It’s the bane offighting gamefans worldwide: button-mashing. The act of randomly pressing buttons as fast as you may draws ire because it doesn’t take skill, and it doesn’t take thought: it’s the equivalent of desperately floundering over your controller.
Most games don’t reward button-mashing, and many even take active measures against it. Particularly in genres that depend on rapid inputs, like fighting games and hack-and-slash. Developers often ensure that random button presses aren’t rewarding, so you’ll be forced tolearn the controls. However, there are some games that actually do reward button-mashing, whether unintentionally or by design, so let’s take a look at them.
The World Ends With You is an iconic RPG that’s a time capsule to the 2000s. Its vibrant visual style, abundance of interactions and rich story belie a combat system that’s deceptively simple.
Though you ostensibly make use of different degrees of tapping and swiping the touch screen to do attacks, the truth is that you can just set all your attacks to tap-activated pins and pepper the touch-screen with your stylus or finger, and get the same result out of it: there’s no penalty for a missed input. However, despite its somewhat simple combat,TWEWY is cool enoughthat you should play it anyway.
Quick-time eventswere among the most oft-derided aspects of 2000s gaming, and many Resident Evil fans see the sixth entry as the point where the series went overboard with these mini-games. While the fourth and fifth RE games required accurate and timely button presses to pass timed events, RE6 just encouraged wearing down your controller.
This is especially true if you lose the same QTE a few times: perhaps as a quality-of-life feature, lower difficulties had it that you could eventually pass a QTE by randomly pressinganybutton, not even the one prompted, allowing you to button-mash your way through.
The third Tekken title is often seen as the point of consolidation for the series' mechanics, and among the PS1’s best fighting games. In terms of graphics, music and gameplay, the game is unmatched in its entire console generation.
Despite all that acclaim, the characterEddy Gordoproves divisive to this day, because he would allow fighting game rookies to win matches just by mashing buttons. It wasn’t because of any mechanic implemented into the game: Tekken 3 just had so many combos that pressing buttons in any order could make cool stuff happen. Eddy, due to many of his moves relying on face button inputs alone, just did it the most.
While Tekken 8 features a Special style which lets you do complex combos by button mashing, it also places you at a massive disadvantage by limiting your move set.
5BlazBlue: Continuum Shift 2
2D fighters carry an unforgiving reputation, with many requiring actual dedicated study before you’ll win in versus mode. A lot of would-be fans are discouraged from playing the genre due to its high barrier of entry and the time investment it requires.
To circumvent this, many 2D fighters in the late 2000s and early 2010s started implementing a different control scheme which simplified the inputs required for powerful moves. While this is balanced in many games, and you’ll have to learn the actual control scheme to beat skilled opponents, BlazBlue: Continuum Shift 2’s Stylish mode just lets you mash your way to victory. The one caveat is that the in-game tutor, Rachel Alucard, says the mode is meant for infants.
BlazBlue: Central Fiction introduced a more balanced scheme where attacks were more powerful if done with proper inputs, rather than Stylish mode.
The Shenmue series saw a short-lived revival in 2019 with Shenmue 3. With an 18-year gap between the second entry and the third, developer Ys Net decided to do away with the Virtua Fighter-esque combat system of the first two entries.
Instead, when you get your first combat tutorial in Shenmue 3, it encourages you to just press any of the face buttons. The directional inputs of the first two games are gone. Though blocking still plays a role in harder difficulties, the combat of Shenmue 3 lacks the depth of its predecessors.
Button-mashing is frowned upon in fighting games, and for the most part Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3 keeps it on the straight and narrow. If you’re the type to rest once you’ve completed your inputs, however, you’re missing out on extra damage.
If you execute a hyper attack that has multiple hits, you may squeeze a little extra damage out of it by mashing all the face buttons as fast as possible during the attack. With how narrow some victories can be, you should make use of this as much as possible.
2WWE 2K18
TheWWE serieshas experienced a lot of flip-flops between button-mashing and skill-based minigames when it comes to pins and submission holds. After the previous entry went with the skill-based mini-game, WWE 2K18 returned to the most definitive form of button-mashing seen in the series yet.
During submission holds, all you have to do is mash the buttons as much as possible. If you’re doing the submission hold, you’ll be more likely to make your opponent tap. If you’re the one being held, you’ll have a better chance of breaking out.
If you find the button-mashing submission system annoying, you can change it to one that requires you to waggle the controller’s stick. WWE 2K24 changes the system to tapping or holding a single button. You can switch between the two modes depending on your preference.
Anime fighters are among the most routinely criticized for lacking depth in their combat. Dragon Ball Fighterz circumvents those criticisms: the game was developed by Arc System Works, a developer with a stellar portfolio of fighting games, and it draws on Guilty Gear and Marvel Vs Capcom for its mechanics.
That said, the fact of the matter is that the FighterZ fandom had to makea wiki articleto teach frustrated veterans how to win against button-mashers. Dragon Ball FighterZ allows for huge combos with up to 30 hits, and mashing buttons is one way to get them.
