At its core, winning in a fighting game is all about mind-games. Strip out execution and the main struggle in any fighting game is successfully outwitting your opponent to achieve victory. Whether that is through successfully reading your opponent or baiting out a bad option, mastering mind-games is key to become a great fighting game player. But how do you improve your mind-games? Hoping to improve the mental fortitude of struggling players, MySmashCorner has released a new video discussing what makes a mind-game.
After briefly discussing the idea of thinking of strategies on multiple levels (traditional fighting game players will know this concept by the word “yomi”), MySmashCorner gives specific examples of using mind-games in a typical match. Most of these mind-games are thought up in the heat of battle, so it’s helpful to see them broken down piece by piece, in order to understand the reasoning behind each one. Of course, some mind-games require one player’s deliberately switching their brain off to make them hard to read, but you shouldn’t rely on this as a common tactic.
Most of the mind-games presented in this video–techchasing, tomahawks, edgeguards–are specific to Smash, but things like shield/block pressure, conditioning and reads are universal to all fighting games. Even if you aren’t a dedicated Smash player, you may learn something about improving your general mental game by watching this analysis.
Source: MySmashCorner