The Beat 'em Up Is in Arrested Development

Very observant and well reasoned essay from KC :) I think he is on to something about how gaming has pigeonholed the genre to a historical/technological time period, though I'm not quite sure what could be done about it. Maybe Yakuza has the right mind of it, where you staple another genre to the gameplay loop of combat. Perhaps by fighting you gain resources that help build up your base, you keep fighting until you fall and reset, sort of like a roguelike.

I wonder if this is because Brawlers are typically designed to be pick up and play with friends, so the design has to maintain a degree of simplicity. And because of that, they also need to keep things moving, so it's a constant sequence of set encounters with minimal down-time in-between, which also dis-incentivizes genre mixing.

Th Soul-like genre is very much an evolution of both beat-em-ups and RPGs, and in some cases (like the World Invasions in Demon/Dark Souls) even retains the PVP elements. The BEU genre is fairly narrowly defined, but its DNA is all over the place. The arrested development is partly because most significant changes move the game out of the genre.

Really enjoyed this entry and analysis! Looking forward to more in this series and from KC

Surely beat em ups evolved to become spectacle fighters or games like Yakuza? In terms of side scrollers, I suppose there was only really so much they could do, though we thought that about platformers before Shovel Knight, Super Meatboy etc al so maybe we’re just waiting on the next big reinvention?

Have you considered the Batman(hork) Arkham series in the light of an updated beat-em-up?