teams at Capcom and Dimps did the same for SF4. Since arcades weren't exactly common around the world at that point and online play did much to rebuild the FGC, I call that a hell of a net positive. Still, as a Third Strike player, I can't help but feel as though SF4 moves like two people throwing rocks at each other in a fish tank, which is certainly not for me.

Here is the great offender, though:

At around 2:30 in this video, legendary Street Fighter player Daigo Umehara demonstrates the absolute gulf between those of casual, and even competitive interest, and the very, very small population that will play this game at the top level. Go to any Street Fighter IV tournament video on the internet, and you'll find something roughly similar: a string for normal and special moves broken up by the occasional dash cancel. To the layman, it's just a guy hitting buttons. To the trained eye, it's ridiculous in its timing and stupid in execution. It is the 1-frame link.

1F link combos aren't exclusive to Street Fighter IV by any means, but they are as common in upper-tiered play as a low forward to a fireball in every fighting game in two dimensions. It's the process of attacking an opponent, and then quickly throwing out another attack that will connect before the opponent's animation resets from its hit stun. It's 1000% more difficult in execution than it is in explanation. Being so rife with them, SF4 players studied less of the fundamentals of spacing and gameplay to rifling through spread sheets of frame data to see what move connected to what.

Worse, this practice of overworking led to diminished returns in use. SF4 has insane damage scaling, which is the the game's way of making each subsequent move in a combo do less damage than it normally would outside of a combo. Basically, it means that if I hit you with three hard moves in a row, you won't be down to 50% of your health. SF4 took this to something of a hilarious extreme in the wake of this 1F link nonsense. That Daigo combo up there? Check out how much damage it actually does. In most Street Fighter games --including the newly released Street Fighter V-- one could logically do the same amount of punishment in a jumping hard punch, a low hard punch, and then a dragon punch. A lot less work for the same result. In that respect, I never wanted to put in the work it takes to do these goofball string combos. I never felt the need to.

So, Street Fighter IV, you're a swell game, but you're a swell game that needs to take a break from the spotlight, and I'm glad we have a new Street Fighter to take your place. I realize that this is all just my personal beef with what amounts to a very good videogame, but that's why this is my blog and not yours. So there.

The Good It's Done

From the perspective of a good eight years, it looks like Street Fighter IV and its children were monumental successes from the jump, and this is mostly true. Though sales for each subsequent upgrade and physical re-release couldn't have stayed steady, it's ubiquity in the fighting game space has lasted almost as long as as Street Fighter II --though without coming close to matching its monetary glory.

But that's ok, really. Success isn't always measured in dollars and cents, even in the rapidly changing development landscape and risk-averse console generation that Street Fighter IV found itself in. Yes, it did pretty well at the market --one source says roughly 8 million units by the end of it's string of releases-- but it wasn't one of the mega hits of the last ten years like singular released such as Halo 3 or Super Mario Galaxy.

I believe that this kind of monetary thinking is defeatist compared to the good that Street Fighter IV has done. Now that we're on the threshold of Street Fighter V's release, I think it's a fair time to assess IV's importance, because "important" is exactly what it is.

As I said last week, Street Fighter IV was designed specifically to appeal to an older, returning audience, so I don't really see the point in reiterating that here. What is worth mentioning was it's development and the embryonic period of its growth. It's now a well-publicized story that producer Yoshinori Ono had been working for Capcom since Third Strike (he was a sound designer) and wanted to make a new numbered game in the series for quite a while, which had been shut down by his superiors time and again. Capcom, a company known for taking a concept and drilling into the ground like a Seth McFarlane gag, had seemed to have bled as much money as it possibly could from the Street Fighter franchise. The PlayStation 2 era was basically keeping it in hospice as the publisher was content to release Anniversary compilations and quick cash-ins like Capcom Fighting Jam. The former did ok, trading more on nostalgia than innovation. The latter did lousy. Nobody wanted to play it, and now it's a laughing stock.

When taken collectively, though, there was a lesson here in these two releases in what the market could bear and who was buying. By the time the Xbox 360 was released, online play and an ephemeral downloadeable marketplace had become a viable concern, and one that the old guard like Capcom took notice of relatively early. 2006, then, is the year that Street Fighter punk broke. Whether it was a way of testing the waters with online infrastructure or to just cash in and bankroll another game in the newly-super expensive HD era, a port of Street Fighter II Turbo Hyper Fighting had made its way to XBLA. It's release, in hindsight, has become almost hilariously important to the landscape of fighting games.

