Accurate depiction of China
This past weekend, October 27, I went to Colorado Spring to participate in the Bromance 4 tournament. Originally a 2v2 format tournament that had too many no shows for Persona 4 Arena, so they made it singles, giving only Street Fighter 4 and Marvel 2v2 formats. I think I was the only participant with his partner there who, ironically, helped me during the tournament.
I will only talk about one match, as there is only one video available from the tournament and only one real notable match: Grand Finals vs True_Tech.
Yes: My handle is "Ryyudo" and my opponent's handle is "True_Tech". Feel free to comment about their typos in the title. It'll amuse me even AFTER they change it.
The set, WHILE we were playing, had to become 2 out of 3 because of "time constraints". There's a lot to say about this but I'll leave it at "poor planning". I think the Tournament Organizer really screwed True_Tech's chances of winning by doing this. More on this later.
True_Tech was one of the few remaining people in Colorado I have not played, and it was not a tournament match I looked forward to. He plays Aigis. The Grand Finals video is my third time playing against an Aigis. The second time, being Winner's Finals at the same tournament (where I beat him), and the first time being some random, bad, online player. Furthermore, I rarely see Aigis played in videos or on streams. Making these matches slightly more challenging, but enjoyable.
My matches with True_Tech were actually fun. Mostly because of the challenge of facing a completely new character, for me, in a win-or-die situation. I needed to learn the match-up in a VERY time-limited environment; analyzing every situation as we played, what to expect, when to burst, how to punish, etc..
It was, and still is watching the video, a lot of information to process. Fortunately for me, after winning the Winner's Finals I spoke with, my would-be Bromance teammate, Greg/Spineshark about Aigis. He played around with Aigis for a small stint of time before going to Yosuke/Elizabeth, and invited me to ask questions.
The conversation went like this
The Q&A session was rather... pathetic. The information I lacked on Aigis was basic at best. The things I needed to ask about made me feel like I should have lost the Winner's Finals match. Sadly, my memory is weak at best and I only remember one thing he said, which I only used once or twice in the Grand Finals: Rolling through Aigis' 2B, the half circular bullet spray.
Better than nothing!
The rest of the matches was figuring out how to outplay True_Tech: What is he weak to and what will he not fall for. He was weak to jumping C, Tomoe's Air Slash, pressure, but he rarely fell for my 236A, flying double-kick, shenanigans. Changing my play style around these patterns made the match all the more rewarding. Rewarded with a win for playing good and calm, even when getting beat up.
I don't think I blocked a single string during Aigis' Orgia mode, and I pretty much accepted that I couldn't. In the later matches, you'll see me trying to stay more airborne and throwing out attacks for Aigis to run into. It was a lot safer in the air because I found out Aigi's 2B is not unblockable while airborne and True_Tech does not air-grab often. My good play was a mix of playing against the player and the character. Fortunately for me, I got the right amount of time to learn how to play against True_Tech, and he didn't have enough time to counter this.
Because of the shortened 2 out of 3 Grand Finals, my ability to read opponents quickly came into play. When I started to change my game half way through, True_Tech didn't have enough time or remaining matches to make necessary changes. To be fair, he most likely felt like he did fine because he hit me so often, so he may not have felt the need to change-up styles. In turn, to save mentality and to work on the things I can fix, I just expected to play my games from a half-life deficit and abuse his lack-of defense afterward.
The last thing to add to video commentary, and this is completely my fault, is the functionality of my C button. I knew it was working maybe 75% of the time before the tournament started. I discovered it had issues when I messed around on King of Fighters '98 a couple days before the tournament. Because KoF'98 was emulated on my PC, I figured it was an emulation issue and shrugged it off without further testing.
Dumb.
Move.
It caused some problems during my matches on Saturday, especially during Grand Finals. I missed a lot of opportunities and combos with the lack of a 100% working C attack. Since then I've fixed it; it seems fine after a training mode session.
During the Grand Final matches, I felt an odd sense of confidence. I did not consider that I could lose. Something felt really... simple about the whole match that if I continued to play my game, making the appropriate changes, I wouldn't lose the tournament. Even after being reset on, I remained strangely calm and confident about the whole situation. I just knew I could beat True_Tech; that his game wasn't strong enough, despite my lack of knowledge, to beat me.
I will watch the video a few more times for major flaws and things I am not capitalizing on, abusing, etc.. I feel I will get much stronger before the next tournament, King of Iron Fresh, in November. Colorado's biggest tournament yet with a $1,000 bonus pot for Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (!!!!).
There's only one more person I need to face in Colorado, and I don't expect to lose to him. There are a couple who may up their game enough, so I need to be concerned. I figure if I stick to my game plan of leveling up enough between tournaments that people continue to not be prepared, I'll be fine.
With this tournament, I am now the 5-time Persona 4 Arena Champion of Colorado/New Mexico. As the game says "They're Unstoppable", but really I don't think people put forth the effort minus a select few because they feel like "What's the point? Ryyudo is going to win anyway."
Aww, you're going away? Maybe I will get back into speedrunning!!!
