The Real Games That Influence Battles Beneath the Stars

Reality Behind Fiction

Battles Beneath the Stars is a project made out of love for fighting games and their narratives. So for the anniversary month of the Warthog Report, I’m going to use this edition of ‘Let Me Talk To You About’ to cover some of the different fighting games it is in conversation with.

Super Smash Bros

It’s no surprise to anyone who knows me that my interest in fighting games and their narratives started with Smash Bros, specifically Super Smash Bros Melee. You might say ‘but Melee has no narrative,' to which I respond that aside from the very loose one present in adventure mode, there was the one my siblings and I created.

All I’ll say about my family’s custom story for Melee was that Peach of all characters was the main villain. We thought she was the strongest character, fighting her on the highest difficulty was the kind of event that required a team up. And Super Smash Bros was also my introduction to online fanfiction communities. So it has quite a sizable role in my development as a writer. I was always looking for and telling stories within the game.

Then Super Smash Bros Brawl came out, boasting a sweeping cinematic story, the Subspace Emissary. I love the Subspace Emissary, and my appreciation for it has only increased with time, especially how it managed to establish fun crossover dynamics with minimal dialogue.

Battles Beneath the Stars specifically came from the desire to make a game like Super Smash Bros while feeling unable to do so. I wrote multiple design docs for it that I doubted I’d ever be able to make. Writing out the story helps make it a touch more real.

In a way some of my Smash Bros fanworks and even the stories crafted by/with my siblings could be considered prototypes or ancestors of Battles Beneath the Stars, since they worked actual matches in the game into the plot.

Soulcalibur

Soul Calibur III was my introduction to the series, though I didn’t really know how to play it at the time. The button inputs in cutscenes always confused me since it used the game’s own button system instead of the ones on the controller. Like any button masher playing Soul Calibur, Kilik was my go to character.

Despite my lack of skill with the game, I was deeply into the story it presented. Soul Calibur is a historical fantasy set in the late 1500s. The driving force of the narrative is Soul Edge, an evil sentient soul consuming sword with corruptive powers so great even a shard of it can bring about tragedy.

Each character has their own reason for pursuing Soul Edge, revenge, redemption, power, and so on. Soul Edge and its servants also have their own goals to accomplish. In III you got to follow each character’s story mode, with decisions that lead you down different paths towards the same endings.

Seeing all of the different stories for the characters and reading up on their history and fighting style through the in game profiles drew me into their world. There are a variety of narratives to follow, Sophitia’s quest to protect her family from Soul Edge’s corruption, Lizardman’s descent to madness, Setsuka’s vengeful hunt for the man who killed her mentor, and others.

The worldbuilding, especially through fighting styles, is something I’ve tried to take in for Battles Beneath the Stars with the character profiles. The use of a tournament also stems in part from wishing that there would be more direct overlap in the different Soulcalibur storylines. Each fighter being on their own journey all over Europe and Asia makes it hard for them to interact.

Persona 4 Arena

Persona 4 Arena was quite the surprise when it was announced, a fighting game spin-off of a JRPG series. A focus on story was promised early on after the announcement, and in my opinion the game delivered.

The game’s narrative is structured in a somewhat unusual way. You play through different character’s stories and unlock more to play through, but all of them cut off halfway through. Then once the player finally unlocks and completes the story of Labrys, which reveals the full backstory of the game, players are able to go in and see the final half of each character’s story. I believe the original Blazblue, made by the same developer, also uses that structure, but I haven’t played it.

Each Persona game stands separately from each other, so one thing I appreciated was that the game is also a bit of a crossover through the appearance of Persona 3 characters. Part of the story’s appeal is seeing the older versions of the Persona 3 cast and their interactions with the Persona 4 characters. Unfortunately some characters ended up being written rather unfaithfully.

The importance of Persona 4 Arena for me is that it was the first time I made a serious attempt to learn how to play a traditional fighting game. Which ultimately led me towards the spaces online where people discussed the design of fighting games and their narratives.

Battles Beneath the Star takes the ‘internal crossover’ part of Persona 4 Arena, where characters who inhabited different parts of the same world with their own stories finally meet. Though this is only apparent to me and a few friends.

There’s also a similarity in the structure of the narrative, where it starts at the same place before diverging for each character. Except in Battles Beneath the Stars that starting point is covered in a separate prologue before you pick your character, while in Persona 4 Arena you see each character’s perspective on events before reaching the point of divergence, which had the drawback of making some scenes rather repetitive since you read them four times.

Guilty Gear

In the latest Guilty Gear games, the story mode does not involve any gameplay. It’s essentially a movie that comes free with the fighting game. I’m the kind of person who thinks people that complain about long cutscenes are weak, but when I sit down to play a video game and pick a mode, I want to play a video game, not watch a movie.

