Apex Legends Has the Heart of a Fighting Game
Earlier this week, Respawn released a new trailer for the fifth season of their battle royale shooter, Apex Legends. Like the previous seasons before it, Season 5 (aka “Fortune’s Favor”) features a new playable Legend, a high-tech thief named Loba.
Loba has a connection to Revenant, the Legend who debuted in the previous season, Assimilation. Revenant was once a human assassin converted into a robot, and one of his assignments saw him kill both of Loba’s parents when she was just a girl. She’s been hunting for him ever since, and though she gets close to her goal in the trailer, she’s still got a long ways to go before she can get her revenge.
Since its surprise release last year, I’ve come to enjoy the cinematic trailers that Respawn puts out for Apex. They’re action-packed, have a striking art style and highlight the skills of the various characters without breaking the game’s own internal logic. There’s a fun [adult swim] vibe to each trailer as the characters kill each other off while also being fully aware that they’re in a game. Everyone feels like they could star in a solo title of their own if given chance, from the hologram-using idiot that is Mirage to Wattson, an engineer responsible for building the Containment Ring used in the Apex games. The world of Apex and its sibling series Titanfall is one I enjoy greatly, even if I’ve decided to dip out of playing the battle royale shooter.
Sometimes describing what you like about a game universe that you don’t actively play is hard, and it wasn’t until I saw a tweet from Verge writer Joshua Rivera that I found the words I was looking for. Apex Legends is a fighting game wearing the skin of a first-person shooter. Like in Mortal Kombat, the characters are all connected in one way or another that keeps them in each other’s orbit for when the fighting tournament starts. No one in Kombat ever really leaves each other’s orbit, like how Scorpion and Sub-Zero tried to kill each other multiple times in the earlier games, and now in MK11 they’re a duo fighting ninja robots side by side. Other fighting games like Tekken feature oddities of their own like clones or actual pandas.
You can forgive a lot when it comes to characters and story in a fighting game, and it makes perfect sense why Respawn would apply these sensibilties to Apex. The high-speed daredevil Octane got his bionic legs courtesy of the game’s medic Lifeline. Fan favorite hunter Bloodhound has a dislike for technology, which is why they often target the robot Pathfinder in cinematic trailers.
Apex has often been compared to Overwatch since they’re both colorful shooters with an eclectic cast of characters. But I think what sets the two apart is how the former has yet to lose sight of itself. In Overwatch, it’s sort of hard to keep track of how everyone knows each other, why they’re fighting with against each other. Its story is still primarily set in the past, though Overwatch 2 is set to change that whenever it comes out. Meanwhile, the Apex Games always stay at the forefront, because the characters have some sort of personal investment for being in the Games. Some are sympathetic, like Pathfinder joining because he wants to be famous and hopefully meet his creator, or Bangalore raising money to get a ticket back home. Others are simple, such as Octane joining the Games because he’s basically bored and wants to show off. But all their motivations fit with who they are, how they’ve been presented, and the Games serve as a solid framework to keep everyone consistent. Because when you’re in any kind of competition, every backstory is different.
Apex isn’t the first wacky shooter featuring colorful weirdos, and it definitely won’t be the last. Much like how they managed to make “Dark Souls, but Star Wars” work better than you’d think, they figured out how bring storytelling from fighting games into a shooter and let the characters just act as if they weren’t aware of the genre change. And as it turns out, that’s a formula that works.
