The biggest issue is that fighting games can't teach you how to play without making it feel like you're doing homework. The Xrd tutorial is extremely well done but it still feels like work where you're learning all the minutiae. There's no FG equivalent to Zelda or Mario where the game teaches you how to play without making it obvious you're being taught.
Frankly, I don't know if that's even possible, though. The reason why someone like LI Joe can pick up a fighting game he's never touched, like DBFZ, and body a guy who also has never touched that same game but also doesn't play fighting games seriously is because fighting games have a high level of knowledge transfer. Maybe a fighting game can make learning the absolute basics fun but players expect that if the game teaches them how to play that they should be able to hold their own online which absolutely isn't reality.
When I learned how to do counter hit combos it's not like I had to specifically learn how to do it for each game. Once I was comfortable doing it in one game applying that knowledge to another game took like a tenth of the time. I've been aware of shit like frame traps, counter hits, option selects, etc. in fighting games for 15-20 years now but I ignored most of these universal features because learning them all at once seemed overwhelming. Instead I would learn a few per game over time when the character I played's gameplan revolved heavily around a specific concept.
So I'm not sure how a game can give a crash course on fighting game mechanics that players can absorb in a few days which took me years to learn.
Frankly, I don't know if that's even possible, though. The reason why someone like LI Joe can pick up a fighting game he's never touched, like DBFZ, and body a guy who also has never touched that same game but also doesn't play fighting games seriously is because fighting games have a high level of knowledge transfer. Maybe a fighting game can make learning the absolute basics fun but players expect that if the game teaches them how to play that they should be able to hold their own online which absolutely isn't reality.
When I learned how to do counter hit combos it's not like I had to specifically learn how to do it for each game. Once I was comfortable doing it in one game applying that knowledge to another game took like a tenth of the time. I've been aware of shit like frame traps, counter hits, option selects, etc. in fighting games for 15-20 years now but I ignored most of these universal features because learning them all at once seemed overwhelming. Instead I would learn a few per game over time when the character I played's gameplan revolved heavily around a specific concept.
So I'm not sure how a game can give a crash course on fighting game mechanics that players can absorb in a few days which took me years to learn.