I suck at Street Fighter. When I was five years old playing Super Turbo on the SNES I didn't know this truth.

In '94 or '95 my small group of friends and I weren't focused on fighting one another, we wanted to beat the arcade mode. We spent a lot of time passing the controller around, each taking our shot at M. Bison, each losing time and time again. It was a fun and innocent time. How could we know the despicable truth that the CPU Bison was nothing compared to the real monsters of Street Fighter.

I dabbled in each successive release and began watching tournaments around the time SFIV arrived. Upon trying my hand at Super Street Fighter IV I felt it wasn't within my being to pull off the combos in that game. I jumped into matches only to watch my life bar melt away and be baffled by the ferocity and skill of the online warriors. This wasn't fun, these people were out for blood. So I stopped and decided that I would be content to watch the big tournaments and marvel at the drama and intensity of high level play.

Fast forward a few years and Ultra Street Fighter IV is out. I had been watching The Excellent Adventures of gootecks and Mike Ross. This YouTube show features two (formerly) tournament level Street Fighter players going up against the masses in online ranked matches. They win, they lose, they get salty, but they have a lot of fun. Because of this show I threw my hat into the ring again and bought USFIV last year. I played for a few weeks and I may have even won a round or two but I definitely never won a match. People were simply too experienced and too familiar with the game.

Now SFV is out and I have yet another chance to get in. I was more familiar than I'd ever been with Street Fighter in general. So I downloaded the game on launch day despite warnings of crumbling servers and a barebones package and entered training mode as Necalli. I began searching for combos to learn, figuring out what buttons to poke with and I was feeling pretty good (having never played the betas), I could do a couple combos reliably in training mode and I had played through survival a couple times. Ready for some casual matches. The moment the first round started I forgot everything. I was getting crossed up and mixed up and option selected and everything in between. I couldn't land a single hit let alone a combo. But I kept going at it, getting beaten and going back to training mode to try and refine and reevaluate my mistakes and I actually feel like I'm getting better.

Tonight I got into Bronze and it felt really good. I'm sitting on 700 something League Points and that is like nothing to a lot of people (and it really isn't that much of an accomplishment I know) but for me it is a step in the right direction. I won something like 5 ranked matches in a row a couple hours ago and I'm able to reliably land 5 to 7 hit combos or safely hit confirm into my critical art. I don't want to sound like I'm bragging because I know I'm still really bad at this game. I've stuck with Necalli (in fact I've yet to play online with any other character) and I know I have a lot of bad habits and many of the things I'm getting away with will not work in the long term. I still jump in too much, I still wake up uppercut, and I still mash when things start getting hairy among many other things. That being said I am excited to continue improving.

Thanks for reading! Sorry this was long and rambly. I can't wait till the lobby system is better and we can get a group of duders together to play proper. Feel free to add me on PSN or the fighters network thing my name is Tokens on both.