After some early play tests and a special E3 invitational event, the stretchy-limbed fighter ARMS has finally made its way into the ring. While bigger names are battling to be the heavyweight champion of the FGC, ARMS acts as a great introduction to the world of fighting games for those who aren’t that interested in Hadokens and Wind God Fists. Don’t expect ARMS to be headlining next year’s Evo, but it may convince a swathe of new combatants to pick up a stick and try another game.
Like Nintendo’s efforts to simplify and rework elements of the shooter with Splatoon, ARMS strips back the fighting genre to its bare essentials. Gone are light, medium or heavy attacks; ARMS has a left punch, a right punch and a grab. Instead, players pick between light, medium and heavy gloves for each arm, with the heavier gloves being able to punch away lighter attacks. Rather than specific character supers, ARMS has a universal Rush combo, where players let off a flurry of charged-up blows. To replace special moves and command normal, fighters pick between special boxing gloves, which are also called ARMS. These range from electrified boxing gloves, to motorized missiles, to beam-firing dragons heads — and even giant balls of goop. Each character starts with a unique set of starter ARMS, but players can slowly unlock every ARM for every fighter. Much like shooter players finding the most powerful weapon and perk loadout, I feel the number of viable ARM combos will narrow quickly. At present, Electric ARMS seem the most effective, as a direct hit can disable your opponent’s ability to use either of their limbs, leaving them open to a free Rush combo or throw. As a result, the mobility and special ability of each character will become most important, with slower characters being left in the dust.
At its core, ARMS is all about whiff punishing. Stretchy limbs take a long time to retract, so a reckless punch leaves you wide open for a counter-attack. The average ARMS game therefore revolves around staking out your opponent, forcing them to throw out a risky punch or grab and thumping them while their guard is down. With ARMS utilizing the usual fighting game triangle of punches beating grabs, grabs beating guards, and guards beating punches, picking a character that can get around the area quickly and exploit an opponent’s blindspot is the key to victory. Expect plenty of triple-jumping Ribbon Girls and air-dashing Ninjaras during the first weeks of Ranked play, desperately throwing out grabs to catch you off-guard.
Despite these action shots, most Ranked games run out the clock.
This is where my first issue with ARMS arises: your average Ranked game is just too slow. While you do get your occasional grab spammer, most matches involve players dancing around the edge of the arena and waiting for the opponent to mess up. Movement is mostly dashing around to bait a punch and while there is an “Advancing Guard” style move that allows you to instantly dash after a successful block, expect most matches to be played at several arms’ length. The amount of rounds that go to time is massive compared to other fighters, with some stages actively promoting camping. The Ninja School is a dreadful stage, as the person who spawns on the top of the stairs gets a huge advantage on their opponent. Factor in a character like Byte and Barq, who has a little robo-dog helper that acts and attacks of its own accord, and you’ve got a recipe for Switches going through windows.
Party matches are a bit quicker, thanks to item pickups forcing players to approach if they want to regain health or fill up their Rush meter. ARMS may actually be a fighter that benefits from being played with items on, to force player interaction and stop matches going to time out. Luckily, ARMS’ netcode is solid, so it’s rare you have to deal with the double whammy of a slow match and a laggy connection. When it does lag, punches will phase through people and grabs will take about three seconds to register. As there is no rage quitting allowed, it forces salty opponents to fight through the pain until someone delivers the knockout blow.
This slow speed is not helped by ARMS’ control scheme, which is the victim of the development team’s compromise between traditional and motion controls. While ARMS has been mainly marketed with its motion controls, there are options for those who want to play in tablet mode or with a Pro Controller. Each mode has its bonuses and trade-offs: motion controls allow you to control the trajectory of both punches at the same time, while traditional control users have to wait for one punch to finish before they can individually aim the other. Traditional controls allow for greater control of your character with the Control Stick, while motion control players need to point the JoyCons either forward, backwards, left or right to move around.
Your mileage will vary with each control scheme, but the restriction for both is that you cannot move and punch at the same time. When playing with motion, this is fairly intuitive but when using the traditional controls, it means that aiming your punch and moving around is mapped to the same stick. It makes the phrase “stick and move” very literal, as your character is rooted to the spot until your punch has finished its journey outwards. With ARMS having different arcs and lengths, getting used to this control scheme is incredibly difficult at first. Years of playing console shooters have hard-wired my brain to move with the left stick and aim with the right, so switching to ARMS’ control scheme seems like a huge step back. What’s worse is that you cannot rebind your buttons to make blocking or dashing more comfortable. Get hand cramps by continually clicking in the left stick to block? Too bad. You either deal with it or switch to motion controls. For a game that’s hoping to be a fresh take on the fighting genre, its approach to controls is surprisingly backward.
If the controls do click with you, you then have to go through the trial of completing ARMS’ Grand Prix mode to unlock Ranked matches. Completing a fighting game’s Arcade ladder is usually a piece of cake, but ARMS will smack you silly even on its Normal difficulty mode. Any errant punch will be punished, the computer will read your inputs and insta-block/Rush combo you in certain situations, and on about level 6 difficulty and above, it’s like you’re going in the ring against an actual boxer. Luckily, you only have to complete Grand Prix once to play Ranked mode but it’s quite the humbling experience, especially if you haven’t yet gelled with ARMS’ controls.
You’ll learn to hate this guy’s sh*t-eating grin from playing Grand Prix.
Outside that, ARMS’ single-player modes are fairly limited. You’ve got Versus where you can play through ARMS’ novelty modes like V-Ball and Doubles, alongside a special survival mode where you have to fight off 100 fighters as fast as possible. There’s ARMS’ Test, where you compete in three rounds with randomly generated ARM setups, as well as a basic tutorial which has you fighting against bots with simple behaviors. There is very little meat outside of Party and Ranked mode once you’ve completed the Grand Prix, with the only single-player mode that you’ll regularly play is the shooting gallery to unlock more ARMS.
As seen with the recent ARMS Invitational, many are hyping up ARMS as another entry on the esports totem pole. Personally, I don’t see this happening, due to its glacial pace and frustrating control scheme. With the issue of most tournaments probably forcing players to use the default ARMS for each character, much of the strategy of mixing and matching new ARM combos will be left behind. If there is a bustling competitive scene still going in the next three months, I will be shocked.
But criticizing ARMS for not being the next big thing for the FGC is to do it a disservice. Its real success is how to introduce the basic concepts of fighting games in a unique way that will hopefully see more players picking up other games. While it didn’t click for me and I found it more frustrating than fun, I can see what Nintendo has tried to do and it has certainly resonated for many. Will ARMS be at the next Evo? Almost certainly not. Will it get more people to see the fun of fighting games? Absolutely, and that is a more admirable goal than simply making something for the esports circuit.
Score: 7/10