love fighting games, though as i don't have many friends who play them and have social anxiety keeping me from joining discord servers for games so far, my experience with anything from before the 2020s (i.e. any game without consistent in-game matchmaking) boils down to playing through arcade mode as every character, picking the one i had the most fun with and going "cool! now i have a main for this game i won't end up playing!" despite that i love fighting games deeply and would love to play them more consistently!

i got into them a couple years ago when bedman was announced for guilty gear strive. bedman was one of the only characters from the series past that i recognized, and how different he was here compared to his last appearance got me super intrigued and got me to pick the game back up after buying it at launch and then giving up due to being bad at it. back then i had only tried at ramlethal and i-no since i thought they were both cute, but upon picking it back up i decided to look at the 15 base character roster (i never bought any dlc even though happy chaos was my bi awakening LOL), pretending i didn't know a single thing about any of them, and picking a main based solely on what i could glean on the character select screen. that lead me to trying out faust, who ended up being the first fighting game character to click with me! for the first time i was winning online matches semi-consistently and having fun playing a fighting game! a few weeks later bedman would release and would click with me even more, and from there the rest is history!

my takeaway for anyone reading this thread who is trying to get into fighting games is, once you've found a game to play, pick the character that you think looks the coolest or most interesting, get a feel for their movement, learn all their moves, and start playing some matches. if you feel the way many people new to fighting games feel, losing most matches, not having much fun, keep trying other characters until you find one that finally clicks with, one that you have fun playing in real matches even if you're still not winning much. and if you try the whole roster and still aren't into it, try a different game! the most magically part of finding the characters that clicked with me in guilty gear strive was that afterwards, i could now go back to fighting games i had tried in the past and enjoy them the same way i enjoyed this one! once you find just one character in a single game that clicks with you, the whole genre becomes your oyster!