I think the trick with 2d fighters has everything to do with the fact that, since they're not aiming for realism, and since spacing, as opposed to space itself, is the issue, they don't NEED as many button presses for simple things. Look at street fighter: 9 punches, 9 kicks, but the range and features are entirely predictable. Your kicks are at kicking range, punches at punching range, and it's the same for when you're jumping or squatting. Other than that, you have a handful of "special moves" which are character specific and very gimmicky so they're easier to remember. Moreover, many characters are pure plug-n-play, with minor differences (Ken, Ryu, etc). Now, look at Smash bros. What are the controls? Do these games have fancy setups? Nope, you're instantly on stun when you get hit, and you get out of stun when the string ends. Granted, 2d fighters have much, much harder combos, which is something that i like about 3d fighters. Unfortunately, 3d fighters have alot more moves with more dynamics to them. Now in DoA, the character, given the controls, can have 24 punches (11 directions [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 46, 236, 214, 66, 33] + P and P+K), 24 kicks (directions + K and H+K), holds, and 23 throws (i'm not sure whether it hurts more or helps more that we saturate). On top of that, we have special quirky moves like offensive holds, expert holds, sabaki, special movements (marie's jump or christie's sidestep), and that's just the first move of a string. Worse yet, these all have ranges and speeds that aren't predictable, like LP, MP, and HP are in street fighter. And it gets better, because we don't know what they are, our opponent doesn't either, which means we don't know which ones we can rely on to come out, so we come up with complex strategies, especially since simply hitting your target isn't good enough. The new player has to go through each possible combination, memorize all the information for their character, then go get wrecked by other characters hoping to find a pattern to fighting against them without going through the 80+ step process with every character in the game. And what does one get when asking for help? Told all the information, or how to find it on their own (which usually isn't specific enough), or beaten mercilessly in a match, etc. You know what sucks the most about that? Everyone who's trying to teach and learn actually thinks that's the best way to do it and are doing it with honest and good intentions.
All that said, invite your friend over and convince him to play with you. Worse yet, if he hasn't had a fighter before to hear all the smack talk about 3d fighters (or DoA), you're going to have a hard enough time teaching him the basics of a 2d fighter, let alone convincing teaching him a 3d fighter before he's bored out of his wits. Tekken is only slightly better than this, and i don't even know how to tackle VF, because i'm screwing up bad in command training and i don't have a clue what i'm doing wrong. Oh, and for kicks, i code in x86 assembly, and i find this more challenging.
I may sound like i'm bashing, but there are alot of good points to 3d fighters. Unfortunately, most people aren't willing to invest that deep just to figure out what we mean. You can bet that anyone who's remotely competent either subconsciously came up with solutions to this organization mess or spent a long time doing it. 3d fighter fans like us need to work on trying to simplify the process before the devs are forced to simplify the game.
All that said, invite your friend over and convince him to play with you. Worse yet, if he hasn't had a fighter before to hear all the smack talk about 3d fighters (or DoA), you're going to have a hard enough time teaching him the basics of a 2d fighter, let alone convincing teaching him a 3d fighter before he's bored out of his wits. Tekken is only slightly better than this, and i don't even know how to tackle VF, because i'm screwing up bad in command training and i don't have a clue what i'm doing wrong. Oh, and for kicks, i code in x86 assembly, and i find this more challenging.
I may sound like i'm bashing, but there are alot of good points to 3d fighters. Unfortunately, most people aren't willing to invest that deep just to figure out what we mean. You can bet that anyone who's remotely competent either subconsciously came up with solutions to this organization mess or spent a long time doing it. 3d fighter fans like us need to work on trying to simplify the process before the devs are forced to simplify the game.