The reason why, in short, is that it caused a seismic chain reaction of events outside of the scope of this particular writing, and this is something that I'll cover some day. What's ultimately worth mentioning are twofold: A) it had online match support, although this wasn't brand new for fighting games or even Capcom (the Anniversary's Third Strike port for the original Xbox could connect to the internet, as could a few Japan-only Dreamcast games) and B) it sold better than the company's expectations; much better, apparently. But, because this is the video game industry, there was a certain level of uproar. The online component of the game was its biggest criticism, and any review that you might look up from the time straddles the line between "hey, this is still a good game with bad connectivity," to "they should have never released it in this state." Still, in a single, inexpensive release of an old game, it reiterated to Capcom what Street Fighter Anniversary Collection and Capcom Fighting Jam had already told them: people are willing to pay for old, well-made games, and almost as importantly, they wanted these old games online.

Two games were quickly placed into development around this time. The first was Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, lead by longtime fighting game tournament player David Sirlin and his team at Backbone Entertainment, and the Ono-produced Street Fighter IV for Japanese arcades and home consoles. Both were released in 2008, though the console versions of SFIV didn't arrive until early 2009.

As companion pieces for each other, it was clear that those hard-earned lessons learned in the PS2 era were becoming axiom. HD Remix broke records for day-one downloads, and acted as the perfect appetizer for SFIV's eventual home release a few months later where it quickly became a million-seller. Again, like the releases of the PS2 era, both traded on nostalgia mixed with refinement. But for any number of reasons --new systems, a larger cast, nicer graphics, whatever-- Street Fighter IV had longer legs, its release igniting the real renaissance in for the genre. Licensed products featuring the game and its cast were finding their way back to the shelves, and gaming sites were featuring match videos and interviews with creators with increased frequency. A new numbered Street Fighter was a big deal again, something it hadn't been since the late 90s.

I don't know how long Street Fighter IV was in development, but we can assume at least two years, getting the game past the proposal stage around the latter end of 2006 (close enough after SFII Turbo XBLA launched). That's about a year after the launch of YouTube, and roughly close to the launch of GGPO, two mutual monumental steps for both fighting games and videogames as a whole. With the latter, stable online fighting games were now possible with some clever latency masking. Though it wasn't as widely adopted by companies like Capcom, it was a clear step in the right direction to build a fighting game's netcode, and had to be noticed. The former, well, you know. SFIV's release a few years later was the absolute perfect timing for an ultra-competitive throwback genre to re-enter the mainstream. Online tournaments matches for training and glory were now a nightly ritual for even casual fans. Tournaments large and small were now being archived on the internet for people to study like playback tape at a high school football practice. Tournaments themselves went from tiny grassroots gatherings set up on forums to big, consistent business in terms of attendance and prize money.

The sum of these parts is that Street Fighter was doing what it did best in its 90s heyday: people were coming together again. Whether it was for competition or camaraderie, players could meet, play, argue, and learn from each other, and had further tools to do so on their own. This is Street Fighter IV's greatest legacy. Now that we're on the precipice of a new numbered Street Fighter in a few days --again, a big deal-- it was worth pointing it out, if only briefly.

A Thing of Beauty

On Saturdays, I like to do what's become known in my house as "long cardio day." This means that I go to the gym and run on the treadmill like the boring 30-something that I am and then, and then, do another 30 minutes on the elliptical machine. 60 minutes of cardio! That's long, man!

But life, as it does, is starting to wag its finger in my face about that. Minor and subtle aches creep into my legs more often than they used to these days, which is something I once thought was major problem and is now just one of those normal things you accept. I used to think that I was an 80 year-old guy trapped in 28 year-old's body. Now, I'm just some dude.

