A small memoir inspired by watching a child grow.
Still Wanting to Enjoy Fighting Games
Image Credit: CAPCOM Official Press Kit
Some mornings I still boot up SF6. A couple rounds with the kid before school, and out of nowhere the thought hits me: huh, I'm still doing this. And just like that, the thought yanks me backward — like a DeLorean — straight into "back then."The '90s_Walk into the neighborhood arcade and the smell always got you first. Cigarette smoke, the heat off the cabinets, that lukewarm metal scent of hundred-won coins going warm in your palm. And the same faces, every single day after school. Nobody had to organize anything — you just walked up to the stick and lined your coin up in the row, like handing over an entry ticket. Loser stepped aside, winner just kept going against whoever showed up next. We didn't even know it was a sport back then. They were just the friends you saw every day, and winning or losing decided your whole mood for the afternoon.
Something just as strange was happening in theaters around the same time. When Terminator 2: Judgment Day opened in 1991, I still remember the whole theater gasping at a kind of sci-fi none of us had seen before. That CG, the sheer idea that a human body could flow like liquid across a screen — it hit like a shock. Two years later Jurassic Park came out and it felt like stepping into a different universe entirely. Not stop-motion. Actual, living dinosaurs? Those two movies were the proof, for me, that visual technology could actually catch up to imagination.
Then throw Hong Kong cinema into the mix and it gets even more complicated. I especially loved Tsui Hark and John Woo — that tricky, off-kilter rhythm of bullets crossing blades in slow motion left me genuinely stunned. If Hollywood floored me with technology and scale, Hong Kong's wuxia and hardboiled crime films shook me through pure mise-en-scène. Looking back now, those two threads are exactly why I fell into fighting games in the first place.
Learning to Animate_I trained as an animator for a while, once. Never walked that road for long, but what I picked up there stuck around and quietly became the way I see everything. Once I'd dug deep into how a human body actually moves, scenes I used to wave off with a simple "that's cool" started reading completely differently. And bringing that eye back to the arcade, every game looked brand new. A handful of them still stand out even now...
One was the Street Fighter III series — forget everything else, the character animation alone was enough to make your eyes water. The walk cycles, the idle stances, even the specific way each character crumpled when they lost. Looking at it as an animator, this was basically a textbook.
Then SNK's The King of Fighters '98. This one felt like getting all that Hong Kong cinematic flair I mentioned earlier, packed into a fighting game that somehow nailed both balance and pure fan service at once.
And I can't leave out Samurai Shodown. The tension of blade-on-blade combat! That dense, psychological standoff where a single strong slash could end it — that was a completely different kind of thrill.
Every one of these had its own distinct personality, but they shared one thing: every single motion carried conviction. Not a single throwaway frame in any of them.
(Think you know who's who? It's just your imagination.)
A Shift in Hobbies
Once school and work life started for real, the time I spent at arcades shrank, and the passion I'd poured into fighting games thinned out along with it. Later, after I moved back to my hometown, the center of gravity of my hobby shifted toward a handful of other titles.
I still haven't forgotten the shock of playing God of War on the PS2 for the first time. That was the moment I learned a console game could be this brutal, this spectacular. By the PS3 era, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was the special one — I remember thinking this was where gaming and cinema actually fused into one thing. The Last of Us held onto me for days after the credits rolled, and by the time I looked up, I'd somehow sunk close to a thousand hours into its multiplayer alone.
Looking back, I don't think I'd actually left fighting games behind in that stretch. I think I was just wandering, chasing a different shape of "impact."
Image Credit: SIE Official Press Kit
(?!)
The Honeymoon Didn't Last
When Street Fighter IV came out in 2008, my phone lit up like it hadn't in years. Every arcade kid I knew must've felt the same jolt, because we spent days catching up on nothing but fighting game talk. Ahh... but the feel of actually playing wasn't what it used to be. My fingers couldn't keep up with the memory anymore. Commands that used to fire off on pure reflex now needed a beat of conscious thought before my hands would move. (What?!)
Meanwhile, online fighting game culture was blooming faster by the day. That low hum of quiet jealousy and admiration that used to fill the arcades — that whole scene — was gone, replaced by rank numbers, match records, and forum threads. Strangely, this genre wore me down faster than any other game I played online. Maybe it was the pace — no waiting around, just cycling straight into the next opponent, match after match, with nowhere to breathe.
Somewhere around the last version of Street Fighter IV — I quietly let go. No dramatic turning point. I just picked up the stick less and less, until one day I'd stopped completely.
Honestly, Street Fighter V didn't do much for me either. If anything, it pushed me even further away. The character designs had become harder and harder for me to connect with, and Ryu's build... I don't know. He looked less like the martial artist I remembered and more like a bodybuilder who'd taken things a little too far. The older games had huge characters too, but somehow they still felt graceful. By comparison, SFV's style just wasn't for me.
The system didn't help, either. It had climbed to a point where I knew I wasn't willing—or maybe no longer able—to put in the work it demanded. After a few days of tinkering, I lost interest and quietly uninstalled it. I still remember surprising myself. I'd always believed fighting games would be with me for life, yet here I was walking away without much hesitation. Maybe people—and their tastes—change more easily than we like to admit.
Every new fighting game that followed seemed to miss me in one way or another. Eventually I just figured my time with the genre had passed. And honestly, there were more than enough other games waiting to be played.
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