Grappler Hate is Unwarranted

Just don't get grabbed

Don’t Get Scooped

Every fighting game has that one character whose entire mission in life is to get next to you and hug you to death. We call those grapplers. They fit a very specific niche in the fighting game world, with their win condition. They’re meant to be high-risk high-reward characters that have a tough time getting in, but once they’re in, they throw you in a vortex of guesses where one mistake will cost you half your health. Two mistakes means you’re probably dead.

This leads to players fuming. Seething, wailing and even obnubilating. This can’t be right. They played perfectly yet they got grabbed once and it’s all over? It can’t be! Grapplers are garbage!

At least that seems to be the general sentiment on the internet. One which I disagree with. Grapplers are an archetype like any other, and they need to be played around. They fill an important niche in fighting games, and the hate they get is unwarranted. Due to many factors, one of them being that grapplers kinda suck, and that’s coming form a grappler player.

Definition

The most basic definition of a grappler is a character who has special throws. The character’s gameplan revolves around using these, usually very damaging, special throws to get through their opponent’s defense. They’re usually on the slow side, with slow walk speeds and poor dashes or other mobility options. This is to offset their explosive potential, since they pretty much win if they get within sniffing distance of their opponent, so they have to have some trade-off. There are slight variations character-to-character, but to qualify as a grappler they have to have a grab that’s central to their existence. The other attributes are there as a way to balance them, but it’s not a necessary component of the archetype.

Anyone who throws their opponent for a living has Zangief to thank. Almost every archetype comes from Street Fighter II, and the grappler is no exception. He burst on into the scene in a red speedo and challenged players with his weird 360 degree input motion, where you had to spin the stick around to get access to his Spinning Pile Driver. If done correctly, you’d get an unblockable grab that took you and your opponent into the air before slamming them head-first into the concrete for a ridiculous amount of damage.

I’ll interject with a quick “um actually” here. Zangief was the first fighting game grappler. The title of the first grappler goes to Mike Haggar from Final Fight, released two years before Street Fighter. He was a slow, lumbering powerhouse who could grab his enemies, carry them around and slam them for big damage. On with the rest of the essay.

Zangief’s Spinning Pile Driver (SPD, for short), is what started an entire sub-genre of character. With one grab, you could delete a third of an opponent’s life bar. That’s the kind of absolute power that corrupts absolutely. The reason you pick this guy is to do the funny spin move and make your friends angry.

His simple but versatile moveset made him easy to understand at a glance. Once you saw your first SPD, and how it destroyed opponents, you knew that that was your key to victory as Zangief. Getting to do it was a different story, but his intentions are clear, and he plays different from the rest of the cast. A solid, defined character, even with his drawbacks.

The problem

The problem a lot of people seem to have with grapplers is with their signature grabs. There’s nothing like fighting your opponent, keeping him at bay for what feels like ages, only to screw up once, get grabbed and lose the round off one mistake. If you’re playing a zoner, you have to control space, time your projectiles, lock your opponent down without getting too predictable and you risk having to use your subpar close-ranged options if someone gets next to you. If you’re a rushdown character, you have to stay in your opponent’s range, mashing quick attacks to chip away at them, and with every button you press you risk getting grabbed and destroyed.

“It’s not fair!” they say. They have to actually play the game, while a lumbering wall of meat slowly closes in on them, throws them once and shatters their dreams of winning Evo along with their spine. It’s lunacy! Why would a character be able to punish my mistakes like that?

Letting your opponent in is a mistake, and mistakes should be punished. Even if it is with an attack that takes off half of your health. The rest of the archetype makes up for it. Grapplers are usually slow, immobile tanks that trudge forward. You have different ways of keeping them at bay, especially if you’re a zoner.

Even if a grappler has ways to deal with your projectiles, you should be fine. Zangief has his lariat, and in some incarnations, he has his green hand, which lets him absorb projectiles while moving forward, but it’s not always like that. Potemkin has a flick move which lets him reflect projectiles, but it doesn’t move him. He doesn’t close the space while using it. He still has to maneuver through the mess of fireballs in his way to get to his target.

