Fighting Game Cosmetics
Recently, I read this Expression Via Fighting Game Colors blog post, and I really liked it and thought the topic was interesting, so now I'm making a blog post about fighting games cosmetics.
Color Selection In Early Fighting Games
Before I actually get to the main point, I wanna bitch about old ass games that aren't really hurting me. Feel free to skip this section.
In early fighting games, instead of having any sort of UI for selecting colors, they're instead just selected by whichever button you used to select your character. Plenty of fighting games also didn't have a way to back out of a selection, or they just don't show your colors until you get into a match, so if you wanna try and find a nice palette for a character, you either have to check every color through trial and error, or look them up online, either way is really tedious.
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| I would recommend looking them up since plenty of games have palettes hidden behind combination inputs. |
What especially annoys me though is how their controls wouldn't be changed to better suit standard control pads in home console ports. Instead of having A as the default color selection button, many games instead have default colors set to whatever your Light Punch button is, which is pretty much always Y (on a Nintendo controller) by default. And instead of having B as the back out of menu button, older fighting games traditionally use the Select button instead.
To me, these menu controls best encapsulate the sort of "isolation" fighting games used to have from the video game medium as a whole. I don't know any non-fighting game that's ever had Y and Select as the default Confirm and Cancel menu buttons.
The last game I know of (not including rereleases and updates) that had weird menu controls like this was Skullgirls. Although this game actually has a proper color select U.I. when you press the start button (which the game tells you about), so it's actually alright in my book.
In the bottom left
This game also tells you that Select is Cancel :)
If anything, I actually appreciate the old school color select inputs in this game because they're a really fast alternative to selecting colors with the proper menu, while not being strung along with all of the other problems these controls usually came with.
Color Palettes Feeling Personal
This is discussed in that aforementioned Expression Via Fighting Game Colors post but, fighting game color paletts, albeit simple cosmetic changes, are a surprisingly effective way of making a character feel more personal to select.
To quote myself from an email that I wrote, "I think the sort of simplicity and oftentimes meaninglessness to
alternate costumes (Side Note: I'm pretty sure I meant to say color palettes) sort of leaves more room for people to project their
own personal meanings onto them".
I'm not very educated on art or psychology but, from my understanding colors are subconsciously (and I guess somewhat consciously) seen as core to the essences of things. So when you select a color palette in a fighting game, it can kinda feel like your selecting that character(s)' essence. If you wanna get philosophical or whatever, I guess you could argue that color is core to essence, simply because people see it as such, or due to how it represents the way in which things interact with the all encompassing light of our perceived world, but that's getting off topic so I'll move on.
Color Palettes In Early Fighting Games
Using alternate color paletts to represent other players had already been pretty commonplace before fighting games;
But fighting games would quickly break from the mold by giving characters way more color palettes than necessary, presumably to give players some variety.
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| Only up to 2 of these palettes can be used at a time. |
Some games still felt pretty limited though, even if they did have "more than necessary". It'd be kinda hit or miss if you even liked any of the color choices for a character.
Something odd about some older games is how certain colors weren't always selectable. For examples, the mirror match colors in Guilty Gear The Missing Link (selected by trying to select the same character + color as your opponent), and certain team only colors in the original Super Smash Bros:
Unsurprisingly, stuff like this wouldn't be common, because restrictions like this are pretty arbitrary.
Modern Day Color Palettes
I can't really pinpoint a split between early and modern, since the genre doesn't linearly build on itself, but I'd estimate it to be around the late 2000's or early 2010's when some games just started spewing out color palettes, like Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code which features a whopping 40 palettes per character!
Most games wouldn't get that crazy, but especially anime fighters would oftentimes end up with like 20 palettes per character which I really appreciate because I like having options.
More color palettes doesn't always lead to people distinguishing themselves though. Some palettes are simply more popular than others, so you end up not really standing out for playing with certain colors.
