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What is the third most influential fighting game series?
- Thread starter JusDoIt
- Start date
SNK technically was the innovator in that regard. Or at least, their games were the first ones to features "Guest Characters" with Ryo from Final Fight guest-starring in Fatal Fury, and Geese similarly guest-starring in Final Fight. And this all ultimately culminated in KOF 94 which was their big cross-over game of the various franchises.
This is where Sakurai got his inspiration for Smash.
King of Fighters in 1994, probably. Definitely not Marvel vs Capcom since that has its origins in Akuma's appearance in X-Men: Children of the Atom a few months later.
But Banpresto was pumping out crossover video games on a regular basis since their sumo game in 1990 - no traditional fighters until after KOF existed, but platformers, sports games, RPGs, strategy games and things like that. There was a Shonen Jump crossover game in 1989, Famicom Jump Retsuden. I'm sure there are other things that I can't immediately think of as well.
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OP
OP
I love VO, but that's more a direct inspiration to Gotcha Forca and Gundam Vs Gundam series and GvG absolutely ran Japanese arcades for awhile.
Mortal Kombat literally lead to my favorite fighting series, Killer Instinct. Literally one of the best "new/rebooted" fighters in a long time.
How the eff you people forget about that??!
How the eff you people forget about that??!
Really? Everything was trying to copy MK back in the 90's.
If anything, the current levels of violence encountered in today's games can be traced back to its success. It was the violent game of its time and arguably the first to be successful in making that the selling point.
I see! In any case, this prevents me from thinking of Smash as a groundbreaking series on the same level as the others.
In all fairness, Pixel said Smash was an introduction to IPs, not a guaranteed bridge.
You mean Geese appeared in Art of Fighting 2.
Anyways, my answer is probably Darkstalkers for influencing "traditional" fighters despite the IP itself not being uber-huge in its heyday. Its legacy is the mechanics and characters. Mortal Kombat should be acknowledged for spawning the most clones outside of Street Fighter II itself, codifying the "standard" for single-player content in modern fighters, and contributing to a whole rating system. To say nothing of its general reach outside of games in various regions. Smash (and by extension, The Outfoxies) gets credit for codifying an entire subgenre. I'll also give the nod to Samurai Shodown and its predecessor(s) and successors for popularizing the idea of the weapon fighter, which should be more commonplace in this genre, but alas.
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Let's see:
Street Fighter: standard system, special moves, cancel combos, chain combos, link combos, grabs, command grabs
Art of Fighting: Dashes, backdashes, supers, EX moves, perfect frame moves, asymmetric gameplay, story mode
Fatal Fury: 3D positioning, guard attacks/guard cancel, counter specials, crouch walking, low jumps/hops, crossovers, kara cancels
World Heroes: Air Dashes, blockstun cancels, interactive stages, double jumps, throw reversals
Samurai Shodown: Run, parries, rolls, counter attacks, hidden specials, universal overheads, different versions of the same character
Mortal Kombat: Juggles, fatalities, hidden characters
Power Instinct: Character transformations
Fighters History: Weak Points
Not comprehensive by any means
Street Fighter: standard system, special moves, cancel combos, chain combos, link combos, grabs, command grabs
Art of Fighting: Dashes, backdashes, supers, EX moves, perfect frame moves, asymmetric gameplay, story mode
Fatal Fury: 3D positioning, guard attacks/guard cancel, counter specials, crouch walking, low jumps/hops, crossovers, kara cancels
World Heroes: Air Dashes, blockstun cancels, interactive stages, double jumps, throw reversals
Samurai Shodown: Run, parries, rolls, counter attacks, hidden specials, universal overheads, different versions of the same character
Mortal Kombat: Juggles, fatalities, hidden characters
Power Instinct: Character transformations
Fighters History: Weak Points
Not comprehensive by any means
SHout Outs to Fighters Megamix for being a crossover where it didn't matter if the characters made sense or not (Hornet, AM2 Palmtree, a giant inflatable bear)
I also don't understand the issue some have with NRS game animations. Street Fighter is always held up as the gold standard for fighting game animations and it baffles my mind. Do they look good? Yes Do they look objectively better than MK's not at all. I don't think a magical ninja from hell needs to explain to me how he jumps up so high without bending his knees to the the ground. Its a magical ninja for godsake. I think MK has actually been the most influential fighting game of all time. Eclipsing even Street Fighter.