If it sounds like I’m saying that hating grapplers is a result of a skill issue, you’d be right. Grapplers have glaring flaws that can, and should be exploited at every opportunity. Same as with any archetype.

I think people hate playing against grapplers for the perceived simplicity of their gameplan. If you get killed by a rush down character, you’re getting killed by a thousand cuts. You can see your opponent mashing buttons, doing a hundred different things, throwing out high-low mix-ups, catching you off-guard multiple times. They had to work for it, unlike those smelly gorillas who just throw you once and win. Anyone could do that.

Can they really? When you’re on the receiving end of a grappler, you only see the successful throws. The times Zangief managed to get you with an SPD, the times where Wolf actually landed his Giant Swing and threw you off the stage. You can concentrate your blame on one moment; one very specific, clearly defined moment in time where your opponent won the match off one interaction, while you had to struggle for your gameplan.

You don’t usually notice the failed attempts. The times where your opponent tries to get close, but you keep them out with a well-timed poke. You don’t see all the time you spend keeping them out with skilled play, because to you, that’s how you always play. That’s a regular match, nothing special, except for the fact that you’re extra nervous looking not to get scooped and served on a cone.

You do notice when you get a hard read on your opponent, and you jump at the right moment and punish them while they’re recovering from a grab. When that happens, you outplayed them. That’s good. When they manage to navigate your web and snatch you up, that’s dumb. That’s low effort. Anyone could do that. You don’t think about how slow they are, how limited their options are. You just think about the huge damage they can do.

The only other archetype I see get a similar level of hatred is the zoner, AKA, the guy who stands on the other side of the screen shooting you. I’ve seen people comment that zoners are “cheap” and that they’re supposed to be playing a fighting game, not a shooter. Common complaints that are, admittedly and while trying not to cause too much controversy, scrub opinions.

I admit that a lot of this is extrapolation. I have seen comments from people complaining about grapplers, but people on the Internet aren’t very eloquent. They don’t know how to present a point. This gets worse when they’re salty, as a lot of these anti-grappler screeds are hastily typed up after they lost to yet another Tager, so I’m assuming they hate them because of how stupid easy it is to get a grab.

I have been on the receiving end of grapplers, and it’s a stressful experience. Knowing that at any moment, one slip-up could lead to me getting planted into the ground and losing. I’ve gone up against Zangief since I used to mash buttons in Street Fighter II, and then again when I played Street Fighter IV online, and I’ve gone up against every other grappler in-between and up until now, and I’ve felt that frustration, but it’s manageable.

One of the primary reasons why it’s manageable is because grapplers suck. Can’t mince words here, they’re usually bad. Any game where a grappler is top-tier is considered an oddity. Zangief is considered good in Street Fighter Alpha 3, and he’s often listed at A or B tier, meaning “good”. You know who is consistently at the very bottom of the list? Rainbow Mika, the game’s only other grappler. General Raam, the Gears of War guy, is in Killer Instinct, and he’s a traditional grappler. Slow, beefy and all about grabbing you for big damage. You know what else he has in common with the others? He stinks. Zangief was considered awful in both Street Fighter V and 6, and the one time they gave him a slight buff in 6, there were mass riots. Gannondorf and Incineroar could be considered strange semi-grapplers in Smash Bros, and they’re terrible. Tizoc in City of the Wolves? Terrible. Considered one of the worst in the game. King of Dinosaurs and Antonov in King of Fighters XV are also rated as some of the worst in the roster. Granted, Shermie, a grappler, is in A tier, which is surprising. Potemkin? Mediocre in Accent Core, bottom tier in Xrd. He’s now “amazing” in Strive thanks to some buffs he got, and everyone is up in arms and screaming. He’s a grappler, they don’t deserve to go above B tier, because everyone hates playing against them.