Whenever I actually stop to give these little pains some real thought --which, kind of never happens, I guess-- I'm always reminded of my time in college training in Kyokushin karate. Mostly, I'm reminded of how often I would come home from practice with my bell rung because I never kept my hands up during fights with one of the Japanese students (whom were goddamn Kyokushin wizards). "Minor aches and pains" were often sore shins and bruised chest muscles from taking a few training beatings. We're talking 2000-2002 here, which means that MMA was still very much a niche thing, and it wasn't as easy to find a gym that taught hard-contact fighting as it might be today. Dumb-lucking into it on my own college campus at such a time was kind of spectacular. I stopped training in martial arts after I graduated from college because I was broke and couldn't find a suitable Kyokushin replacement in the Cleveland area (though it was the broke thing, mostly), but these are times I remember fondly; ass beatings notwithstanding.

Ok, then. Look at this. I mean, really, skip to the 54 second mark of this video and gaze upon this poetic thing of beauty:

Really quick, I'm not a violent guy. I'm very even-tempered, and my full time job requires that I maintain that kind of disposition. But, man, this combo. This is a pre-programmed chain (the Street Fighter games call them "target combos" now) that originated in Tekken 4. No, I don't mean the dumb uppercut/ sidekick thing at the end, I mean the four kicks and punches that came in such a succinct and brutal manner beforehand. Tekken 4, in all honesty, is a piece of shit in Tekken terms, but this combo is not. From a fighter's perspective, it looks like it was made in a laboratory full of mad Kyokushin geniuses. In a stand-up fight in a ring, these four hits, aligned in such an economical symphony of body movement, is at once startlingly efficient in its systemic ways of butchering an opponent as it is fluid in its seemingly simple mechanics. I can't not talk about this combo.

Piece-of-Shit-Tekken 4 came out at a time in my Kyokushin training when we were taking a break from learning the often useless perfunctory of katas so we could focus on why most of us were in the class: to train for and compete in tournaments. What makes it unique compared to its far superior predecessor, if only to two or three males in Bowling Green, OH at the turn of the millennium, was its copious inclusion of Kyokushin tidbits. From an attract mode kata to story mode implications to combos like this one, the ghost of Oyama's style looms heavily over the game, and it was impossible for someone training in the form to miss it. Naturally, we even tried to replicate what we were playing while sparring, at least as best we could. In the game, the combo in question isn't entirely useful compared to other ways of closing the distance and finishing someone off. IRL, though. if I can get off that first kick to your head, even blocked, then you would remember it. It is as gorgeous and perfect as the Spring sun upon a flowered meadow. I swear to God I'm not joking about this.

So let's break it down, movement by movement. It certainly looks simple enough to perform, and it's relatively short length is deceptive in the damage that it would deal to a human body, but that's part of the beauty. The reality, here, is that these are all pinpointed movements to shorten the space between you and the target before quickly attacking individual locations on the body to cripple them and end the fight.

It starts before the high round kick with the left leg to the head. In the video, right-handed Kazuya deftly switches his stance to the left while inching forward (or "kosa," and if he were rounding the side of the opponent subtly to do it --which would have only made to make this combo that much fucking crazier-- it would have been a "sabaki" movement). This looks like he's just taking a step forward with his right leg (and, in a way, it is), but this takes planning and forethought in a real fight to dope an opponent into letting their guard down to pull it off. From here, the kick comes to the side of the head, as roundhouse kicks are meant to do, but isn't intent on going through the target as roundhouse kicks normally should. While certainly designed to hurt, the kosa movement and then kick scoots Kazuya forward for one of two mutually useful effects: either it hits the guy in the head to daze them, or gets their hands up to block the kick. The payoff of the latter will come soon.

It's here that we need to take a quick second and swoon like the child I am at Kazuya's form with this kick, because that leads us into the next movement. Like most Japanese fighters, the mechanics of his round kick form a motion that resembles a person running: left foot forward/ left hand back/ right foot back/ right hand forward. This is intentionally taught, because to get this seemingly easy concept down in execution takes a substantial amount of practice. And for good reason, too, because if you're doing it right, you'll obtain the maximum amount of force for the kick. But we just discussed that force wasn't the point of this particular attack, though it would certainly be handy here.

