Hey y'all. A quick note before getting to the fighting games, I've yet to figure out how consistent this blog is going to be both in how often I'm going to be posting and how big the posts are going to be. Haven't really done this kinda thing before so I'm just gonna kind and go with the flow and see what happens. That also goes for when I'm streaming my journey, which again to shamelessly plug myself is over here.

So what have I been up to in Guilty Gear? Well mostly practicing tech. I figured after getting reamed in my first real round of matches that I should get the mechanics of the game down and let my fighting game chops come after that bit. I at the very least figured that I would want to know what I was doing before I could figure out why I was losing to people instead of just getting bodied. Leo seemed like a fun character so I decided to stick with him in my quest to git gud, at least for now. What other place to start then by learning some fat combos right? So I managed to complete all of his basic combos (only one of them proved to be a total bitch--namely the one that starts with an air dash, took a hell of a lot of them. I also went into the advanced combos/tactics and learned quite a lot about my German lion-y friend.

I feel like I'm starting to see through the veneer and see the meat of what makes Leo a unique character. His stance switch seemed just like an offensive tool when I started but when I was introduced to the guard in the stance my mind started to wander and think of the possibilities with that guard, not to mention guard out of slash and heavy slash. In fact as I'm writing this I'm thinking about how I should be playing defensively and in neutral which was definitely my biggest issue when I tried to take my BnBs and combos online. If you're curious about how those matches went it's pretty simple--he played Ky, I got bodied. Added him on steam afterwards to hopefully get bodied some more in the future.

In any case, I do feel like I've hit my first wall in the game. Where I've learned some things but when it comes to actually applying them to a real match I'm lost. So I feel like I'm in a weird spot where I could practice my tech and combos all I want, but that won't help me win actual matches, and likewise I could go and get bodied over and over, but I don't know if I would feel like I'm growing at all.

Right now I feel like my best option is to play a lot with a friend of mine who is better, but not monumentally better. When he plays his main (Faust) he can beat me 100% of the time, but put him on anyone else and we go 70-30 or 60-40. So I feel like playing and learning from him would be a good spot to continue my journey!

Any tips hints or suggestions are more than welcome. Felt like it was a hot minute since I updated this so I threw this little thing together. Let me know any thoughts and I'll try to continue to do stuff!

Stay Fresh,

~nic~