So, in recent years I haven't had much call to play fighting games. Most of my local group has split, the people I hang out with aren't very into them, and the arcades that are around don't really host a big scene (as far as I know). I think the last fighting games I played with any seriousness were Soul Calibur II and Guilty Gear XX. I still really like fighting games, but my skill level is "Good in the friend's group, but not trying hard". So it makes the prospect of adopting a new game hard, y'know? I'm not super into labbing, and don't really have desire to seek out locals to enter into tourneys etc. etc. This is an issue with a lot of genres I like, but fighting games get it the worst.

I like card games, but don't really want to do meta constructed decks. But hey, there is often draft formats, or limited, etc. And a lot of games use deck building as a format to do interesting single player games. I like shooters, but don't really go for competitive squad games (Valorant, PUBG, CoD, Apex, so on). But hey, plenty of games using the format for interesting single player (Doom, Neon White, etc.)

Fighting games, overall, really don't offer that. I can only think of the adventure modes in Soul Calibur III, Subspace Emmisary in Brawl, or the dungeon mode in Tobal. Which sucks because while I like fighting games, I don't always want that to be competitive against another person. And just "Fight against CPU" is fine for awhile, it isn't really compelling. You're just playing a less interesting version of the game.

Some offer decent story/arcade modes, but they generally just boil down to the basic CPU fights again and again. And yeah, if that is the case I would rather play against a human player (And again, I don't always want that).

Idol Showdown would probably never be my fighter of choice, but it does do one thing that I haven't gotten from fighting games in awhile: it has a compelling single player mode that isn't just the VS CPU mode.

The single player Virtual Frontier offers a "deck building" fighter mode where you have a continuous health bar that carries over between fights, and events on the board as well as temporary buffs and permanent buffs. Enemies can have modifiers, stages can have modifiers, and you get money and items for winning fights. Maybe it's just that these modes aren't advertised to ME, I just looked up and I guess Granblue did have a brawler mode, but I only learned that after just seeing if it had any kind of single player mode since I already knew GB was a browser RPG. But I would really like to see more interesting bending of the standard rules and mechanics for single player modes.

Or even the challenge fights from old Guilty Gear being more of a staple. Or at least advertising them if they are there, I really don't know if they are.

I think that is another thing I do like about Idol Showdown is that it has simple challenges that tell you to engage in mechanics more. Like "Use the collab mechanic with X character 3 times in a fight to unlock more items in Frontier mode". It gives me a goal to work at and try to incorporate into my run that might make me better at the system than just "Survive 90 seconds" or "Win a match in 10" or whatever (though it does have ones like that).

Also a free fighting game with rollback, so very low commitment to get into that can be a good time with whoever.


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