Last night I helped Pat train for an upcoming tournament where he's going to enter what sounds like every single game. We focused on two games I have some competency in: Vampire Savior (of course!) and Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code.
There's being good at fighting games, a level where you can beat newer players consistently and they perceive what is happening as magic. Then there's the level several steps beyond mere 'good' where you can play a much weaker player and ensure BOTH of you have fun: this is the level Pat is on. It's an incredibly difficult and nuanced skill that requires so much understanding of the particular game, of how people learn, and how fighting games as a whole are built. There's no point to this paragraph other than that Pat rules, but I think his approach is instructive for understanding how to play to LEARN, not play to WIN. Something I still have trouble doing and getting in the mindset of doing. I still have much to learn!
The second big thing I took away from the session was that vsav and MBAACC are extremely different games. I am a big enthusiast of competitive games! I really love them from every angle, and in many different genres. There's tons of writing and critical analysis out there about every aspect of fighting games except for what makes competitive games similar to and different from each other.
To be fair, you rarely see this about any kind of game, because this would require articulating what the experience of playing the game and how the game achieves that experience for the player. You'd have to peek behind the curtain at what the game is actually doing, the intended effect on the player, the actual effect on yourself, and how that differs from other approaches. The amount of expertise required is incredible for any game, and for competitive games there is much, much more you have to know. If you don't know it, you can only kind of grasp at what the experience is because at your level you might as well be playing a different game than anyone else. If you know the depths of the game, you may be unable to pull yourself out and describe the picture holistically. You'd have to not just catalogue all the deepest mechanics of the game and how to use them to win, but describe how they make you feel and how they make other people feel, and how they add up to create a game you love.
The whiplash between going from playing Vampire Savior to Melty Blood opened something up for me. Both are extremely fast games with huge amounts of aerial movement and tight execution, but their tempo is so different they don't feel like they're even in the same genre.
You can't talk and play Vampire Savior at the same time. The action just never pauses; not only are the combos short and fast, but so is pressure. In both games pressure is incredibly deadly and the defender has to be very cautious, but in Melty Blood strings are long, tricky, free-form, and come with all kinds of luxurious extenders. Both players are paused, but on high alert. They are watching for an opening and looking for predictable behavior. Vsav shortens this loop so much there's no time to catch your breath. The only quiet points are when both players are on opposite sides of the screen, judging when it's time to approach, because once committed, the approach is very predictable.
Neutral in vsav feels like two brick walls running into each other. You're either barreling forward or putting something out for your opponent to slam headfirst into. Movement is insanely fast and very direct.
Neutral in Melty Blood feels a spider trying to catch a fly. I can't imagine a more confusing way to describe this, but Melty Blood lets you change your momentum and angle of approach multiple times with no warning. You can't just put something out that will stop that wall, because if you miss the timing you'll just look like an idiot, standing there or falling from the sky with no way to change your movement anymore. Movement is impossibly tricky, so you need to keep track of what your opponent has done in a much larger window of time than Vsav.
Vsav is full of such short loops that patterns emerge very quickly. You change it up or die, but there is a lot of room to be hit several times by the same trick and then start adjusting. In Melty Blood, character movement holds endless surprises but when the hit lands, it hurts so tremendously you'd be a fool to gamble everything on that one interaction without having a much more complex plan for how to catch your opponent.
The core difference between the two is a matter of patience. Vsav is impatient; there's no stopping, ever. Melty is also a relatively impatient game, one where you never want to be too respectful and too cautious because you don't just fly and slam into each other like brick walls; you can thread the needle and catch someone on the other side of the screen immediately if they get too predictable. This leads to a lot of funny whiffs, turns, and curves, with the bodies in space bending and flipping around like acrobats and the conclusion being something surprising for one and just as planned for the other.
So much to discuss in just one aspect of gameplay between two games! Probably this is a big reason why more people don't do this.