Now the left hand comes as the left leg returns to the floor. However, Kazuya didn't wheel his hip backward after his left kick like most people would after the connection. Instead, he drops his foot to the ground after the strike snaps to use it as his final movement forward so as to ease into the range of the left punch, which was already in the chamber. Though it's just a guy kicking and then punching, doing both from one side of the body in succession is something of a counter-intuitive movement without having practiced it extensively. But carefully looking at how Kazuya pulls it off makes it deceptively seamless. The reality of it is simple body mechanics, like the rest of the combo: as his hips are turned for the kick, placing the foot down and forward after the strike readies the already-cocked left arm for quick release.

Most novice or intermediate opponents probably know that this isn't a common movement, this punch off of the kicking leg's side, and indeed it subverts the typical left/right/left/right techniques that are common to a student's early training. It's actually hard to notice without slowing down the video or pausing at the right moment, but the eventual punch goes slightly downward into the collarbone or top of the chest, implying that this wasn't meant to be the real breadwinner of these four movements, either (although the dummy in the video is just bending backward for effect). But imagine this combo like a four syllable word or phrase, and where the emphasis is placed is a decision for the speaker. One could really get some force out of that punch, but judging by what you see from next two moves that follow, it doesn't feel totally necessary.

For that, we're going back to basic body mechanics. With clever movement, Kazuya is now re-positioned back to his original right-handed stance. This happened concurrent with the punch, which readies his hips with ample amounts of torque for the back right leg to throw a devastating low round kick. This is a somewhat short ranged move that the first two attacks placed Kazuya in perfect range for. In the gym, the kick would strike on the side (or top) of the opponent's thigh, with the point of impact being the bottom of Kazuya's shin --something harder than the fragile arch of his foot-- into the meat of the leg. But that's the nice guy way of doing things. In a combat situation where Kazuya's life might depend on it, he would nail the other schmuck on the side of the knee to try to blow out the joint which, if it connects, is about as cruel as it sounds. Even if that's not the case, a full-speed kick like this to the quad is a real bruiser, even if it's not the most common way of turning someone's lights out like a roundhouse to the back of the head might be. The low kick snaps back to ready Kazuya's hips for the final blow.

Now, if you grew up watching martial arts movies as a kid, you easily condition yourself into thinking that real hand-to-hand fighting has a secret vocabulary of enchanted movements. When it comes to actual training, though, this gets demystified for you pretty quickly once you get passed learning specific techniques and logistical movement. From there, it's just practice, practice, practice until you get your body able to do things that opponents flat out don't see coming or can't react to. Basically, once you move out of the newbie stage, there aren't any secrets anymore.

Except one.

I'm writing this on a Monday. Before I had my kid, Mondays were often the day of the week that meant an apology note should be sent to my liver. Maybe even a large, though tasteful, bouquet of flowers. I would do terrible things to my liver on the weekends, and if I were still training in Kyokushin, Mondays are the days that I would pay for them the worst. The liver, you see, is located on the front right side of the body just outside of the abdominal region, but not quite to your profile. It is soft, and easy to target. It will also make a grown man crumple to his knees when given the right kind of shot, and it's a shot that takes even less effort depending on how much this grown man drinks. The liver is the great, mythic hot spot in a martial art that doesn't typically allow punches to the face during open tournaments; it can do the most amount of real punishment with comparatively minimal effort in terms of energy consumption (round kicks to the face, unsurprisingly, take a lot out of you). At the risk of sounding even more meatheaded than the rest of this blog already has, one good smack to the liver hurts like a motherfucker. It's the best.

A good left hook would do it, and our buddy Kazuya had built the previous three movements to carefully worm his way there. Though painful, the first two attacks set up a perfect sleight-of-hand misdirection to take the opponent's defense away from the tender right side of their body: a blocked high round kick gets the arm up, which will try to defend the left straight punch, which wouldn't even see the fast low round kick coming at that range (which is gravy here), opening up to a perfect drill to the chops. Conversely, if the first kick really lands, the subsequent techniques would render a body limp enough that no kind of arm flailing would sufficiently block that last hit. The opponent crumples in a heap before him, and this fight's over. After taking my share of liver punches, I can tell you with perfect confidence that this is the natural conclusion.

I cannot stress enough how difficult it can be to make your body do these things with this kind of fluidity. But after a certain amount of practice and a little bit of forethought, it's an amazingly economical way of beating the snot out of someone. It's a stone cold beating with absolutely zero wasted movement. Each technique is at the ready even during the first step, and it simply needs the correct speed and follow-through to put someone on the floor. I could never get all four shots off at the speed in which video game Kazuya pulls it off, but it was good enough for me to try, and strangely spectacular to have video game Kazuya show me the way. The Japanese guys in class eventually sniffed it out and nailed me for it. But like I said, those guys were Kyokushin maestros anyway.

