Poll of the Day > Why did jumping become such a big thing in fighting games?

(+) Yeah! (+)

jumping is almost never useful in traditional fighters.

I'll exclude smash bros as you are almost as agile in the air as on the ground, so it works there. I'm also excluding wrestling games where jumps (from the turnbuckle or off the ropes) are high risk moves, and the original Karate/Taekwando games where you can do a relatively realistic jump kick.
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Because then they would be boring

TheWorstPoster posted...

Because then they would be boring

This post could have been on point, but it makes zero sense in context.
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Jumping in 3D fighters is almost only used for dodging low attacks.
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Lokarin posted...

jumping is almost never useful in traditional fighters.

There's an entire strategy based on jumping-in in fighters, I don't know what you're talking about. Jumping leads to cross-ups, it's an optional for avoiding a fireball instead of taking chip damage, opens some characters up to using divekicks or air fireballs, some characters even have air grabs. Jumping is a big proportion of fighting games. Good players know when to do it versus that noob who keeps getting AA'd all game, but you'll rarely see a professional match that's 90% ground game.

It's to piss people off when you do ambiguous cross-ups on them.
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Jumping makes the game more fun
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Lokarin posted...

I'll exclude smash bros as you are almost as agile in the air as on the ground, so it works there.

It is also one of the few fighters build around recovering from ring-outs, so it is an integral part of the gameplay.
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jumping is almost never useful in traditional fighters.

say what?

I think he meant never useful in real life fighting.

I mean in actual real fights, people never jump

And they tend not to jump the height of a person in real life.
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Zikten posted...

I think he meant never useful in real life fighting.

I mean in actual real fights, people never jump

There is a million unrealistic things in video games
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I'm referring to the change in fighting games from before SF2/MK and... SF2/MK

While I always found jumping in these games to be not particularly helpful due to the low priority of air moves and the relative quickness of things you'd want to jump over.

I mean, why would you jump over a fireball when your opponent will get out of their animation before you're over it? You're just gunna get smashed for free.

But that aside: Jumping wasn't super huge before these 2 games and then after that it was the only thing done for like 10 years, and it's still the norm.
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fighting games before SF2 and MK are barely recognizable as fighting games today in general
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TheSlinja posted...

fighting games before SF2 and MK are barely recognizable as fighting games today in general

This

Zikten posted...

I think he meant never useful in real life fighting.

I mean in actual real fights, people never jump

No, he said traditional fighters, not real fights.
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