What's Your Favorite Fighting Game of All-Time?
COMMUNITY QUESTION | Let's celebrate Evo 2019 by talking about our favorite fighting games.
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This week felt simultaneously very long but also very short. But it's the weekend now, and with more Fire Emblem: Three Houses occupying our time, we're greeting the free time with open arms.
It's also Evo 2019 this weekend, with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate leading the pack. We'll be tuning in all weekend long in the off chance of some news appearing. (And for Tekken 7, which is sure to be a blast this year.) Evo 2019 is also the theme for this week's Community Question: What's your favorite fighting game of all-time? Tell us in the comments!
Eric Van Allen, News Editor
Picking a favorite fighting game is like picking a favorite child, but in my heart, I always come back to Soulcalibur 2. I forget how I first started playing it, but Soulcalibur was a deep dive for me at a young age on the GameCube. It was the game that opened me up to fighting games; I had played the occasional round of Street Fighter 2 or Budokai, but Soulcalibur 2 opened my eyes to what was possible in fighting games.
It's ironic that a game with strictly less challenging inputs and combos than other fighting games from Capcom, SNK, or the anime developers was what made it click. But Soulcalibur 2 was the game that demanded patience, smart choices, a balanced approach, and calculated gambles. I learned how to play neutral before I knew what neutral was. I'll always have a special spot in my heart for late-night Soulcalibur 2 team battles.
Nadia Oxford, Staff Writer
The peak of my fighting game fandom is long behind me, but I'm still very fond of a few retro fighting game titles. I've always been a Street Fighter person—not someone who's any good at the games, mind you, just someone who loves the lore and characters. I'll always have a weakness for Street Fighter Alpha 3, which I spent the better part of a summer playing in the arcade (I worked in an amusement park that summer and had access to free tokens) and on the excellent PlayStation home port. The graphics, music, and character roster all just came together perfectly, plus it debuted one of my favorite characters: Punk-ass Prison Cody. I'm glad he's the mayor of Metro City now. Proves he was a good boy all along. (Ha ha.)
Caty McCarthy, Features Editor
My favorite fighting game is more recent, at least relatively so. I really love Lab Zero Games' Skullgirls, because it's the first legit fighting game, and the only, that I seriously got into.
I like Skullgirls because while it's deep beneath the surface, it has an excellent tutorial mode that not only taught me how to play Skullgirls itself, but how to understand fighting games as a whole. Plus, it has one of the best art styles out there in terms of fighters. While I'm sad a Skullgirls 2 probably isn't happening anytime soon with the studio's next game Indivisible on the horizon, at least the original is available on virtually every platform out there.