These tier list shenanigans are natural due to how the characters are designed. Like I said earlier, they’re meant to fit a very specific niche, and when you’re really good at one thing, you’re not so good at others, and that’s the main thing keeping grapplers down. They put all their stats into getting on top of the opponent and nuking them, at the expense of everything else. They usually don’t have projectiles (Tager does, but that’s a special case), they lack mobility (Potemkin can’t air dash in a game where everyone flies) and their gameplan is very exploitable. If they get close to you, they’re going to throw, and if you know this, you can jump or do something to counter it. Sure, mistakes happen and you can, and will, get caught in a scoop, but you know what’s coming and when, and how to stop it.

I know all this because I’m a grappler enjoyer myself. I am amongst the ranks of paste-eating gorillas that love to slam. I used to play R. Mika and Laura in Street Fighter V, Incineroar in Smash Ultimate, Bullet (who is a semi-grappler, and very bad) in Blazblue, Wolf Hawkfield in Virtua Fighter, Tina in Dead or Alive and I always keep Zangief as a secret secondary pick whenever I play Street Fighter with the exception of Street Fighter 6, where I play Manon (also considered one of the worst characters in the game).

I know how grapplers work, and how they tick. I also know why people play them. Because it’s fun. Navigating neutral like it’s a mine field, while you’re piloting a Hummer H2, only to get close enough to an opponent and disintegrate them with one flick of the joystick. It’s hard work, but it’s honest work. Okay, maybe it’s a little cheesy, but I think it’s worth it, even if I have to spend 40 seconds every round blocking a never ending stream of sonic booms and missiles.

From this place of experience, I can also say that balancing grapplers is about as hard as playing them. If you make them too strong, they will piss everyone off and they’ll complain. See top-tier Potemkin in Strive and that two-week period where everyone thought Zangief was top-tier in SF6. It upsets the natural order.

If you put everything they have into their grab, they become a one-trick pony. They can win the round off one interaction, and that’s not fun for either player. It’s not fun to mess up once and get killed. On the other hand, if the grab is too weak, it won’t be the option you go for, and you’d end up using strikes like a regular character, and since a grappler’s kit is balanced around their one big grab, this leads to less options.

Manon is a good example of this. Her gameplan revolves around getting throws, which raises her medal count. The higher the medal count (up to 5), the more damage she does with her throw. With 5 medals, she can win a round in just three throws, which is insane. To compensate for that, they took away a lot of her tools in other departments. Her drive rush is short and slow, her mobility is limited, and she doesn’t have many ways to open an opponent up other than by throwing them. She doesn’t have a special-cancelable crouching medium kick, so she can’t poke and drive rush, and her funny trick of drive rushing into a command throw can be countered by mashing, which everyone does. She doesn’t have many plus on block moves, so she can’t force mixups and her throw leaves her opponent on the other side of the screen, so she can’t continue her pressure afterwards, and she doesn’t have many ways of making her opponent respect her other than her grab.

This is a result of modern developers building their games against grapplers, due to the hate. They hate them, and they know their players hate them, so they cut back on their most obvious strengths, that being their vortex. The vortex is a term for when you throw someone and they land in a range where you can throw them again. This leads to a guessing game; a coin toss. When I get up, am I going to get thrown again? Granted, this could be unfun, so the developers made throws separate both players like a chaperon at prom.

Are there better ways to balance grapplers? There could be. There’s always room for improvement. If it were up to me, I’d equip them with some way to handle jumps when you threaten a grab. They don’t need more speed, or more ways to get in, they need more interesting tools to oppress their opponent and make them act strangely. Zangief’s air throw is a great implementation of this. To do it, you have to jump into the air and do it, which requires a hard read, so it’s high risk, but if you pull it off, it’s one of the most satisfying things in fighting games, and video games in general. More things like that.

Conclusion:

I recommend grapplers. If you struggle against them, play as one. Walk a mile in their shoes. See what it’s like to try to navigate the neutral as a slow, lumbering hulk whose only mission is to throw. You’ll start to recognize common situations they try to force to get their throws, and you’ll see what your opponent does to keep you out, and you can implement it yourself. The best case scenario is, you improve at the game. Worst case? You become a grappler enjoyer, and you develop a taste for glue.