The nontransitive loop at the heart of Rock Paper Scissors is one of the most elegant ideas in game design: no dominant strategy, every choice has an answer, the game never collapses to a single winning move. It took decades for the game design community to fully recognize this as a framework rather than just a children's hand game, but the evidence was always there in the games people built on top of it.
Pokémon made it visible to a generation. The Fire, Grass, Water type triangle is textbook RPS — Fire beats Grass, Grass beats Water, Water beats Fire — but Nintendo then ran that logic through 18 types, six active Pokémon, dual typing, and a prediction game that can sustain hours of serious competition. The skeleton is the same three-move cycle. The building on top of it is what makes competitive Pokémon a distinct discipline.
Fire Emblem applied the same framework to medieval combat through the weapon triangle: Swords beat Axes, Axes beat Lances, Lances beat Swords. In a tactical RPG where every unit's survival matters, that three-way counter relationship creates real strategic pressure. Bringing a sword to a lance fight isn't just suboptimal. It's a choice with consequences several turns down the line.
Super Smash Bros uses the framework at the most fundamental gameplay level: Attack beats Grab, Grab beats Shield, Shield beats Attack. Unlike Pokémon's type matchups or Fire Emblem's weapons, these are live split-second decisions made dozens of times per match. The RPS structure here isn't strategic planning — it's the reason two players with identical characters can produce genuinely different match outcomes. You can't just pick one option and run it. Every defense has a punish.
What these games share is that they took the RPS loop and layered depth on top of it without breaking the core property: no dominant strategy. The moment a game designer adds a move that beats everything, the RPS architecture collapses. The games that last are the ones that preserved the triangle while building everything else around it.