sry been busy.

Anyway previously I had written out this long comprehensive guide sort of thing towards fighting games that I never really finished. In the end I realize it’s for the better since it kind of defeats the purpose of learning how to play fighters by just reading some guide. Experience through trial and error and observation are much better means of grasping the concepts behind fighters so I’ll spare finishing the entire product. Instead I salvaged just a little remainder of what I thought was important, Chris Hu of East Coast’s thoughts behind fighting games and a little annotation of a MBAA fight that I thought displayed certain advance fighting game concepts well.

“Combination means mix up,anti mix up, mix up is a very comprehensive topic we are discussing about, mix up is about your style. let me have a example, SF4 once u knock down the opponent, how many options u have? basically, it’s grab,fake grab(walk front and then walk back!) cross up, fake cross up, do nothing trick the opponent do stupid shit. that’s the basic option mix up u can have, pirticular chacracters have pirticular mix up, like rufus, EL,etc. how to use good mix up that relates how u know about your opponent style during the match. Mix up is the shit u guys have to know and use it very smoothly.” – Fighting Game Concept

:01-:20 – General poking and spacing game to determine who will be put in pressure first.

:20 – Highspeed misses the anti-air katto and thus immediately starts to defend thinking Yuu will attempt to rush him down, which he does.

:20-:29 – Yuu pressures with quick moves with small unsafe gaps in between his pressure strings. Highspeed does not try to escape because he knows Yuu can bait and punish that.

:30 – Highspeed at this point is too tense to see the overhead coming due to Yuu’s unpredictability and gets hit with it, eating a 2k combo ending in knockdown thus resetting pressure.

:40 – Yuu purposely leaves a gap (this is called a frame trap) and Highspeed attempts to jump out, Yuu foresees this and tries to prevent it.

:48 – Highspeed manages to free himself of Yuu’s pressure and throws Yuu into the corner. Because of his low life he’s playing very safe.

:54 – Yuu dodge rolls out of Warachia’s 2C. Because dodging in MBAA has a bit of recovery, Highspeed could have reversal EX Katto’d to hit Yuu’s Sion if he was to attack, but knowing that Yuu could block it on reaction he chooses to play it safe and block whatever Yuu was gonna do next, however that happened to be a throw thus beating his choice.

:56 – Yuu fakes a 2A keeping Highspeed to play defensively. He runs in and successfully throws again.

:58 – This is actually a more advance technique called Fuzzy Guarding which is character specific to specific games. In 2D fighting games, if you block an overhead, your character’s hitbox will stick to its standing size when blocking the next hit allowing for some normally impossible moves to hit. Highspeed block’s Sion’s j.C, Sion jump cancels it and hits with a fuzzy j.A (you can see Warachia crouch blocks) which isn’t an overhead but keeps pressure going. He hits with another blocked j.A and immediately cancels into Sion’s unique j.214B which is slow but unblockable. Highspeed thought Yuu was going to land and hit low so he went back to blocking low. By the time he realizes that it wasn’t a low, he guards high on reaction to a possible overhead but forgets that the j.214B is unblockable entirely thus eating it and losing the round.

Next post coming: ?_?