Persona 4 Arena ULTIMAX reminds me that being invited to the table is all that matters

Fighting games have always been tricky for me. For example, thanks to the overly detailed training mode in Mortal Kombat 11, I’ve discovered that many of the combos are unworkable because of my motor skill issues. I also feel locked out of Street Fighter because of how tight the quarter circles are to execute.

Thankfully, we are in a space where lots of different fighters can take the core of the 2D fighter and lower the skill floor. When a developer is making a fighting game that’s meant to appeal to a wider audience, they often add systems to make the game feel approachable. Anime fighters like Persona 4 Arena ULTIMAX are known for their outlandish combos and usually higher degree of movement options. This game was also the first time I was ever exposed to an ‘auto combo,’ a mechanic that lets you do a basic combo that ends in a Super Move by pushing just a single attack button. This one idea, that you can reduce a combination that would normally require five or six individual buttons to just pressing a single button four times, feels life-changing. In some ways, it’s like getting your first dishwasher.

This by no means makes the game easy to win, and it doesn’t give the player any distinct advantage other than pushing fewer buttons. These moves act exactly the same and can be avoided the same way they could be if the player was using regular inputs. Game knowledge will almost always overcome a button masher determined to do one thing. Yet, for some reason, the most vocal people who play fighting games will often insist that games are being “dumbed down” for a “casual” audience and that somehow the inclusion of an auto combo will erase all possible depth that any fighting game could ever have.

If there’s a game that smacks that kind of complaint right in the mouth, it’s yet another Arc System Works game: 2018’s Dragonball FighterZ which takes the auto combo system and expands it by giving the player three different auto strings to use instead of just one. It also effectively gives you nine different auto strings because FighterZ is a 3v3 game. None of that assistance makes FighterZ a less compelling game. It still requires you to match up knowledge and a full understanding of resource management to perform well. Because of the assists that do exist, I’ve been able to put more time into that fighting game than others.

So, that brings us back to the merry-go-round of this Ultimax re-release. As I sit there and try to understand the different training mode exercises, I’m finding I finish most things in less than a minute. While there are some advanced mechanics I find myself locked out of, I still feel like a better player today than I was in 2016. That has nothing to do with my specific desire to learn a single game, but simply occurred as fighting games in general have opened up to people like me.

The large vocal audience that demands games have ‘skill’ and ‘purity’ misunderstands that by starting with a low skill floor, you make it vastly easier to start that climb to begin with. If you imagine the skill ladder as a building, it would be nonsensical to say that adding a ramp to the bottom doesn’t make the building less tall, just easier to get into. I’m not asking to be in the money matches at EVO, I just want to spend a half-hour unwinding before bed. Thankfully Persona 4 Arena ULTIMAX provides that in spades.