Would you pay $10 to listen to Ryan “coL|Filipino Champ” Ramirez talk about fighting games for almost four hours?

For most of you, the answer is probably “Nope!” But Champ and Ryan “gootecks” Gutierrez (with a little help from SoCal Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 player/commentator Genesis) have created an interesting instructional interview set in Fighting Game Mastery that is worth looking at for students of the street-fightin’ sweet science.

What you get for $10

Fighting Game Mastery is a set of six interviews with Filipino Champ, each about 40 minutes long. Each interview is dedicated to a different topic, starting off with Champ’s background and mental preparation for competition in the first section, then risk/reward analysis and the psychology of high-level play in the second; after that, Genesis and Champ talk Marvel for two chapters, Gootecks brings it back to Street Fighter IV in the fifth, and in the last “bonus” chapter Champ explains in detail how he likes to set up and use training mode.

The set costs $10 for just the audio, $15 to add a video version (the video is just a screencap of their Skype chat, as far as I can tell, with chapters for easy skipping around) and written transcript, or $75 for a deluxe version that includes admission to three one-hour “group Q&A training sessions” over Google Hangouts. I personally prefer reading to listening — I’m not much of a podcast listener, really — so I would have preferred the transcript, but if you are more into podcasts, save yourself the $5. Also, you can download a sample for free at the Fighting Game Mastery website.

Asking “why” instead of “how”

Frankly, I was skeptical at first; there are many top players who are great at playing games but not so great at talking about them, much less teaching them. But Champ gives an interesting interview; one minute he’ll be talking about some high-level theoretical concepts, and the next minute he’ll be walking through his step-by-step thought process for a specific situation in the Phoenix-Vergil matchup.

As someone who voraciously devours any educational materials I can find on fighting games, I really liked how Champ describes how he thinks about fighting games, and why he does what he does. But it’s definitely not for everyone — if you come in expecting finely-detailed instruction, you’ll be disappointed. Fighting Game Mastery isn’t an instructional video in the sense that we see them in fitness or martial arts, for example. It’s less about specifics and more about concepts.

You won’t finish listening to Fighting Game Mastery and think, “Now I am a better player than I was before,” or even “Wow, I learned a whole bunch of very specific things about Marvel”. Rather than teach you how he gets out of Flocker’s 50/50 Zero mixups, he’ll talk about how he avoids letting Flocker set them up in the first place. Of course, that isn’t as specific or immediately applicable as Blocking Zero Mixups 101, but it’s still plenty useful if you spend a lot of time thinking about how to get better at fighting games.

Needs an editor

Fighting Game Mastery needs an editor. “Four hours long” might sound like a bonus to some people, but for me, that’s an additional cost beyond the $10. The interviews aren’t particularly well structured, and there isn’t really a clear big picture — a “What are you trying to teach, exactly?” — which makes it hard to listen to without a healthy dose of patience and a willingness to keep listening until Champ gets to something useful.

Gootecks asks, “So, can you define the ‘neutral game’?” and Champ responds with a long, convoluted answer that doesn’t really define the neutral game, but does show how he thinks about it in a way that is useful to someone who is already familiar with the idea. Genesis asks what Champ thinks about Doctor Doom’s foot dive; I think, “There’s no way Champ could possibly have anything interesting to say about the foot dive”. Five minutes later, it turns out I did learn something new about the foot dive, but it probably could have been cut down to 30 seconds.

To be sure, there was a lot that I found useful. Champ describes his training routines, like playing three-out-of-five sets even during casuals, setting little mini-goals like “Win six straight” against people who aren’t that competitive against him, and using hecklers in stream chat as a proxy for tournament stress. He talks about how he decides to block or go for a throw tech based on how far ahead or behind he is in life, about the difference between “air control”- and “ground control”-based teams in Marvel, about working around Dormammu’s poor ground mobility, about how he mentally categorizes new players when he goes up against them for the first time.

But it takes time, and you just have to kind of trust that he’ll get there eventually. It’s kind of like having a good conversation over a burrito with a top player who just happens to be your good buddy, except it’s four hours long, you’re paying for his burrito, and when you ask him a question he might not really answer it but will drop a whole lot of other useful knowledge along the way. Champ is really good at describing his thought process clearly and illustrating it with actual examples from his matches and others; I just wish Gootecks and company would have condensed the four hours down to two.

Is Fighting Game Mastery worth it?

You know that feeling you get when you’re coming home from a tournament and you realize that you’ve been thinking about fighting games all wrong? At its best, Fighting Game Mastery is kind of like that; you get to listen to Champ describe his perspective on fighting games, and depending on where you are in your fighting game career, the way he describes footsies in Marvel or something will change the way you think of playing the game, or cause you to pay attention to a factor you didn’t know to pay attention to before. Personally, I don’t think that’s a bad deal for $10, as it’s kind of a neat shortcut into the top player mindset, which is something you can’t necessarily discover by yourself in training mode.

The main criticism I have of Fighting Game Mastery is that it just feels a little lazy. I feel okay about paying $10 for a long Skype recording; I’d feel better about paying $20 for a version that was shorter and included relevant gameplay videos to accompany the interview. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a better start than I had expected.