Skullgirls Review

 

Skullgirls is a fighting game initially released April 12, 2012, over a decade ago. As I have been doing research on the series for my next death prediction, I thought I'd give this series a review.

I'd like to give a caveat first. I might not be the ideal person to review this. I'm not actually that much of a gamer. I am not going to very well be able to review the gameplay of Skullgirls. Instead this is more so a review of the story of Skullgirls. Also spoilers. 

So I want to talk first about what I think are the best quality about Skullgirls. A little later I will talk about the more admirable quality of Skullgirls, which is a separate point. The best quality about Skullgirls is something that extends across the entirety of it, bleeding into every aspect; it has the ability to incorporate the best aspects of both Animism and Formalism.

Scott McCloud first developed the idea of the four artistic campfires, with Animists and Formalists being on opposite ends, thus being some of the hardest to synergize. 

Animism is the drive to create content and substance; characters and plot, to recreate the appeal of genre elements. As such Animist works best represent the iconic feel of a genre, forming it's backbone, and called the most important quadrant by Scott McCloud because it attracts the majority of people to a genre. Animist works speak to people at the broadest level and focus on creating relatable and compelling characters, and gripping plots. However, at its worst Animist works can risk becoming cliché and predictable as it reproduces the elements that make up a genre.

Formalism is the drive to experiment with genre and medium, to test what a genre can do and experiment with it. It's focused on presentation, on style, on the way genre elements can be expressed, and are usually especially interesting to hardcore fans of a genre already. At its best Formalist works can be revolutionary and can expand the very idea of what a work in a genre CAN be. However, Formalist works risk feeling cold or shallow, focused on novelty and experimentation at the risk of story. 

What I think Skullgirls does better than anything else is that it manages to evoke the best of these two opposites quadrants. It has both style AND substance, it's well built on a fundamental level, yet also expressed in a distinctive and flashy way. It is like food that is both hearty and filling while also being an explosion of flavor. This dichotomy bleeds into every aspect of the game. 

Skullgirls cast, for instance, is a perfect example of this dichotomy. The characters are all interesting and compelling archetypes, many of which have a complete character arc despite not that much time to establish such, yet they are also unique among their genre due to their massive distinctive designs and allusions. To go over some personal favorites of mine for instance; Valentine is a secondary villain of the game known for her pragmaticism and wit, who despite her lacking in power, managed to maneuver herself into a position to assassinate the dreaded Skullgirl, the threat to the world, through personal sacrifices, emotionally caught between being forced to work for her most hated enemy and the needs of the greater good. Yet she is also a stereotypical Halloween Nurse costume; with exaggerated revealing seductive build and costume and intimidating mad science elements. Beowulf is a washed up pro wrestler who wishes to regain his own fame and glory, only to find his legendary win was actually a sham. Despite this he refuses to let this discourage him, and rises to not only regain his old status but to surpass it becoming a true hero. He's also themed around the Norse Legend of Beowulf who uses wrestling themed abilities and calls his fans the "Wolfpack." Annie of the Stars is an eternally youthful girl who lost her sense of hope and optimism who has to slowly regain her sense of heroism from seeing the heroism of normal people and her friends. She's also a star-themed magical girl who uses magical girl type powers and has an actual Magical Girl transformation from the power of friendship and her story has shades of the Sailor Cosmos subplot of the Stars arc. The shared quality all of these have is that they combine style and substance. That they have a compelling character arc central to their story, yet presented in a dynamic and interesting way.

The plot, or plots as it were (more on that later), are similarly established. The cutscenes of the story are presented in comic book format with static images with caption boxes appearing at the bottom of the screen represent the characters speech. Initially these didn't have voice acting, though now voice acted has been added to most of them, as of the time of writing. These plots share this same synergy. Many of them are at their core fairly conventional plots for the genre. Painwheel's story is a story of a human turned into a monster and regaining her humanity. Parasoul's is an elder sibling trying to protect her younger sibling after the death of their parents. Ms. Fortune is the avenging apparition story of revenge and forgiveness, hunting down the killers of her gang and having to learn the ultimate necessity of forgiveness. These are not stories that seek to upend their genre or subvert expectations, but are moreso stories that are firmly planted in the conventions of the genre with allusions to many other works. I've mentioned already Annie is a reference to the Magical Girl genre, especially to Sailor Moon. Peacock is mentioned as having started Detective Comics. There is a recurring locale called Little Innsmouth, an obvious reference to H. P. Lovecraft and so on. What makes these plots special is that they are well told stories conventionally but are also presented in interesting stylish ways. 

This duality is clearest in Skullgirl's most immediate eye-catching quality, it's aesthetic

Skullgirls aesthetic is one of the first things mentioned in almost every review of Skullgirls. The series aesthetic is referred to as "Dark Deco", an aesthetic popularized by Batman: The Animated Series in which backgrounds were drawn on dark paper, and black objects were left unpainted on, creating a moody atmosphere of danger, mystery, and adultness. Skullgirls visuals resemble that of the Golden Age of Film. It's a very distinctive aesthetic but one that is not only a major element of Skullgirls' successes but also blends well into plot and characters. 

