Removing Motion Inputs Will Kill Cool Characters In Fighting Games

This week's flavor of discourse in the fighting games seems to revolve around a bizarre trend of trying to remove motion inputs from fighting games. If you're out of the loop, a motion input is simply a combination of directions on your stick to do special moves. Ryu's Hadoken, the template for all fighting game fireballs, is down, then forward (also known as a quarter circle forward or 236 in more modern conversations).

Now look, I get the reasoning for why they'd do this. Fighting games have been chasing new blood for years now, eager to get the same kind of appeal games like Valorant or League of Legends get instead of someone seeing an arcade stick and looking like they'd just been given the controls of a spaceship for mantis shrimp.

But that chasing of casual audiences seems to be yielding mixed effects- on one hand, you get pretty smart inventions like Street Fighter 6's Modern controls, and on the other you get games like Invincible VS and 2XKO just feeling like they're missing that oomph because you're doing Marvel combos with Smash controls.

Motion Inputs, Gumbo And This Behemoth Typhoon

I don't want to say something overly dramatic like "Motion inputs are a core part of fighting game identity" but they're definitely the cayenne to its gumbo. Basically, a future without motion inputs is going to have the most boring roster ever simply because the amount of ways you can express a character are different.

Like, we don't have to talk about how the DP input is everyone's first execution barrier. But once they need to conform their playstyles to tilt inputs, you lose out on some real freaks and weirdos, the kind that keep people hooked on your game for years.

I mean, look at Urien from 3rd Strike or Venom in Guilty Gear. At the forefront of the input apocalypse, charge characters will be first to go, and these two are the magnificent elephants on the Serengeti. These are characters who aren't just hard- they're actively hostile to players, having their best gameplay locked behind extremely difficult controls.

In Urien's case, he's become the face of Charge Partitioning– needing you to somehow precisely split up a charge input to do his iconic Aegis Reflector setups. In Venom's case, his moves are so precise with respect to his ball setups that using his charge moves is a hard commitment- locking down your opponent with moves like Carcass Raid or Stinger and the ensuing physics-based aftermath is something you just wouldn't enjoy as much if they weren't also hard to do.

Motion inputs give characters that extra dimension of personality. To this day, I'll always remember Kagura Mutsuki as "the guy with an up charge input" because of the amount of times I've directly lost to it. It makes characters harder to play, yes, but it makes them that much more satisfying to fall in love with.

The point is that motion inputs are a part of a character's identity, and the argument to remove them assumes that the actual feeling of learning a character isn't part of that experience.

No one exemplifies this better than Goldlewis Dickinson from Guilty Gear Strive- his defining trait is Behemoth Typhoon- a series of special moves that require you to be able to string multiple half-circles in different directions. He's insanely difficult for beginners but once you get the hang of it? He's the kind of character you get hooked on.

In contrast, a game without motion inputs doesn't seem to benefit roster diversity in anyways. Outside of making a move do many things, you'll start to see just how quickly you run out of unique characters if they're all built for 4 cardinal directions and a special button.

It helps streamline gameplay, sure. It might even encourage people to check out more characters once they feel like it. But freak picks are what give entire games their identity, and making a character a freak because of how they handle is so much more interesting than tying it to simple stats or frame data.

Not Just Boomer Whinging About Motion Inputs

It's easy to see a lot of this as boomer whinging. After all, even Danger Time can be redeemed, as long as there's a new Guilty Gear game to complain about after it. To this day many anime players haven't really forgiven Guilty Gear Strive for not being Xrd Rev 3, and see its simplifications as just as egregious as a future without motion inputs.

I don't think all simplification is inherently bad- Like I said at the top of this Modern Controls in Street Fighter 6 practically makes new characters altogether, but still rewarding execution by letting you actually learn the inputs. I also think things like the update to add a macro for Drive Rush Cancel is an inherently good thing.

Granblue Fantasy VS Rising also does this really well- both options are just available to every character at the same time, meaning at all times you have both a one-button DP and an input DP for when you need speed vs damage (the versions have their own benefits).

But when it comes to the new wave of fighting games being released, there's definitely a fear that too much might be lost in pursuit of something that doesn't necessarily exist. I think when it comes to games like 2XKO or Invincible VS, the people who wanted to play that game would have done so no matter how it controls. And while you may not feel it now, once you start seeing more characters you're eventually going to see just how limiting it can be to make a character when their entire kit is given all the input complexity of Captain Falcon.