Fighting Game Guide

Team Building

Let's create a team. Aim to create teams that enhance each other's strengths and cover each other's weaknesses. The first character on the team is called the point character. The last character on the team is called the anchor character. In games where teams have more than 2 teammates the character between them may be called the middle character.

Sometimes the character that is currently out is also called the point character. This can be confusing. For this website the character that's out will be referred to as the active character and the characters that are not will be referred to as the reserve characters.

A battery character is a character whose main goal is to build as much meter for the team as possible. They are usually the first character on the team but they can be the middle character. Battery characters generally have longer combos for building meter and don't require a lot of meter themselves.

The next character(s) should be able to take advantage of the resources built by the battery. A good anchor character should be able to spend large amounts of meter, make comebacks, and have few bad matchups. Pick a character that can fight alone because an anchor will not have any assists to help them.

A character's assist should compliment all the characters that come before them. In a 3-on-3 team fighter, the third character's assist is the most important as the first and second character need to benefit from it. The first character's assist is unimportant as you may not even use it. The first character should not be spending a lot of meter so their tools need to be complimented by the second and third character's assists.

Team Health

Damage in team games is massive. It has to be or else games would go on too long and every game would end in a timeout. In team games it's common to be able to kill a character in a single combo, this is called a Touch of Death (TOD) combo. This sounds overpowered but if a team has three characters, think of a Touch of Death combo as doing 33% of a full health bar.

You have to decide if killing a character with a Touch of Death combo is worth it. I can kill my opponent from the middle of the screen but this requires ALL my resources and gives my opponent 4 gauges of super meter. My opponent still has two characters left on their team and I will have to fight both with a huge meter disadvantage. Is it worth it? That depends on the player, depends on my character(s), and depends on the situation.

Another reason why damage in team games is massive is to punish bad tags and assists. Assist calling can be difficult to punish and even then the recoverable health mechanic in team fighters means the reserve character may be able to recover most of the health from the punish. That means that anything short of killing the reserve character is a weak punish. To keep tags and assists from being overpowered, characters have to be able to die in one combo.

When characters get hit in tag games, the damage they take is split into two categories: permanent damage, also called minimum damage, and recoverable damage. Recoverable damage shows up on the health bar as recoverable health. When an active character is tagged out and becomes a reserve character, their recoverable health begins to convert into permanent health.

The rules for recovering health differs between games. In many games if a character is brought in in any way all their recoverable health is lost. In those games killing the active character as quickly as possible so the reserve character is brought in before they can fully recover their health is a viable strategy. In other games the character only forfeits recoverable health when they willingly tag in. Find out what removes recoverable health in your game.