"Just go play practice mode. I have 300 hours just in practice" says some fucking Tekken superplayer or FGC oldhead. No fucking shit you do. At the high tier of play, practice mode with custom settings can be "fun" for some players. Or sort of fun anyway. But no beginner wants to sit through that shit. It's tedious as all hell. And practice mode STILL won't teach you anything about
how other human players play the game. In the current fighting game environment, only playing other players can teach you that. Now, if fighting games offered more tailored AI built around replays of expert players who have hundreds of recorded hours of game time to go off of, then fighting games could provide single-player content that wasn't totally useless to solo players. I know because I have a ton of hours in ghost match Tekken 6. It's super fun. You fight a match against a ghost and then you have a choice of 3 other ghosts to get matched with. Sure, they're all AI and kinda scrubby, and sometimes the AI will cheat inputs to counter you with bullshit (like ducking a jab perfectly). BUT! At least the devs
tried. Imagine how much better AI in fighting games could be if anyone cared enough to throw money/time/talent at the problem.
Even fighting games that try to offer single-player modes end up failing because their AI is so shit that all the modes become worthless. When every mode uses the same input-reading, jank AI, every mode is unusable. You end up with a scenario where the game has zero value offline/in single play, and only dubious value online if the connections are poor. Because playing in large amounts of lag will make you a worse player too.
It's not a surprise to me that a lot of the best players in the FGC are from Japan, Korea or parts of the US with a large arcade scene. The current model for fighting games is still running off that arcade design and it works fine there. But it doesn't work at all on home consoles.
And you know what would actually help new players get better at the game? Look at the fucking tutorial videos on jewtube to find out. The tutorial mode for a fighting game should have a simplified teaching tool that gets new players into games faster. It should be something like, "oh, you're playing Ken? Here are Ken's 10 best moves. Here are some reasons why they're so good." And the fucking tutorial should have voice overs where they tell you about the character and the moves while you're playing. You shouldn't have to read text for ants to play a vidya gaem. They should hire gootecks or one of those guys to design and voice every line in the tutorial. Then include an easy button you can press to make him repeat the last thing he said. And show picture-in-picture with it. Make this teaching tool compatible with every offline gameplay mode so you can enable it whenever.
It should be some microsoft help assistant shit. "Hey, it looks like you're trying to throw a fireball. Want some help with that?"
Except not annoying. You'd have to turn it on in options.
Finally, something that grinds my gears about fighting game tutorials is they never acknowledge tiers of either moves or characters. I have a couple of physical guides for tekken games (because I think they're neat to have) and the one for Tekken 5 DR was actually honest about tiers. Would straight up tell you which moves are good and which characters are super strong. Sure, tiers aren't a straightjacket, but they can be a helpful starting point for noobs to figure out which characters might be easier to pick up or which moves they should try to start learning to input reliably. A Mishima user who only plays solo will never learn that PEWGF is essential to his chosen character.