ARMS - Accessible Depth

            ARMS is a game I've been playing a little too much of recently, and back in January when this game was first revealed, I never would have believed that I'd say something like this. It's a motion controlled fighting game based on boxing, and at reveal it looked like Wii Sports Boxing HD to a lot of us. As Nintendo revealed more information on the title though, opinions were slowly changed, and now ARMS is  runaway success, considering its existence as a new IP in the niche genre of fighting games. The thing that makes ARMS most stand out in the fighting genre is just how accessible it is, even to the point where many people have dismissed it as a casual party game. Today I wanted to look at what the game did to be this accessible in a genre known for having a high barrier to entry, without sacrificing depth.

   Nintendo has dabbled in the fighting genre before with their unorthodox Super Smash Bros. series, but for most, those games have been more about chaotic multiplayer action than intense, competitive fights. So in a sense, ARMS is Nintendo's first real fighter, but, in classic Nintendo fashion, it still manages to be unconventional. Picture boxing, but with arms that stretch like slinkies and function more like projectiles than they do fisticuffs. Although the concept is wacky, it's not too hard to get the hang of when you're playing the game.

   ARMS is a game that's very easy to get into, especially for a fighting game. First, it's built on top of an accessible foundation. Thanks to the miracle of TV and movies, even those who weren't troublemakers in school have seen some kind of fist fight, and even if not, punching is pretty instinctive to most humans. Punching in-game works a lot like punching in reality, just with more travel time. The main thing that really ties it together is the intuitive motion controls. Back in the era of Wii waggling, no one would have thought the words “motion controls” and “intuitive” would belong in the same sentence, but ARMS’ controls are simple enough to work. You can tilt the controllers in any direction to move in that direction, but the main thing is you punch with one hand to punch with that hand in game. This makes the game instantly accessible, because to pick up and play, all you have to do is do what you would do in real life, it's intuitive.

   One issue many fighting games run into is the issue of button combos. Traditional fighters will have different moves activated by different combinations of button inputs being pressed in rapid succession. This creates a high barrier to entry since new players have to memorize and perfect these strings of inputs in order to be competent. In ARMS, this entire system is dropped completely. Your only two methods of attack are punching and grabbing. Instead of focusing on giving characters a wide variety of abilities, they chose to gave them limited actions with a lot of depth. There's nuance to punching because you can use both arms separately, and steer them while they're in mid-air. The developers decided to cut anything extraneous and focus the game solely on this concept of punching.

     This is classic “depth not width” approach, enabled them to truly refine the main mechanic, but it also helps in the game's accessibility. It's not that easy to just start playing a game that has a wide array of mechanics to learn. Consider something like the Civilization series, where you have to understand how to manage resources, properly expand settlements, keep citizens happy, run an economy, maintain positive relations with other civilizations, etc. Now it isn't necessary to understand or even know of these mechanics to play the game, or even to succeed, but it does make it a lot harder for players to fully understand the game. If a player is really good at waging war, but doesn't know how to do anything else, they'll feel like they have no idea what they're doing when they're tasked to spread a religion. Contrast this to ARMS where once you know the basics of moving and punching (and grabbing and blocking), you fully understand the game. But thanks to the depth of these mechanics and their interactions, you can have a good grasp on them but still be nowhere near a master. Not to say one approach is better than another (if one was objectively better, we wouldn't have a market for games like Civilization), but in terms of accessibility, depth is clearly superior to width.

            Yet ARMS does not sacrifice its depth to be this accessible. As just stated, the game chooses to focus on one mechanic, but chooses to focus on that one mechanic in depth. There's nuance to curving your punches, dodging, and of course the intense predictive mind-games that begin to occur at higher levels, made more intense by the large commitment that comes from throwing at an arm. But new players don't have to know any of this. A lack of understanding of the game's true depth will not prevent them from playing the game, because the only thing they truly need to understand is the core punching mechanic. Mastering the game's depth will only lead to improvement, and that's the part that comes after you've been hooked by how easy the game is to pick up.

Key takeaways

• A really intuitive concept should do as much as it can to base itself off something the player will already be familiar with, and then function how it would in reality
• More accessibility comes from focusing on a few mechanics with lots of depth, instead of many different mechanics.
• You do not have to sacrifice depth to make things accessible, just make it so the player only needs to understand a little to play and enjoy the game, and anything else they can learn just helps them improve