And I find this approach emblematic of the true problem with fighting game stories, the big developers don’t want to tell fighting game stories. Every video game genre has to blend narrative with gameplay. Making characters in a fighting game with no reason to fight is like making an Ace Attorney character with no connection to a crime or the legal system, the only thing about the genre it shows is a failure to understand it.

Fighting games don’t work well when typical action movie plots are shoved into them, because the genre is fundamentally about ensembles. I think the very idea of a fighting game having a designated ‘main character’ beyond who they show on the cover is at odds with how fighting games work. There’s a reason the character a player defaults to is known as their ‘main.’

That’s why even though it’s not a real video game, I made sure to weave the imaginary gameplay of Battles Beneath the Stars into the story. Because I wrote it as a fighting game story, and it frustrates me how most of the big fighting game developers aren’t interested in fighting game stories. The focus on designing for esports did a lot to remove what made fighting games really compelling for me.

To be clear there are other parts of the recent Guilty Gears that I do like, I even compete in weekly tournaments for the latest game, Guilty Gear Strive. And the character theme songs are excellent at representing the characters and make me wish I could do something like that for Battles Beneath the Stars. It’s not often that I associate songs with my characters, but The Disaster of Passion is one of two songs I associate with Aodh (specifically after his story).

I don’t like being negative, especially when discussing someone else’s work relative to my own. But the fact is that Battles Beneath the Stars is a conscious attempt to push back against the likes of Guilty Gear Strive in terms of how fighting games approach narrative and how those stories are perceived. Sometimes being in conversation with something means arguing against it.

Schwarzerblitz

Schwarzerblitz is an indie fighting game that focuses on single player, including a story mode. The plot follows various characters a year after the mysterious Black Lightning Incident, where a power plant blew up and destroyed an entire city.

You don’t follow just one character in story mode, chapters switch focus between different groups of characters. You’re free to select any chapter you currently have unlocked, and there are cases where multiple chapters will unlock at once. This lets you decide which plotlines you want to prioritize. In my case I always went for chapters related to members of the Fishface Crime Syndicate as soon as they unlocked.

After a certain point in story mode, you’ll have to clear arcade mode at least once to unlock the next chapter. However, each character’s arcade mode ending is part of the story, so completing it with everyone will show you the full picture. And some chapters require earning specific arcade endings to be unlocked. This offers another way for you to make choices about which storylines you’re most invested in.

While I don’t think it was intended as a person’s first fighting game, the focus on narrative as a reason to play makes it a perfect introduction if you’re like me and prefer games with some actual story in them. You can go into options and reduce the AI difficulty to make it easier as well.

Playing Schwarzerblitz made me conclude that I needed to make the fights in Battles Beneath the Stars more distinctive. In Schwarzerblitz many story mode fights come with special conditions that help convey the narrative, and it’d be weaker without them. That’s something I’ve been making a conscious effort to imitate.

Schwarzerblitz has a similar background to Battles Beneath the Stars in a way, since it’s set in the same world as a series of books written by the developer (which are in Italian with no English translation). Except in this case the fighting game is real. There are also various epilogue short stories available on the game’s official discord, which has made me contemplate something similar as a possible bonus for this substack.

And did I mention that the game is free? As well as the creator’s other fighting games set in the same universe, Motionsickness and Exploding Judo Federation. There’s no barrier of entry to giving it a try.

Merfight: Curse of the Arctic Prince

This game has a rather obvious way it intersects with Battles Beneath the Stars, I’m helping edit it. While I haven’t consciously been influenced by it like with Schwarzerblitz, as an editor I’ve had to think about the story mode so much it’d be more of a surprise if none of that ended up influencing Battles Beneath the Stars.

Merfight is set in a constructed world where in the distant past some cosmically dramatic events resulted in all sea life being forced to the land and all other forms of life dying off. Like with Battles Beneath the Stars, getting players/readers up to speed on all the relevant worldbuilding has been a concern throughout the writing process.

Working on Merfight has been interesting in that I get to actually apply all of my thoughts on fighting game narratives, but only as an editor working on someone else’s story. It’s easy to become blind to your own story, so there have been times where after sending in feedback on Merfight’s narrative I stop and wonder if I may need my own advice.

As of this writing the game is still in early access, meaning that you can play it but it’s still in development. And story mode has yet to be released, meaning there’s not much I could or should say about its contents. Expect to hear when the game gets a full release, as I’m eager for people to experience the story of Merfight for themselves. And maybe there will be some parallels with Battles Beneath the Stars that I haven’t noticed.

There are even more fighting games I could discuss, but if I keep going on with this it will just turn into a list of fighting games and fighting game trends that I have opinions on. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but I hope reading it has given a clearer understanding of both what I look for in fighting game narratives and what I’m aiming to achieve with Battles Beneath the Stars.