I'm offended that MK is considered a 3rd place on this list tbh, no doubt SF is 1, but I'd wager MK has had more impact in the last 30 years than any other game I can think of.
3rd is close because you get into games that created sub-genres between Tekken and Virtua Fighter for 3d fighters, then Smash for whatever we are calling those now "party fighters"?, then the Capcom vs. series namely Marvel vs. Capcom. KoF falling in this same realm,, but then I'd argue Fatal Fury being the actual series backbone of influence there.
So naturally the 3rd most influential goes to..Primal Rage
3rd is close because you get into games that created sub-genres between Tekken and Virtua Fighter for 3d fighters, then Smash for whatever we are calling those now "party fighters"?, then the Capcom vs. series namely Marvel vs. Capcom. KoF falling in this same realm,, but then I'd argue Fatal Fury being the actual series backbone of influence there.
So naturally the 3rd most influential goes to..Primal Rage
I think longterm Smash will be the second most influential fighting game series given how many copies each entry sold and how ripe it is for copying. It baffles me that there haven't been more copycats. Right now it's third, but it is admittedly close with MK, and VF is easily second. I'd almost say it has more of an influence on stuff like Fortnite's reliance on crossovers than other fighting games, but you could say the same for how MK influenced other 90s games to be more violent.
I think Mortal Kombat is fourth and Smash is third but you could easily swap them. I want to give Power Stone fifth but that's kinda weird, because for as many games feel influenced by it, it's hard for me to say if they wouldn't have just come along anyways. The Arena Fighter genre just kind of feels like a natural extension and multiplayer version of the combat system used in a lot of single-player action games, whereas something like VF plays in an extremely specific way when compared to other games outside fighting game genre conventions and other 3D fighters all copied it.
I think Mortal Kombat is fourth and Smash is third but you could easily swap them. I want to give Power Stone fifth but that's kinda weird, because for as many games feel influenced by it, it's hard for me to say if they wouldn't have just come along anyways. The Arena Fighter genre just kind of feels like a natural extension and multiplayer version of the combat system used in a lot of single-player action games, whereas something like VF plays in an extremely specific way when compared to other games outside fighting game genre conventions and other 3D fighters all copied it.
This thread makes me wonder what a determination of influence of (active) fighting game IPs by decade would look like. Street Fighter and Virtua Fighter take it for the 90s, but who was really running things in the 2000s? And I mean inspiring other companies/franchises to emulate them. Like, Tekken and Dead or Alive might have some claim to that title, at least as far as 3D Mortal Kombat was concerned. The rise of anime fighters throughout that decade gives a posthumous win to Darkstalkers, but for the series that were still actually seeing new games and changing the industry's tides so to speak, I'm not really sure.
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Generally, I agree with you.
I just think it's not very influential on current fighting games specifically. But in the 90s? Absolutely.
In the 2000s, fighting games were just coasting. It felt like nobody was really trend setting anything outside of Smash.
I hit you, guy. Codify that.
Edit: but honestly that was such a mic drop response and I'm kinda shook. Haha.
I feel like people in this thread want MK to be considered that influential just because of its popularity. I give you the ESRB rating system but that doesn't have much to do with fighting games. The series itself hasn't done much in terms of mechanics that revolutionized the genre. There's nothing wrong with that in general, but for something to be considered one of the most influential fighting games it has to have contributed to the genre as a whole in ways that still appear in fighting games today.
I don't even play Darkstalkers, but I think the fact that chain combos, EX moves and air dashes originated from that series makes it a bit more influential than MK even though it's not a popular series.
The OP literally says this discussion isn't about commercial success
Simplified inputs are definitely relevant to this discussion though
Smash did NOT pioneer crossover games. It didn't even pioneer fighting game specific crossovers.
The first four KOF titles and all the Versus titles up to MVC1 pre-date Smash 64. Sakurai himself apparently used to play KOF95.
90's: Street Fighter, Virtua Fighter, Mortal Kombat
00's: Smash, Tekken
I have no idea what the most influential FG's would be for the 10's. Though MK9 definitely had FG's chasing that cinematic story mode money for a while
I'm not really an expert on fighting games, but would it be fair to say that the home ports of Tekken raised the bar on how to bring fighting games to consoles?
A remixed soundtrack, FMV endings, more characters, training, and the extra modes made the Virtua Fighter ports seem barebones no matter how accurate the port was.
