List Of 10 Fighting Game Glossary
From the outside, this fighting game language might seem strange, but it’s how things work.
If you spend a lot of time playing fighting games or, even better, professional fighting games, you might come across some strange phrases that don’t make any sense. There are a lot of words and sentences you’ll only hear in fighting games. Some of them are completely new, while others are fun words whose meanings have been completely changed.
Even more amazing is that, while some terms are used in all games in the same genre, a few games have a lot of terms that are only used in those games and not in any others. If you watch people play fighting games, you’ll hear all of these terms a lot. It would be great to know what they all mean.
Frame Advantage
Fighting game players love technical terms, and frame edge is one that only those who know a lot about how the game works will know. Frame edge is a period of time when a player can keep comboing or putting pressure on an opponent without worrying about getting hit back.
When someone keeps fighting an enemy, it’s easy to see how frame advantage works. Most of the time, when a character is hurt or stunned, they can’t do anything, so whoever is attacking has the frame edge.
Plinking
This term is actually a shortened version of “priority linking,” but you’ll hear it more often. It’s a simple move, but it serves the same goal in a lot of different fighting games.
Plinking is when you push two buttons as quickly as possible one after the other to link the moves. This makes it easier to do useful techniques, tricky moves, and even combos, based on the game you’re practicing for so much. Even though it sounds weird, plinking is more important than you might think.
Touch Of Death
Touches of death aren’t very common in fighting games, but there have been some pretty big ones. This term means that as soon as you touch your opponent, you can kill them even if their health bar is full without stopping your move.
Everyone in Dragon Ball FighterZ has been able to do a touch-of-death combo at some point, so this has become a bit of a joke. This means that a player can lose an entire character in a very fast-paced game before they even get to do anything with their favorite team.
Wavedash
A wavedash is a unique way to move that has been used in many famous fighting games, but you probably know it best from Super Smash Bros. Melee. In every case, characters fly across a stage by combining a dash or dodge with other moves or combos.
In almost every game where it’s used, being able to wavedash is important because you need to be fast and able to throw people off. It’s not always easy to pull off, but with enough practice, anyone can learn it.
Teching
Teching is another term that you might hear in more than one fighting game. The term loosely refers to the act of responding to someone else’s throw try with your own throw input. Most of the time, doing that will lead to a kind of deadlock where both teams are on the same level.
This is a big part of both current Mortal Kombat and Tekken games, so you’ll probably hear announcers use the term when a player does a great job of reading the situation.
Counterpick
This is a term that you are likely to hear over and over again at video game events. As players move through the sets of the games they’ve chosen, they’ll have the chance to switch roles.
The point of a counterpick is to get a useful advantage over the player you probably just lost to. For example, in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, if you played as Donkey Kong and lost to Captain Falcon, you might want to play as Mr. Game and Watch to get the statistical edge.
Edge Guard
Most likely, you will only hear this term in connection to Super Smash Bros, but you might be able to do the same thing in other games. Edge guarding is stopping your opponent from grabbing a ledge from offstage to get back on their feet.
You can do this with a lot of master moves, but you can also do it with a simple poke attack. There are parts of every Super Smash Bros match where players edge guard each other until a stock is lost.
Input Read
When you learn how to play PvE fighting games, you’ll hear this term more often. The name comes from the fact that many of these games have tools that let the computer characters read what you type.
Almost everyone hates input reads because they make things harder than they need to be. Input reads were a big part of the early Mortal Kombat games, and this seems to be a typical way for bosses in fighting games to look more scary. When you hear this word again, you’ll know that someone is upset about something.
Korean Backdash
Since this is a very special term used only by Tekken players, it would be strange if anyone else had heard it before. The word “Korean backdash” actually refers to a way to move quickly by doing dashes and then stopping them.
The method, which was made by Drive Mad player, is a way to defend yourself in Tekken and is a key part of being able to compete. If you can’t pull off the move, you probably won’t get very far, especially in a set of games as technical and intense as the Tekken games.
Happy Birthday
Fair enough, you probably do hear this word a lot, but you probably don’t hear it used to talk about video games. In tag-fighting games, this is a very important word because it means to hit multiple targets with a huge combo or super attack.
It’s a way of saying that it’s fun to be surprised when you can do a lot of damage to a character who might not even be in the match yet. Even better would be if you could kill the character without them joining in even once.