I personally try to avoid this, because I like standing out at least a little bit, and I don't like having my color ripped away from me in mirror matches. For example, in Guilty Gear Strive I used to use Sol's color 3, but that turned out to be a really popular palette so I switched to color 7 because that was my second favorite, and from what I can tell his color 7 is generally people's least favorite Sol color, so I get to stand out now.
I actually used to think his color 3 was based on Ragna from BlazBlue, but then I realized
this palette has actually been in the series since Guilty Gear X, about
8 years before the first BlazBlue.
Someone was actually racist (and homophobic) towards me for using that purple costume once. I'm white IRL though, so it's especially easy for me to just laugh this off as a wildy stupid thing someone said to me once. I don't think I even won the set, but it seems I had more fun.
Anyways, one "problem" I wanna bring up with modern fighting games is how some games will homogenize alternate colors palettes across the cast. For example, Dragon Ball FighterZ:
As you might be able to guess from my use of quotation marks around the word problem, I don't think is a problem, because I actually like this. I love that every character gets a purple color, or a yellow color in case I don't like their purple color, or a blue in case etc... I do get though that it can feel like the devs aren't being very creative when they do this.
Reference Colors
A lot of characters in fighting games have color palettes that reference other characters, whether it be from the same game, series, genre, or whatever random piece of media the devs feel like referencing.
Once color palette I wanna mention that I think might actually be mistaken for being a reference is Smash 4 Meta Knight's 8th palette. It's commonly thought to be a reference to Dark Meta Knight, but viewing it in a match reveals that it actually has a distinctly pinkish-maroon cape and shoes.
Throwing a wrench into my theory though is that in Smash Ultimate, this costume gets replaced by a much more explicitly Dark Meta Knight costume, yet his shoes are still maroon, when they should be red. So perhaps the reference was intentional in Smash 4, but they just gave him maroon 'cause they felt like it.
Color 8 is also directly preceded in order by a Galacta Knight reference in both games, further implying that it is also a reference.
As cool as I think the Dark Meta Knight costume is, I miss the maroon cape. I thought it complimented the dull greys and whites incredibly well. It's straight up one of my favorite color palettes in the entire series.
Custom Color Palettes
It's awesome whenever games let you customize your own color palettes, so they really feel special. Here are some of my custom color palettes.
Something I feel is good to mention now is that some people like to pick certain colors to gain a competitive advantage. To an extent in other games, you can pick colors that mess with visual clarity,
but in games with loose color editors, you can put together some really messed up stuff.
I think stuff like this is pretty funny, but I can totally see why this would be frowned upon. It's an upperhand that doesn't really make fights any more interesting, and generally compromises fun.
Modded Color Palettes
If you wanna go even further beyond with your custom colors, then you can use mods. Free of restrictions though, custom color pallets can take a while to make. Making a color palette using the in-game tools in UNI2 takes me less than 10 minutes, while a single color palette made using the BBCF Improvement Mod takes me well over 2 hours. I felt cool as hell once I finish a BBCF color palette though.
The baura around Ragna, and the huge Deadspike, are both from a separate, Unlimited Characters mod if I remember correctly.
You don't have to make palettes yourself when using mods though. You can just download ones that other people have created and shared online if you think they're neat.
Again though, you can put together some extra messed up stuff with custom color palettes.
In BBCF specifically, you can straight up make yourself invisible.
While I also think this is hilarious, you are just straight up cheating at this point, so you shouldn't really do this against anyone except friends that are chill with it (or maybe other cheaters I guess).
Costumes
This is the modern era, games aren't restricted to just color palettes for cosmetics. Proper costume options have been available for decades.
Some games like Tekken allow you to make custom outfits which is like the peak of cosmetic expression (not including custom characters because I think that's worth a different discussion).
The only game I've played though with costume customization is SNK Heroines, which just kinda lets you slap stuff on top of your character's largely premade outfit.
While Street Fighter 6 only has proper custom outfits for its custom characters, something neat that its going to do (or is in the midst of doing I presume), and something Street Fighter 5 already did is have costumes designed by Capcom Cup Champions. And while that doesn't actually make me like some costumes more, I do still think it's just pretty cool that some players got to leave their direct mark on the game
Speaking of competitive play, some costumes really mess with visual clarity, which in the modern age, can just get them banned from tournaments which I understand, but also think is a little unfortunate. Gill's Pyron costume for example is a hilarious visual mess, but also I think it looks awesome.