A remixed soundtrack, FMV endings, more characters, training, and the extra modes made the Virtua Fighter ports seem barebones no matter how accurate the port was.
Forget fighting game mechanics though (which I'm ill-equipped to discuss), MK had a massive impact on aesthetics and basically just an entire mood. People are writing off the whole ESRB thing as just the lamentations of concerned parents or something but MK was among the first ultra-violent games and along with the later Doom paved the way for others to depict violence through video games, which has had enormous impact still resonating to this day.
Now you can argue whether that's a good thing or not but you can't deny the impact on subsequent game design both in and well outside of the fighting game genre.
..yes....? I don't follow.
Sakurai isn't shy in letting the World know that KOF was his inspiration for Smash. Even the invitation letters we see characters get in the trailers are something taken directly from KOF.
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I expected MK and Smash to be in the lead for valid reasons and because of community bias, but 85% of the vote so far is wild.
Y'all aren't really giving KoF and Darkstalkers (and "other") enough consideration!
(RIP Power Stone)
Y'all aren't really giving KoF and Darkstalkers (and "other") enough consideration!
(RIP Power Stone)
I have little experience with KOF, but a quick search seems to indicate its a crossover of different fighting games into one. And MVC is literally "IP1 x IP2". Neither are really what Smash was originally, and especially is not what it is now. They're not really even that similar to the concept of "guests" that I was talking about, surprising one-off inclusions from completely unrelated IP.
Fighting games, sports games, side scrolling shooters, top down shooters. It pulled from them all. The huge part of the cast never even been in a fighting game before.
I said I wasn't gonna brush the ESRB thing aside, but that didn't really change the genre compared to others though. There aren't a lot of fighting games that have a mature rating, fatalities, or tons of blood and gore. If anything that's what makes MK stands out from the rest rather than being something that fundamentally changed the way the genre was played.
If you don't pick MK, you must be too young to have been around for it. It's easily number 3 and it's not close.
Fighters Megamix was a crossover fighting game with non fighting game characters, and had a "guest" character in Pepsi Man lol
Nope. KOF included more than just fighting games.
Ralf and Clark were from here:
Athena and Kensou were from this game:
King of Fighters 100% did the "company wide crossover fighting game" idea before Smash did.
Slight nitpick, it was Fighting Vipers Pepsiman was in, not Fighters Megamix.
Its Mortal Kombat by a mile.
It started the glorification and spectacle of violence in fighting games, made secret characters/finishers/stages/modes a thing, spawned a thousand try-hard clones, created the ESRB, and really pushed character back stories, lore and timelines in a way that was pretty unique for the time.
It started the glorification and spectacle of violence in fighting games, made secret characters/finishers/stages/modes a thing, spawned a thousand try-hard clones, created the ESRB, and really pushed character back stories, lore and timelines in a way that was pretty unique for the time.
I would say Mortal Kombat as the most influential fighter other than SF and VF. More recently though, more games have been trying to imitate Smash than anything else.
I could be wrong, and should anyone know otherwise they're free to correct me, but pretty sure MK also introduced mirror matches (both the term and the ability for two people to pick the same character) and juggles.
Ahh, that's good to know. I guess Smash's influence is more about the use of "star power" in a crossover rather than the crossover itself. It looks like most of those characters are now more related to KOF itself than their original IP, though at the time of the release maybe that was different? Certainly was never the case with Smash though (with some exceptions of course)
OP
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Nope. If we're talking just fighting games or video games in general, MK is not more influential than VF.
Most (all?) MK games after MK Trilogy would not even exist without VF's influence.
KI 2013 deserves some love for bringing the season pass model to fighting games that everyone copies now. Hugely influental over the last 10 years and everyone shit on it when the business model was revealed.
Well SFII Champion Edition came out slightly before MK1 so technically that game had mirror matches first but Im not too sure if SFIICE was widely distributed in the US before MK so it might have seemed like MK did it first. Juggles you might be right Im trying to think of any fighters pre 1992 that had them..
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Super Street Fighter IV did it before KI. Arcade Edition and Ultra were DLC expansions.
Its not the gameplay from MK, but the full package. Mortal Kombat was the first fighter that felt like it was a full package of content. A strong focus on single player content, mature setting and style which was one of the primary causes of the ESRB, unlockables specifically around characters, digitalizing sprites, etc. The modern expectation for the content on a console release for a fighter is MK.
I mean, Virtual Fighter for all purpose has been a dead franchise for 20 years.