ReplyDeleteSeriously though, I had this idea for next year (since I don't have enough time to do it now with NEC and AGDQ coming up), and...well, I'll just tell you about it at Safe House. You're definitely one of the people I thought might be interested, but who knows what sort of people might be up for it. I'm always surprised, lol.
As far as Persona goes, I really wouldn't mind beating you, I'm just spread too thin, and I know it. I'd probably need to go Tokido to have a chance of competing when I'm trying to play four completely different games...plus Guilty Gear, lol. But it's also hard to make myself train when each character feels so limited and simple compared to other games, which is a lot like how I felt about Marvel as well.
Overall, I'm still trying to feel out the best way to "get good" in a very broad sense, and while I've wondered on and off whether it's better to focus or diversify (as I think we've talked about on this blog before) I think at this point, without a robust community with several highly knowledgeable players (which I really only think SF4 qualifies as, here), it's very difficult to only focus. In a way that's really the reason that I'm sticking with P4 and KOF, because even though I don't like them I feel like breaking through my specific barriers is going to help in the long term, even if I realistically have no shot at ever dethroning Pedro from a tournament as long as I'm not focusing on KOF solely.
I dunno. Just still trying to find my way through all this.
"Even though I don't like them"? I think I forgot to add a "as much as other games that came out recently" or something cause KOF is still pretty godlike.
DeleteThe main things I remember telling you about Aigis are, she only gets the fire wheel and rocket booster in orgia, other stuff about her movement and mixup, mash lots of DPs cause her fatal combos are super situational and Truetech probably didn't know them, and ways to try and bait and punish DP.
That said, I felt like his fundamentals were weak (particularly in how often he let himself burn out, even when you weren't pressuring him), even if his setups and execution were really on point. Of course it takes like two minutes to figure out how to do 4k once you learn what EX fire wheel does, but still. Gonna give him credit.
Well it's not set in absolute stone. If all goes well, I will be gone for about 9 weeks or so. Since I'll be in China, maybe I'll pick up KoF '98 or something. Lol.
DeleteNot 100% sure I'm going to be at Safe House this week. My exercise schedule just changed and I'm not sure how to do that AND make it to Safe House yet. If not, feel free to message, PM, etc. me. You have something in the works, and I'm excited to hear more about it :).
I think we're all trying to find ourselves some. Within our own respective games, like Edgar and Danilo, or within other games, like you and Pedro. I think the best way to start "getting good" in a broad sense is to start playing the most OG games. Namely Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo. We can start doing sessions at some point if you want to do that line of training.
True_Tech's fundamentals are weak and I feel the community knows that as a whole. While I don't feel it's a fully conscious decision, but I think he picks higher tier character to make up for this. He has good set ups and good execution, but then if he gets outside of his "training mode" zone, he's left with nothing but getting beat down usually. Still, I feel his Aigis is better than the ones at Youmacon so he gets credit regardless. I'll see if he makes any appropriate changes before Iron Fresh.
Heh, I've been leveling up my workout game as well. It's actually got me feeling a little too sore to hit long training mode sessions. Still a bad matchup! I'll learn it though.
ReplyDeleteI think you're probably just going to laugh now when I tell you what I'm thinking about. In a good way. Because it will be funny after recent conversations.
Youmacon was ironically another Canada Cup as far as P4 was concerned: an anime con where almost no real anime players showed up. It doesn't help that NEC is only a few weeks later and clearly the Persona (and BB) major of the year, but Reynald is a KOF player of course and I'm not sure what Coma really plays right now but if it's the guy I think it is, he was one of the best CVS2 players in MD/VA a couple years ago. Axis, who got third, is an anime guy, if not a Lord Knight or Xie. But he also plays Kanji, so there's only so much you can do.
As far as top tiers go I think there's a lot of interesting things to talk about there. Maybe I'll write on it. There's a common view that top tiers are a shortcut but I think it's a lot more complicated than that. For now I'll say that I don't think that picking strong characters is a bad way to learn to get better, because there's a lot of things that are difficult to learn if you don't get your chance to play. And fundamentals aren't the same in every game or even every character, particularly in anime games. Aigis' "fundamentals" are about resource management and having a good feel for match flow, while Yosuke's are about movement and baiting. Elizabeth is the only character who really relies on "traditional" mid-range spacing (since she's super slow but actually beats people at that range), and even that's more of a means to put people in Thanatos pressure safely than the way you beat people.
Yeah I used to play AXIS a lot back in BlazBlue. His Tager's defenses were impregnable. But he'd also never act, either. So I knew once he started getting hit near the end, his (im)patience would murder him. And it did.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I was talking about fundamentals with Chavelo and MiracleKnight on the way up to FoCo and that anime generally treats fundamentals differently than other games. While in some cases (Elizabeth, and I'd say Yu also) you want that maximum range poke, anti-air normals, and zone with normals so much it's like a quicker version of Street Fighter in many neutral phases. I agree that being a top tier is not a shortcut to victory. But people choose to remember the fact that I played -Litchi-...even though she was top for only one game and three other people played her and never touched top 3 in any tournament. :P