As an outsider the reason i domt bother with these is you have to know every damn iframe and move flow timing perfectly to even know what the game is.

No you don't. There are very few moves I remember exact numbers for. I know my fastest button, I know what's unsafe on block, and that's really all that's needed. And it's something that can easily be learned by feel too.

Wikis exist as a reference point, but no one is expected to memorize them.

The problem with these games is ranked online multiplayer. Back in the arcade days no one knew the damn frame timings. People just played and had a good time with each other in person. Console ports brought that experience home so you could enjoy it with friends and family, without needing a roll of quarters. No one had any issues with anxiety over these games because you were just hanging out with friends playing a game together. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost. If your brother’s Ryu was too good, you just challenged him to beat you with a different character.

Online ranked play takes all that away. It makes the competition serious even if you don’t want it to be. Now you’re always being matched up against an equally skilled opponent playing their best character. You never feel like you’re making progress because every match is tough as nails. For people who thrive on competition, that’s great. For everyone else it really sucks!

And that's fine, not every game has to be for everyone.

Spares me from reading the article. It tires me when authors have to go the doomer-route and saying things are dying because they themselves, probably haven't touched fighting games in a while. And just because they haven't, then it must be a dying trend.

Yeah, it's an article that makes you think it cites its sources and did its homework, but it doesn't even examine why SF2's success is so high, like that arcade revenue in the 90s is basically a cheat code compared to selling copies of console games, or that SF2 had a number of versions across that entire decade that all factor into that several billion dollars it earned. What the article refers to as "the dark ages" is actually a different era than what most would assign to the moniker to, misnomer though it might be. And it also states things as facts that aren't; not just your Guilty Gear example but that somehow SF6 is the most homogenized SF game somehow. This feels like the author is just salty that they don't care for the last few years' offerings personally.

As someone who doesn't pay attention to niche fighting games: Guilty Gear games are still being made? I thought they were a retro game or something. I think you're overestimating it's prominence. The only moden fighting games that come to mind as someone who has no interest in competitve play are Street Fighter, Mortal Combat (and Injustice), Smash Bros, and 2XKO. I'm don't have confidence to say that fighting games aren't growing, but the only news/attention I've seen for the genre since the launch of Street Fighter 6 has been a couple 2XKO trailers.

The article acknowledges the fact that the most fondly remembered singleplayer modes are the ones with unique twists... then proceeds to write off everyone asking to see more of that.

Singleplayer can never be a substitute for a human opponent. CPUs are just never going to play the way humans do, and they're never going to adequately prepare you for them.

But that's precisely why people loved the modes that didn't try to take it seriously and instead offered something unusual and different. Lean into things singleplayer can do well, instead of trying to chase after things it can't.

The idea of buying characters is itself wild. Games as a service has really screwed up player expectations.

Also, personally, I prefer buying characters for relatively cheap rather than having the usual f2p predatory crap. They should obviously be free for training tho.

As someone who has been playing fighting games on and off since 1995, the idea that non-dlc characters are "f2p predatory crap" is wild to me.

I think the biggest thing it can help with is steady escalation of difficulty.

In level 3, you learn how to grapple. The level has a growing number of enemies that can only be beaten by grappling.

In level 4, you learn about pokes and block punishes; and enemies will use different attacks that can test your block (but grappling is set aside for the moment so players aren’t overloaded)

Oh, and crucially: This isn’t put into the set dressing of a big square stage with a “Training Step 5 of 182” HUD and a “Good!” and jump to the next lesson each time the player executes a mechanic once.

Have the president’s daughter kidnapped, send a horde of zombies, make the player a detective finding clues in the bad part of town. Break it up with a locked door puzzle, climbing sections, etc. The lessons of interest learned from every other action adventure game.

You phrased it as "the newer generation of AI", so it was unclear what you meant, but it seemingly referred to the AI we hear about all too often these days in the news. I do think there's more room to get closer to approximating a human opponent in fighting games, and I know how I'd attempt to tackle it at a high level, but it must be harder than I think it is, or it would have been done by now; one potential pitfall would be having to update it every time you put out a balance patch, because that would affect how the computer player would have to behave.