This aesthetic works very well for Skullgirls story which is a fairly adult world with monstrous and sexual entities comprising half the cast, many of whom having dark events in their backstories. The Dark Deco style compliments this well as the dark default creates an atmosphere of rebellion against a vicious world as well as a mysterious occult feel that coincidences well with an era where the biggest horror movies were Occult Chillers and supernatural belief was high. Skullgirls aesthetics shares its strength with the rest of the game, creating a fittingly cohesive synergy. It balances style and substance.

 The characters obviously are extremely distinctive looking even for its genre, but it's also designed with an almost indulgent care towards the framework, as unusually every single frame of the characters motions are traditionally animated. At the 2014 GDC the lead animator for Skullgirls gave a talk about making good animations for fighting games that show the level of thought done on the fundamentals.

Skullgirls has other things to love about it, although many of them I feel are doable in part because it does strike such a difficult to attain balance of style and substance. A personal love of mine are series in which different tones, genres, or mediums can be referenced or included. This is generally hard for most series to do however because generally these clash and create a mess where it seems like they have no connection. It would be hard for most series to have an Egyptian Egoist carrying a Parasite that controls blood and gruesomely murders people fight a silly catgirl robot that wants to take over the world with memes. The reason Skullgirls can do this however is because it has such a distinctive style to its own. In part of because of its strong Aesthetic sense, and in part due to focus on creating a cohesive mood and world painted atop it, Skullgirls is very good at incorporating bits and pieces from history, mythology, and pop culture as it sees fit.

Another facet of Skullgirls I haven't personally experienced but which I understand how big a deal it is that Skullgirls is praised for is its ability to be a gateway into the fighting game genre. Fighting Games are one of those genres it's hard to get into as it's a massive jump from being not good at them to being somewhat good at them. Skullgirls is routinely praised for its innovations to help new players including one of, if not the best tutorial in the genre which goes in heavy detail into all kinds of fighting game concepts in a typical Skullgirls stylish charming way, as well as for the ability to play a variable number of characters between one and three. While in most games of the genre both players have a set number of characters they play at once, in Skullgirls you can choose a number up to three, with the characters capabilities shifted to be balanced. This also significantly improves the experience for people new to the genre as it means you can start just by learning one character and being able to transition at your leisure into using multiple characters, plus is just an immense quality of life addition. Skullgirls has actually be noted by several reviewers and let's players as having made them better at fighting games in general because it's so friendly to newcomers without losing the ability to be a competitive high-level game. This ability to start just by learning one character is reinforced by the fact that you can actually play the characters stories in any order you pick. While this is not unique to the genre, it does reinforce the overall design philosophy of giving players options and being welcoming to all levels of skill.

However that does bring up one of my two significant criticisms of Skullgirls. The first of these is really moreso a preference, something that has advantages and disadvantages but which I personally prefer the alternate route.

It's a common conceit in fighting games that you can play through an arcade mode with each character who has their own unique ending that may contradict each other, and are viewed as equally valid alternate possibilities. Skullgirls goes a step further and in the story mode every single character's route is an alternate reality and therefore are not necessarily "what happened" or connected to each other. This has some immediate advantages. It means that characters aren't tethered to dramatic events in one route. It means the writers have maximal flexibility to create whatever scenarios they think will be most fun or most affecting. As an example, and spoilers, at the end of her route, Robo-Fortune causes a robot-cat apocalypse while still making cat puns. You obviously can't do that if you want the other characters' routes, or at least any that don't take place prior to not revolve around this.

However the downside is that the events from different routes are harder to build onto each as they are each somewhat mutually exclusive meant to be watched in any order, and events can lose their impact because it isn't going to be reflected in anything else afterwards. The primary plot of Skullgirls focuses around the Skullheart, a wish-granting artifact that turns one into the destroyer of the world, the Skullgirl, if one's wish is not pure and selfless. Numerous character endings have what should be the biggest possible event in the context of Skullgirl's world of either destroying the Skullheart temporarily ending its cycle of destruction or making a wish on the Skullheart and being turned into the Skullgirl. These events should have immense consequences but don't because they won't be referenced after. Similarly other events like beating Double and/or Valentine, a pair of secondary villains, happened in so many stories that it lost a degree of meaning and eroded their sense of threat as antagonists.

To make a comparison, it's like DC Comics. DC Comics has a mainline Earth, Earth-1 that is its standard continuity meant to go on forever but it also has Elseworlds, alternate Earths with their own limited runs of comics. These Elseworlds very often contain dramatic events like the deaths or change in morality of major DC Characters because its an interesting emotional experience to see or concept to explore, that they don't need to keep as part of the continuity. Elseworlds are very fun, they have a large market especially for people who don't normally read DC as they are self-contained and can explore lots of possibilities, but I personally prefer DC's mainline continuity.