Curiously, further Tekken games would alter this perfect sonnet of human movement to make it less realistic; the final blow blasting an opponent backward like they were being pushed out of a helicopter. Judging by how this combo video follows up the movement with the (dumb) uppercut/ sidekick connection, it seem like that was probably the most balanced way of handling things with the total amount of damage that it can incur. But that's just video games. This is a perfect combo.

I'd like to clarify something I said yesterday.

I realized not long after I wrote a nice chunk about Street Fighter IV that I implied that the game is bad. I'm not sure I want that to be the case in your head, but there has certainly been a trajectory to my opinion on the game:

1. This is new and good!
2. This is the fighting game norm
3. This has helped me make new friends
4. This is slow and plodding
5. This isn't what I want

Now, this still seems like I'm being overly harsh, but that isn't the case. In fact, I'm something of a proponent of the game even though I don't ever want to play it again. It's brutally obvious to anyone that reads this that, to me, the fighting game sun rises and sets with Street Fighter III Third Strike, and it would take both a similar masterpiece of a game and the time that I used to have to dump into it for me to be so in love with anything else. The cruel realities of both business and adulthood are against me on that one.

Maybe one of these days I'll write something about all of the good that's come from Street Fighter IV and its many upgrades, but I feel it's more important at this point to qualify yesterday's statements. I'm pretty sure you got that I was using Dhalsim as a metaphor for both fighting game development and the health of the current gaming industry (if only the large developer/ publisher side). But if you didn't, there you go, I guess. Street Fighter IV isn't really that far removed from what we're seeing currently with the new Star Wars movie; it's what you love intimately about the old ones, but with a few new characters and a couple of slight twists. During the previous console generation, things were awfully lean for companies that were swimming in money from the generation before it, and market-tested surefire hits were more the creeping norm than a sense of innovative adventure. Street Fighter IV is a clear product of that, though to its credit, it evolved into something much grander over time.

Comparing that to the Street Fighter III games as I did, which were almost a full reboot from a character and mechanical perspective (though, again, many of those character archetypes still exist), was meant to drive the point home. Maybe it also perpetuated a feeling that SF3 is better than SF4. Well, I guess personal biases creep in sometimes no matter what. Whatever. You're smart people. I think you get it.

Let's Meet Dhalsim

This is Dhalsim.

Meet him. Shake his hand. Study his movements and question his methods. He's sort of new around here, after all.

Ok, of course you know who Dhalsim is. He's a mainstay of the Street Fighter series; a perennial fixture of the roster lineup, and the Patient 0 of what has collectively come to be known as "zoning gameplay." Dhalsim is as new around video games as Sonic the Hedgehog.

But in about three weeks, Dhalsim won't be the yogi you know, and this is both as profound as it is assuring for the direction that both fighting games and maybe gaming as a whole will go.

They say that all successful sequels are the sum of the following equation: 80% old + 20% new. Street Fighter IV, the 2008 sequel that dragged the head-to-head fighting genre into a new found renaissance, practically had this tattooed on its metaphoric neck. Of the 25 playable characters (in the eventual home release in 2009), 19 were from previous games in the vast Street Fighter series, and of those, 15 were lifted straight from Super Street Fighter II Turbo, the final iteration of the seminal 1991 title. Of these 25, 10 were all derivations of the basic "Ryu concept:" that is a character that can throw a projectile to bait an opponent into a jump, and then counter that jump with upward attack (like a Shoryuken or a Somersault/ Flash Kick). Street Fighter IV was a game with new mechanics that was fashioned to play comfortably with old ones, and your nostalgia was the primary selling point. It was a game meant for you to comfortably slip into that old t-shirt, and maybe add another layer on top for fashionable effect. By design, you already knew how to play Street Fighter IV.

By design, then, that will not be Street Fighter V. Sort of. We'll get to that, though.

