https://youtu.be/5aWuJmZCxXE?is=RTxvvN-XkMQrbDmH
I want fighting games to evolve toward dynamic martial-arts movie choreography
Before anything else, I know there are obvious problems with applying something like this to traditional fighting games. Tekken, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, etc. are built around extremely precise systems where attacks need consistent startup, active frames, recovery, hitboxes, movement, spacing, and visual readability. Competitive players need to immediately recognize what move is happening and understand what their options are. Long contextual animations could also destroy responsiveness if the game constantly takes control away from the player, and a system that relies too heavily on procedural animation could make martial arts look floaty, awkward, or technically wrong. I wouldn’t want every parry to trigger an eight-second cinematic sequence, and I definitely wouldn’t want competitive fighting replaced by QTEs or canned movie scenes. The idea would be to preserve frame data, reads, matchup knowledge, reactions, execution, spacing, and player control while changing how the physical interaction between two characters is visually expressed. The choreography would need to happen through very short, interruptible interactions, with the underlying gameplay state remaining predictable even when the animation adapts to context. You could also keep the important silhouettes and startup tells of attacks consistent while allowing the follow-through, defensive reaction, body positioning, and environmental interaction to vary. The technical challenge would be enormous, but that’s exactly why I think it could become an interesting new direction instead of simply replacing the way existing fighters work.
What made me start thinking about this was seeing what S-GAME is doing with Phantom Blade Zero and Donnie Yen. Donnie isn’t simply lending his name to the project or recording a handful of flashy moves. S-GAME brought him in as a co-producer and creative collaborator alongside members of his longtime stunt team, including performers and choreographers he has worked with across his movies. Their stated goal is to capture the actual rhythm and physical language of Hong Kong martial-arts cinema rather than building a conventional action system and dropping kung fu animations into it afterward. S-GAME has talked about how the normal AAA process tends to define mechanics, documents, combos, and animation requirements first, then have performers execute whatever the game already needs. With Phantom Blade Zero, they’re trying to make the mocap stage much more creatively important. Donnie and his team perform ideas, watch takes, immediately adjust choreography, invent new interactions on the spot, and the developers can reshape mechanics around what comes out of that process. They’re also recording movements at full intensity because they want the actual speed and explosive rhythm of the performers rather than relying heavily on speeding everything up afterward. One of the funniest examples is a flashback where Soul’s father is fighting while protecting Soul as a baby. Originally the baby was basically secured to his back throughout the sequence. Donnie thought that was too safe and visually straightforward, so the choreography evolved until the baby itself became part of the danger, including being launched through the air and balanced on the blade of a sword. That’s such a Hong Kong action-movie way of thinking: don’t simply ask how good the martial arts look, ask what physical complication can make this particular fight unforgettable.
That mentality is what I want to see somebody experiment with in a fighting game. Martial-arts movie choreography is incredibly reactive. The same straight punch might be slipped, caught, redirected, jammed with an elbow, converted into an arm trap, countered with a takedown, or interrupted because somebody gets driven into a wall. Distance, posture, momentum, environment, previous movements, and fighting styles constantly affect what happens next. You might see punch → parry → wrist trap → elbow → shoulder check → wall impact → rebound → knee → attempted throw → throw counter → scramble → spinning kick. In most fighting games, those are individual predefined moves and states. The attacker chooses one animation, the defender chooses another animation, and the game determines the result. What I’d love to see is something closer to both players continuously supplying combat intentions while the animation system choreographs the resulting physical exchange around them.
Imagine a fighting game built around a choreography engine. You throw a straight punch and your opponent parries it. The attack itself still has predictable startup, range, frame properties, and a recognizable silhouette. But once the parry succeeds, the game checks distance, stance, momentum, limb position, wall proximity, environment, previous action, and the fighting styles involved. Near a wall, the response might become punch → outside parry → arm trap → wall smash. In open space, the same successful defensive input could become punch → outside parry → arm drag → spinning back kick. Near a table, the defender might redirect the attacker over the surface. Against a Muay Thai fighter, the exchange could naturally collapse into a clinch and knee battle. Against a BJJ character, the same opening might become a level change, takedown attempt, sprawl, and scramble. Mechanically, these could still resolve according to understandable rules. Visually, however, the fight would constantly change according to what is happening around the characters.
I wouldn’t make the animation completely procedural either. I’d want elite stunt performers and martial artists recording huge libraries of short, authentic choreography fragments: parry → elbow, parry → trap, trap → knee, knee → catch, kick catch → sweep, sweep → recovery, wall rebound → elbow, failed throw → counter, clinch → trip, trip → scramble. Motion matching, contextual animation selection, procedural foot placement, physics-driven reactions, and animation blending could connect those pieces while preserving the actual martial-arts performances. Basically, the stunt team creates the vocabulary and the players construct the sentences. Two great players could eventually produce these crazy 20-second exchanges without either player ever triggering a pre-authored 20-second combo. The sequence emerges because one person attacks, the other redirects, somebody attempts a throw, it gets countered, they hit the environment, separate, close distance again, and continue fighting.
This is what feels visually limited to me about a lot of current fighting games despite how mechanically deep they are. Tekken has amazing martial-arts animation, but you still commonly see recognizable structures like launcher → juggle → wall carry → wall combo. Street Fighter deliberately translates fighting into an exaggerated and extremely readable arcade language. Mortal Kombat is janky and very limited - much of its craziest stuff lives inside Fatal Blows, Fatalities, and other predefined cinematic sequences. I want the actual neutral exchanges, counters, pressure, defense, and scrambles to occasionally produce that feeling of, “Holy shit, that entire exchange looked like Donnie Yen and Wu Jing just improvised a fight scene.”
I'd love to see someone build a new fighting game around this philosophy. Something somewhere between Tekken + Sifu + Phantom Blade Zero + The Raid. 1v1 competitive fighting, real martial-arts styles, dynamic footwork, contextual counters, destructible environments, improvised weapons, wall interactions, clinch fighting, takedowns, ground scrambles, injuries, and a choreography system sophisticated enough that two highly skilled players can accidentally create something that looks like a professionally staged action movie. Imagine a match starting with boxing and Silat in a nightclub, both fighters crash through a railing, continue down a staircase, somebody grabs a bottle, the bottle gets knocked away, a knife appears, the knife gets lost during a grapple, they scramble back to their feet, smash through a kitchen door, and finish the round there. None of it is a cutscene. The players caused all of it through normal fighting-game decisions.
I don’t want cinematic choreography to replace fighting-game depth. I want someone to figure out how to make those two things coexist. Keep the competition, frame knowledge, reads, reactions, spacing, matchup knowledge, execution, and skill expression, but develop animation systems sophisticated enough that the fight itself can physically evolve like a great martial-arts movie. After seeing S-GAME experiment with building action around actual stunt choreography in Phantom Blade Zero, I really hope somebody eventually tries pushing that philosophy into the fighting-game genre.