soulcalibur (and as i understand it, tekken by extension) has such unreasonably huge movelists that it feels like one of the most intimidating fighting games to newcomers. I'm not a newcomer myself, but I've never stuck with a game and put in the time necessary to get good since smash 4. id love to, of course, but i haven't found a group yet.
but i have enough exposure to fighting games that the inputs for soulcal aren't scary. i blue-sparked ivy's throws a few times in training mode yesterday. i was getting excited to learn these characters!
but then i talked to my wife about playing the game. she has a lot more experience with fighting games than me, specifically anime fighters, and i really wanna learn a game with her. she can't hold back though, so learning something as fast-paced and overwhelming as DBFZ is pretty much off the table. i wanted to get into street fighter with her but she wasn't very interested. so i brought up soul calibur. shes a huge dork and im sure she'd be super into the goofy character customizing, but she saw the movelists and got super put off by it. she, who has several TIMES more experience with fighting games than me, was more intimidated by the soulcal movelist than me. am i just stupid? SHOULD i be more intimidated? surely not, i just watched sajam's tekkem tourney, these games aren't THAT hard to get into. i know I'm a tabletop kinda gal, is that what does it?
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in reply to @GenuinelyAshley's post:
I don't play too many 3d Fighters myself but I did play some tekken 7 and sc6. Those move lists ARE huge and look daunting, but not all moves are created equal. Most characters only have 12-15 moves that form their core gameplan. So I would suggest looking up a basics guide to point your wife in the right direction, then once she's comfortable with the movement and doing some basic strings and juggles, THEN you can start digging deeper into the move list
no, but it's a common issue with 2D fighters trying out 3D fighters. most 2D players know every single move and attack their charcter can do, so they can feel a loss of control or stupid when they don't know every single possible thing a character can do. It's a hard transition (I'm mostly describing myself here). Like Nero says, there's only about 15 max moves most players will use in a match. maybe a few extra edge cases, but learning the basics help deal with the fear of big movelists.
So, here's the thing,
The move lists are really long, but 40% of those are some combination of direction+attack
Every character has:
press each of eight directions + each of three attack buttons,
Hold each of eight directions + each of three attack buttons
Double tap each of eight directions + each of three attack buttons
While running + each of attack buttons
While rising from a crouch, each of eight directions + each of three attack buttons
That's a lot of moves!!!
But also, most of them are "I swing my weapon".
If you're not overly concerned with the exact frame data of each and every single move your character has, they're, pretty intuitive? Soul Cal is a great beginner fighting game that way. You can get much get by knowing a few key moves really well, a few not as urgent moves kinda well, and the rest of your kit kinda by Character Feel.
I think probably people who have only played 2D fighters would see the length of the move list and think, "oh I have to learn all these", and not realize that most of them are actually what they would consider normals or command normals.
It's not just you, this is the biggest thing that puts me off of 3D games. Even when people say I only need 15 or so, then I'm just like "Okay but how do I know which 15? And why have 85 more then?"
no you misunderstand i LOVE having 150 moves i can learn.
although to defend the people talkin about 15 moves, soulcalibur 6 at least has a page of each character's movelist dedicated to "here's the 10-15 moves that should make up 80% of your game"
as for why you have the other buncha moves, part of it is just mixups? like sure, siegfried kick out of every stance is pretty good, but if that's the only button you press you're kinda predictable. maybe sometimes you feel like pressing B! and obviously combo optimization is a whole other can of worms
and for the rest of them, i dunno, i'm sure there's some silly edge cases where they're good. leave those for when you make it out of pools.