Comparing sequels to Street Fighter II is like comparing sequels to Ridley Scott's Alien. On the one hand, they are competently-made science fiction films in that they all share the same conceit that whatever is happening, and it is happening to (and around) a woman named Ellen Ripley in some distant future. In practice, it is a horror movie followed by an action movie followed by a suspense movie followed by gobbledygook. Much like Street Fighter II, the first Alien movie was not the first movie of its kind, but it was a masterpiece of synthesizing what inspired it. Sure, there were probably other haunted house movies in outer space, but this was the haunted house movie in outer space, and all sci-fi horror flicks will be measured against it until I am cold and in the ground. 1997's Street Fighter III and the updates that followed it took these elements and altered them in a way that broke how fighting on a 2-dimensional plane is played. The fighting was more tactical and measured, and precise play was rewarded with easy wins. It's not a 1:1 comparison, but like Alien to Aliens, Street Fighter III took the foundation of its predecessor and rejiggered it into a superb video game (at least, by the time they got to Third Strike). Again, like your preferences in sci-fi film franchises, your palate can appreciate the tastes of both of these meals, but whichever you might consider "best" is up to the person whom experiences it.

In that respect, it's good, then, that each fully numbered Street Fighter game is different than the last. Variety's the spice of life, you know. Not so dramatically different as, say Final Fantasy XII to XIII, but comparing Third Strike to Ultra Street Fighter IV is certainly more than apples to apples. However, now that we have a little bit of history behind us and the release of the various "true" sequels, it's important to note these games' problems, especially in regard to our new old friend Dhalsim.

The first is re-acknowledge how fundamentally close Street Fighter IV is compared to Street Fighter II, which we're going to go ahead and cite as a major symptom of a gaming industry problem. Yes, SF4 has it's own complex system that players need to have complete mastery of to play at a tournament strength, and high level matches are littered with attack links that require stupid timing to perform (and absurdly stupid amounts of practice to perform reliably). Yet, at its most base level, it's the same game as Super Turbo with a few added layers to the onion: jump in to attack, hit an opponent with a low normal, and then chain it into a fireball. Not a flashy, high damage combo, but the Old Faithful of fighting game mojo that even a novice can perform rote. But again, this was the plan, and for good reason; fighting games had gone underground in the years between 1999's Third Strike and SF4's release almost ten years later, and the video game world had changed rather dramatically. Development costs for HD consoles had such a well-publicized spike that the middle class, B-tier developers of the world were fading away, and every large publisher of yesteryear were hemorrhaging money from one big budget flop to the next. Even though Street Fighter IV was comparatively modest in its development cost beside other Capcom games of the time like Lost Planet and Dark Void, it needed to be a hit for the publisher so it could be distanced from games like those specifically for their costly thud of a critical and commercial reception. SF4 needed to appeal to the old fan and the new.

Dhalsim, then, fit into this mold like that old t-shirt. His presence was easily recognized by old timers, and his inclusion in the game made him a dramatic shift away from the rest of the cast. He played like always had, though. Fireballs from across the screen used to dope foes into defending while he teleported behind them. Stretchy limbs could keep frustrated opponents at a literal arm's reach at mid-screen. Closer confrontations were handled by a signature Yoga Flame. This is how you could play 'ol Sim in Super Turbo, and once you got used to the movement in SFIV, this is how you could play Sim there, too. It was reliable. It was safe. It was boring. It was the norm of a console generation made manifest.

Street Fighter III was made at a different time with a different staff using different money that was, comparatively, flowing like a river, and our buddy Sim was there, too. Of course, it really wasn't the Dhalsim that we knew and loved, but that's just how SF3 was initially concocted: include Ryu and Ken, and then let's bake this whole thing fresh. But Capcom were already in too deep. They had created the archetypes for this whole fighting game thing, and they did too good of a job. Even if they started completely from scratch without a Ken and Ryu (which, depending on what you believe, was originally in the cards), most characters would hew pretty closely to what had already come before. Sure, Capcom's rivals and contemporaries were making new and interesting characters for their fighting games in terms of play style and mechanics (just look at the mess of characters in the King of Fighters series), but even most of those fall into a few loosely-defined roles that they themselves had created. Just to make it tougher on themselves, they were doing it with a game that fundamentally made "zoning" characters like Sim obsolete: the Street Fighter III series let you swat away attacks, making the risk of jumping over a fireball shot at you from across the screen much lower for an average player and practically non-existent for a pro.

