this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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I call bullshit on fighting games and frame data.
I remember ages ago when SF4 happened I was friends with a pretty solid tournament competitor and talking about this he mentioned that frame counting is for nerds because the only thing you need to know is if you can push a button or not and that happens from intuition, which is true. At least it's true in a good game that has good animation. I've always had a kick of beating sweaties with their "this is minus three" obsession by having solid fundamentals. Some of them got pretty annoyed.
And to this day I will claim that Dragon Ball FighterZ is the best fighting game of the last decade specifically because a) every basic combo route is built out of repeatable, simplistic, easy to remember chunks, and b) you can mash the CRAP out of 90% of that game's links and they work perfectly fine unless you're trying to do a rejump or time an assist extension.
I will die on this hill, except I won't because I'm right. I will survive on this hill. Make a little cottage on it and play fighting games inside it.
That hasn't been my experience at all. Knowing the difference between what's plus, what's minus, and what's block punishable is super important. Knowing if I can set up a frame trap is huge, and it works specifically because it isn't always intuitive. In Tekken especially you need to know your frames for block punishes, when you can sidestep, and what options your opponent has in a given situation.
It's not always mandatory, but it's always useful.
It is super important, but it's not a timing problem, it's a knowledge check.
The thing you want to know is whether you can buffer a button during your recovery and get it off before the other guy. If you can, the timing is often very loose, you mash on that thing and you probably get your punish out frame 1.
And if the game is good you don't learn it by spending a ton of time with a wiki or even with the training mode, you learn it by playing the game and looking at the animations.
If you are a bad game, like the first few Tekkens (yeah, I said it), then you won't get that from the animation, but you can still learn it by trial and error. And crucially, once you learn it it's always the same. In most decent games with consistent base mechanics, anyway.
So no, you shouldn't have to learn whether your jab is four or five frames. That's how the game is put together, but it should be good enough at communicating how fast your button came out that you can intuit when it's safe or effective to put it out after blocking. At least after you try it once.
There are a ton of fighting games that are still grandfathered into the notion of putting complexity in this part of the design. You know, the ones where your fastest attack is different per character so you need to know this particular guy's fastest opener is a crouching medium kick, but only when you're close enough or whatever. I'd argue those games are less elegant without adding anything to the skill ceiling when compared to newer games like my previous DBFZ example, where everybody's jab is probably the same speed and the basic flowchart of what to do after you block an attack doesn't require a textbook and complementary materials.