Why Choosing Chance In Fighting Games Is A Huge Choice

Last week, publisher GameMill Entertainment unveiled Nickelodeon Star Brawl, a fighting game starring iconic Nickelodeon characters like SpongeBob SquarePants, Nigel Thornberry, and that dude with the toast-shaped face. Between the memes, you might see potential players debating who would be the strongest fighter (Patrick Star, obviously) and who they plan to keep (also Patrick Star), even so far away from the exit. I say that such a debate is unnecessary.

The correct answer is no answer at all.

Read more: Nickelodeon Fighting Game Developers Have High Hopes And Competitive Dreams

Star Brawl sounds and looks like a legitimate To break clone, a with potentially better online features than Nintendo’s fighting game. If you are playing as a randomly selected player All stars character, face someone who fights as the “principal” – that is, the person they are most used to playing with – you have instantly become used to the loss. Random Choice also telegraphs a level of assurance that only players who really know their shit.

Of course, you could technically “lose” a particular match after choosing a fighter at random, but you can still attribute that loss to an unbalanced match. Perhaps the whimsical whims of fate assign you a fighter whom you have mastered. More likely, they’ve got you stuck with a player that you don’t know at all or that you’ve never played before. Come on, how is that a balanced measure of competence? The game was an uneven playing field; the scales have been tilted against you since the jump.

Meanwhile, winning means you can say you have achieved glory against all odds. Your opponent had a choice of everything, picked the fighter they are (probably) the best at, and again lost – against someone who had no say in who their fighter was.

In other words, it’s a win-win scenario, at least for you, the choice of “random”.

I learned this lesson the hard way, mostly through five iterations and hundreds if not thousands of hours of Super Smash Bros., Nintendo’s long-standing platform fighting game. A guy in our To break The group considers it a point of personal pride to be an effective brawler with every character on the roster. When we meet others To break players in bars or parties, it will inevitably happen.

“Who is your principal?” People will ask.

“Nobody,” he will say with the blind confidence of someone who knows he is going to win. “Everyone,” he will add with a shrug. “Random.”

It’s maddening.

Periodically, while we are choosing fighters, he moves his cursor over the “random” tile. Everyone sighed and will move their cursor as well. To do otherwise would make us look like cowards. Not all wins really to count. Any loss counts double. We know the rules.

On the other hand, playing in such conditions has been a multi-year training camp that made me become a much better player than I would be if I stayed with Yoshi or Roy or the L-Man for every match. Look, I’m not gonna stand on a pedestal and pretend I’m awesome now – or even just good – with every To break fighter. But, at this point, I’m pretty decent with the 912-character list of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Basically, if you and I go head-to-head and pick our “best” fighters, you could win. But what if we both agreed to let the game choose for us? Well, that’s another story.

Want to put money on it?