So, while the SF3 games created a handful of players that were wholly unique like Makoto and Oro, it was crowd of reasonable facsimiles of older, better-established characters. Our man Dhalsim, then, was right there in front of you. He just had a new paint job and some reshuffled moves. Oh, and his name was Necro. But that was the beauty of it --Necro was a guy with just about all of Sim's normal attacks (or at least, the majority of the ones you'll recognize) coupled with none of the special moves. No fireballs. No teleports. No goddamn Yoga Flames. All of a sudden, these long limbs don't mean as much as getting inside for spinning punch combos and maybe a Magnetic Story super Hail Mary. Corner juggles were more the norm than distance setups and subterfuge. Necro was Dhalsim, but not Dhalsim. And at this point, not enough people really gave a damn.

Street Fighter III and its updates did fine for Capcom, but they didn't set the world aflame like its predecessors and the various spin offs had. Too little, too late, people cried. The 32-bit era was firmly upon us at home, and we could play our Tekkens and Virtua Fighters without dumping quarters into a "backward thinking" sprite-based 2D game like Street Fighter III. A new generation had looked upon a New Generation and shrugged. Besides, these weren't the characters that we fell in love with, so why bother, right? It was challenging and beautiful and fluid, but even as a Triple-A game of its time, it was just a little too left of center.

So Dhalsim languished. And then he perceived.

On paper (if this is paper), it's reasonable to say on a very base level that Street Fighter V's Dhalsim will be the best Dhalsim of three worlds; or, at least three distinct generations of Street Fighter games. I personally haven't used him in the betas, and we're still a few weeks away from the game's official release, so I can't really tell you for sure. But what a little more navel-gazing can tell us is that this is gross oversimplification. Street Fighter as a series has finally come to terms with its audience, and as a series, come to terms with its market.

This begins and ends with Dhalsim. Yes, he will play roughly similar to his older versions, but subtle adjustments to some of his fundamental attacks evolve him into a different character. Fireballs will now travel in an upward arc toward the opponent, and only by burning precious EX meter will they move horizontally across the screen. This sounds simple, but will be a drastic reeducation for older Sim players. Simple floating options will alter his movement, not unlike Oro from Street Fighter III, throwing off the timing of a defending player or one on the attack as he sails over projectiles beneath him. But he is not Necro. This Sim will still keep his opponents at a distance, and on their toes with misdirection that is classic to the character.

The roster for Street Fighter V small, all things considered. But it is this consideration that makes this new Sim, and every other character present, so measured and well-thought. Gone are the sea of "shoto clones" where now only Ryu and Ken exist. And between the two of them, the gulf between abilities is so much more pronounced that it's highly illogical to play them similarly. Each character, from new to old, fits a specific, purposeful niche, and though each character has their own specific mechanic tied their V-Skill. Most of these are pulled from various Street Fighter games of years past, giving older players something to easily tinker with and new players something to easily learn.

But the characters themselves are what's most telling, and what's most affirming. Though there are only four new characters in the game, each returning character have noticeable changes. Some are less subtle: Cammy isn't as far removed from her life in Street Fighter IV as Ken is. But that's ok. There are more alterations than not, and that suggests a level of trust that Capcom has had in its audience and development staff than it has for a long time. It suggests that, even though you know and love these folks from different games from across the vast Street Fighter-verse, you will be fine with re-learning this new game, character by character. It's a Capcom that learned its lesson from the rebellious Street Fighter III adolescence, but still has significantly retooled characters that a player that may yet recognize.

This is a good sign for fighting games as much as it's a good sign for the larger gaming spectrum. Like the games industry of 2008, the industry of 2016 is evolved and nuanced. It took Sony to bankroll SFV, after all, and this is turning into more of a necessary evil than people seem to be comfortable with. But that's a different discussion. What we're seeing are games that push its audience, like the SFV roster will do. Games that will push technology, content delivery, and DLC options, like SFV will do. Games that welcome community, and player sharing, and competition like SFV will do. All of these are healthy. All of these are necessary.

So. Say hello again to Dhalsim. Learn things from him. Buddy-punch his shoulder like the old friend that he is. He's an important guy.