Awright, it's past midnight, I'm not drunk, but I can't fucking go to sleep and my brain is drawing a blank on how to continue this short story (not Dry Serial. That shit's something else) I told myself I'd finish this weekend but failed. So I might as well talk about something else that comes to mind: fighting games. In this particular one, I'm going to ask a question and hopefully get more than one comment in response from someone who's had a bad day and decides to take it out on me. *ahem*

Do you prefer realistic or not realistic fighting styles in your fightan gaems? On one hand, you look at fighters like Virtua Fighter 5, which based some of its fighters' fighting styles off of real-live martial arts from Aikido (Aoi) and Bājíquán (Akira) to Muay Thai (Brad) and Jeet Kune Do (Jacky). You've also got your UFC games which involve a lot of Brazilian Jiu-Jutsu a.k.a. "two guys grab-assing until one of them gets his opponent in a nasty arm-lock or choke hold."

(Full disclosure: this author has taken part in some BJJ lessons, and ended them in a lot of pain. Mostly his own.)

Perhaps the realistic fighting styles are cool because you can somewhat emulate them in real life. Sure, I can't exactly leap 10 feet into the air and backflip onto someone's face, but you do get a sense of where the power in a strike comes from, how the energy within your body needs to be twisted around. And it's cool, because it's a sense of art somewhat imitating life. Or something.

But on the other hand, there's plenty of fun to be had in fighting games with fake fighting styles, like the various Street Fighter titles including all the characters that shoot fireballs from their hands. Also, on a semi-related note, I've been having fun playing with BlazBlue, even though nothing in that game could quite be described as realistic let alone the fighting styles. I guess the argument could be made that if we limited our fighting games to having the characters imitate styles that could only be found in real life, it wouldn't be fun anymore. We wouldn't have teenage girls able to stand up against giant hulking cyborgs, or old men fighting fake green-skinned war gods. After all, ain't that what games are supposed to be about, having fun?

In defense of the first side, though, you could argue that such things are kinda childish escapism, whereas putting characters with realistic fighting styles actually could convince people young and old to look up and attend such classes about various martial arts in real life. We may not be able to fling fireballs from our hands, but with enough training and motivation we can disarm a charging bum with a knife and immobilize him in a matter of seconds.

What say you, collective Destructoid hive mind? Is it better to have cool fighting styles in videogames that are possible to emulate? Is it better to have wacky characters and magical projectiles? Or is the true answer somewhere in between? Feel free to leave your answer, I'm going to try getting some sleep again.