Author's Rant: My troubles with Mugen as a single player.

Mugen is a fighting game engine that's free to download and use, while it is a game engine originally most people will know it as the everything vs everything fighter that has tons of content just waiting to be downloaded and played. The engine is used more like a game with modded content, authors create stages for characters to fight on, characters that do the fighting, and even whole UI changes in the form of screen packs and lifebar skins. The content is vast and growing to this day as new content is being created so in theory, this would make Mugen like the ultimate fighting game. But there is just one problem, unless you bring a friend along for local multiplayer you’re stuck fighting the AI now AI in Mugen comes in a few types, the Default Mugen AI that just spams buttons and special moves that while unpredictable also aren’t that intelligent. Then you have the Automatic AI that brutally performs the same AI-perfected combo on you with no chance of the AI dropping their combo until your dead. While human-friendly AI that challenges you without overwhelmingly owning you exist, there sadly hard to come by. While some AIs have what I call a Configuration file that lets you lower the difficulty of extremely powerful AIs but sadly that's not always the case for AI code.

Another problem you’re faced as an active player of Mugen is balance issues, see while there are tons of characters that are made/ported as Mugen content their not all going to play nicely from a game balance perspective. I personally prefer the SNK or King of Fighters characters, their four-button setup feels approachable for a noob like me, but sadly there aren’t many KOF-styled characters from the IPs I want. There are tons of different styles of gameplay characters can have that it’s impossible to perfectly balance them around each other. Air dashing characters will have more mobility than characters without one and mechanics like Burst that break you out of a combo will no doubt be strong and make characters with them more powerful than characters without a burst. Then you have to consider things like different kinds of mechanics like Parries and other stuff am sure are out there. Simply put if you clash styles balance issues will turn up.

While most enjoy Mugen as a spectator sport pairing their favorite characters against each other in AI vs AI battles I personally wished Mugen was a bit easier to balance for a Player vs AI experience. I may not be good at fighting games but I do enjoy the idea of the ultimate fighter that lets me fight against my favorite characters while having a wide amount of stages to fight in. I don’t know why Mugen isn’t more popular but am guessing the super hard AIs and the existence of balanced and polished fighting games out there make Mugen look a bit janky in comparison. I even got to the point of just giving up on making a single-player-friendly Mugen Build and using my Mugen as an AI battle game as almost nothing out there has an AI made for a human player. What's more, Mugen has quite a learning curve in learning how to add the content into the game, you have to put characters in the chars folder, You got to put the stages into the stages folder. Sure am making it sound simple and once you learn the ropes of adding content it is pretty simple but tedious when I add and playtest characters at the same time. What's more, you have to make edits in text files if you don’t plan on using programs made for Mugen like VSelect or Stage Def Editor. By the way, be careful of where you download characters and stuff from, thankfully I never encountered a virus or malware but that's because I look at the file sizes before downloading a character. Inclosing Mugen is best experienced as a spectator sport if you don’t have friends to play it with, plus there are better official fighters out there that have decent enough AI for beginners to fight against.