That actually ties well into both my other major criticism of Skullgirls, something I think perhaps even its biggest fan might agree with me on, as well as the thing I think is most admirable about Skullgirls.

Skullgirls is actually supposed to have a main story mode, a main canon that will be everyone's story, an equivalent to what I was speaking about. This is still supposedly the same game as the one released in 2012, but updated sporadically for over a decade on things the developers wanted to put in. Skullgirls was released over a decade ago and only recently has Marie, the main antagonist, as playable character and the main story been announced. Skullgirls has unfortunately included a lot of game elements over a very long period of time which can be frustrating and has been bad for the games overall momentum according to major players in the Skullgirls scene like Patrick Kelly "KenInBlack." Releasing updates and game elements piecemeal over a decade is painful and when large developers do this it's considered an immoral attempt to make more money through DLC. However Skullgirls was not made by a large developer. The late game reviewer Totalbiscuit commented on this in his video about Skullgirls (in Beta) commenting that it seems like a Triple A Fighting Game with an oddly small roster (at the time nine.) But the reason the roster is so small is because it wasn't made by a Triple A studios, it was made by an indie team and the fact that the entire game was so polished as to appear was actually very impressive.  And this real life story is probably the most admirable thing about Skullgirls 

Skullgirls despite being one of the most highly praised Fighting Games to be released has had numerous real world difficulties. Skullgirls early on had legal problems with a legal dispute from Konami, a company that makes multi-billion dollar revenues annually, driving off investors with the key team of Skullgirls working unpaid for a year on the project to keep it alive. It would later force LabZero to remove Skullgirls from Playstation Network and Xbox live forcing them to essentially rebuild the game from the ground up as Skullgirls Encore without the Konami affiliation. Tournament attendance was hard to keep up and in January of 2013 at the last Skullgirls was outbid by a pair of $10,000 donations to appear as the last game for Evo 2013 by Super Smash Bros Melee. Player passion was still hype LabZero was out of funds by this point, and relied purely on a crowd-funding campaign to keep the game development alive, though the passion of the fans was intense enough that they received over five and a half times the amount of money they set as a goal. Even this would not be the end as major controversies would break out about the lead developer Mike Z, and major events that set to showcase Skullgirls were canceled for a combination of reasons. Skullgirls is a game that in any normal course of events would not have survived, and only did due to sheer passion of its fanbase and developers. This has caused Akshon Esports, the channel I'm getting most of this real world information from to describe Skullgirls as "The Fighting Game That Refuses to Die" and is why the "main story" has taken so long to come out.

One of the things that reoccurs a lot in Skullgirls is the conflict between an adult cynicism and the wisdom of children and optimism. One of the characters, Painwheel, was a girl turned into a monsterous rage machine having her innocent childhood stripped from her. Another character, a character similarly given enhancements is Peacock themed around cartoons who is an emblem of youth, optimism, and hope in everything she does. And the game states clearly that Peacock who was not even primarily made to be a weapon is nontheless far stronger against the Skullheart, both because she's physically powerful, and also because she has a childlike spirit that isn't tricked by the Skullheart's deception. Similarly two of the newest character story modes added; Umbrella and Annie both heavily feature this dichitomy and conclusion with Umbrella's being the story of a young girl trying to show the adult world around her the value of childish exploration, and Annie's being the story of a girl with the spirit of a wizened cynic ironically trapped in the body of an eternally young girl having to rediscover that spirit in order to save her friends and re-embody the values she once had.

Formalism and Animism are a hard duality to balance, but the rare times I see it, I ALWAYS find an absolutely, passionately, fanatically devoted fanbase. Why? Despite the fact that my understanding of the gameplay side of Skullgirls is not the best, this question and its answer seems to tie into why people so passionately love Skullgirls and into Skullgirls recurring theme of the wisdom of youthful optimism and idealism based on the discussion of both its gameplay and story. 

Skullgirls in gameplay, like in story, is not radically different from other games in its genre. It bears striking familiarity in fact to the Marvel vs Capcom series of games. It's not an attempt to deconstruct the genre the way Divekick. But because it's presented in a creative and new way, giving players new options and shown in an original audio-visual language, it recreates the sense of newness in the familiarity. It makes one feel like a child again, rediscovering all the joys they have with the genre, where it feels like anything is possible, where everything old is new and exciting again. To a child, a simple towel can be a superhero cape, a stick can be a mighty sword, and every day can be a new adventure. Likewise to the people writing Skullgirls a mobility based fighter can be an anti-hero nurse super-soldier with sex appeal and mad science, a rushdown fighter can be a cute zombie girl with a little dragon coming out of her body which has a musical thing, and a spacing character can be a remade orphan girl whose a symbol of hope with toonforce powers and themed after a bird. 

It is this passion and optimism that allowed Skullgirls to be born and the secret to its immortality in the face of so many real world difficulties. Skullgirls as an artistic piece both in gameplay and story is a testament to the limitless possibility the world has if one can look at that which is old and familiar through the eyes of hope and optimism.