Colors Vs Costumes
Costumes are a lot of work to implement, so a lot of devs, most infamously in recent times is Arc Systems Works, barely bother. Or at least, I think the workload is why they generally haven't bothered. It doesn't make complete sense though when stuff like Super Sayain 1 Gogeta is literally used in-game, but is just not playable,
and when Videl of all characters straight up just got a selectable alternate costume;
So I assume there's maybe a little more to their reasoning. At least ArcSys is adding costumes in Grandblue Fantasy Versus Rising. Hopefully that's a sign of the future, and not just a one off thing.
I'd say it's not a competition whether colors or costumes are better since some games like Street Fighter 4, 5, and 6 give every costume multiple colors each, but in Smash Bros Ultimate specifically, colors and costumes actually did compete for slots since every character in that game only gets 8 alts total. Most shockingly to me, Fire Mario of all things got replaced by Wedding Mario from the transition from Smash 4 to Smash Ultimate (or at least that's the assumption since they're both white, and since he also lost and gained yellow Wario and Builder Mario alts respectively).
To entertain a (one sided) debate (with myself) just for a bit, I think I actually prefer alternate colors over costumes. Because alternate colors are innately much less work than alternate costumes, they tend to be much higher in quantity which I really appreciate, because the less options I have, the more likely I am just not end up liking any of my options, and not liking any of my options is the worst case scenario I think. And as I said before also, there's something to appreciate in their simplicity. There's simple costumes in some games though, and y'know what, Shark Hat Lebron is awesome.
It doesn't quite feel like his "essence" is changed like what I described alt palettes can do though.
Modded Costumes
When the costumes and/or color palettes in a game aren't enough, some people create (or just download) mods to look even better than what games normally allows. "Better" is subjective of course. I personally think a lot of mods are overrated and don't "look so good that they look official". I can still find plenty of stuff that I think looks good though, for example here's something that I like the look of, that I found by scrolling on GameBanana for just a few minutes:
Most games don't show your modded cosmetics to your opponents though, so modded costumes are pretty much for your eyes and your eyes alone (unless you upload videos or streams online). I personally prefer to have my opponents see my cosmetics, so I tend to prefer just using what's already in game.
You're also not just restricted to modding outfits. You can just totally overhaul models, and when you have that much freedom, you can outright change the character that's there. These pretty much always look amateurish, since making whole models that properly rigs to an already existing character's animations is really hard, but it can still be really cool to see just out of love for a character.
Kebako is so cool and epic :3
Clone Characters
I wasn't initially planning on talking about these since they tend to be past the line of just being cosmetic, but it felt weird to talk about character replacement mods while not acknowledging what's basically the same thing but official.
Most games tend to at least act like clone characters are their own characters, and they tend to have at least some sort of difference gameplay wise, but then Alph and the Koopalings in Smash are straight up just selected like they're costumes which is a little weird I think. The announcer and some text acknowledges their existence as individuals though.
My Favorite Color Palettes
To end off, here's a bunch of my favorite color palettes in fighting games (none of my favorite costumes since I don't play enough fighting games with costumes):
I wanna specially shout out Pyron, Arakune, and just any gradient blob characters in general because I think they look incredible with any color palette.
Unfortunately I don't have anything from Sonic Boom And The Smash Crew to share here, since that game doesn't let you properly select colors, so I barely remember any of them. Plus no one's documented them online, so without a computer at the moment I can't get pictures of any of them. Shout out to green Super Sonic, and blue The Right Colored Sonic I guess.
Feel free to share your favorite colors and costumes in the comments. I don't think you can put pictures there though, so just send links to images of them. Or don't. If you just tell me "Blah Blah Blah's 4th color in Blah Blah Blah 4" I can probably look it up, unless it's from something incredibly niche like Sonic Boom And The Smash Crew.
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