Digital Watches

...Any Axl stuff? (Good work so far by the way)

I'm wondering what super-rensen or sparrow~rensens do on aerial hit. I'm thinking sparrow~rensens might end up being a way to get knockdown off a lot of things, but it really depends on the properties. It might even be a vector for certain combos (Though I kind of doubt it). It could also give Axl some actual zoning capabilities if it's fast enough and covers a nice collective set of spaces. Having more things to throw out that can't get hit would be awesome. I'm also still curious how fast the total animation for sparrow~cancel is. If it's even something like 12-15 frames it would be a very useful pressure tool, which is a lot of what we might be losing from the rollback of Slash/AC/+R buffs Axl got. Also, if we're getting the #R DP back, then that's a huge buff to Axl's ability to get out of pressure, since it'd be full-body invuln.

That image above is a link to Axl's command list from the general news thread. This thread is for any info anyone gleans from loketests, videos, or talking to people with access to said. As the game becomes more developed, I'll archive this thread and make more specific ones. Post anything whatsoever related to Axl in XRD here until the game comes out somewhere or we otherwise get enough information to warrant enforcing some thread-differentiation rules.

Request for anyone who makes the next loketest: Could you look at some Axl stuff for me? There are a few things I want to know: Axl's 63214H stance. What is it? In particular, I want to know: -About how fast can you do 63214H~H and get back to neutral? Does something like 5H-63214H~H, K connect? Is it a combo? -Does the stance itself have any unusual properties? (Makes your hurtbox smaller? Involves any movement?) -Are the other listed followups actually a high, a low, and a mid? -If so, how fast is the overhead? (How does it compare to 6H, 5D, or 63214S? Faster? Slower?) What's the point of using the mid? (Safe on block? Long reach? Fast? Invincible?) -Do any of them knock down? Are any of them safe on block? Do any of them launch or otherwise work as confirms into a combo? Axl Bomber (j.623H): -Does there seem to be a minimum height requirement to TK it? -How well does it launch the opponent? Can you connect with anything after landing it in the corner? Rashousen ([4]6H): -How fast is it? (Like, ballpark. Is it way slower than dust? A little slower?) -How far does it travel? -Are we *sure* they took away the feint? Benten (623S): -Does it seem to be full-body invincible? New Super (214214S): -What's it do? Normals: -Does 3P still exist? -Can you confirm it into anything? Thanks in advance.

Yeah, I realize people are gonna bitch, but as previously stated it's getting real old. I concede your point that making posts on an internet forum is a pretty acceptable place to vent, but it seems to be a lot of the same people complaining about something that's not changing, over and over again. It's probably a bad sign that I find the complaining more annoying than the problem that's causing it, but that's where I seem to be at right now.

Okay, I'm gonna step back here and say that I am confused. I've only met you a handful of times, but you seem like a decent guy if you don't count the occasional blow-up (Which is true of a lot of people so whatever). I'm not exactly sure what you mean by cryptic, but I'll be the first to admit I've not got the world's best social skills. If I've offended you in some way I'm sorry. My point is that while it's fine and good to vent, there's just been so much complaining about this that it's completely absurd and it's driving me a little crazy. Yeah, it sucks that Arc couldn't manage to get a damn patch localized in how the fuck many months has it been? It sucks that the airdasher FGC in the US is basically completely unsupported by the makers of the games most of us play. It sucks that both game developers and gamers have to deal with the insane policies of the big console manufacturers with regards to updates, region locking, DRM, and other arcane bullshit of that nature. To me, it sucks that proprietary, locked-down game consoles aren't some laughable relic of a bygone era already. A lot of these problems are big and tough for individuals to affect in any way. I get being salty at arcsys, but as every attempt to reach out to them has demonstrated, they're unlikely to do anything, either because they can't, or because they don't care. The issues with airdash fighters, localization, the video game industry, and the scene are annoying, venting about them is reasonable, but there's such a huge venting-to-actually-doing-anything ratio that it's kind of ridiculous. I don't see value in further bitching about this. It is worthwhile to try to actually solve some of these problems, if we can. The immediate individual problem of not having the game (i.e. the thing most people are actively bitching about) is almost laughably trivial to solve. This is part of why I'm so annoyed that people are still bitching so much. There is a procedure by which Americans can get the game. It is well-documented and easy and the documentation is widely available on this forum. It's completely absurd to me that there is anyone who is interested in having this game who does not have it. Similarly, the unfortunate fact of the matter is that Eugene, Oregon doesn't have much of a scene for Guilty Gear. Not having a scene is frustrating. Getting a driver's license and coming to Portland to play is one of a number of things you might do about this. Other options include getting the game and trying to get local people, possibly even just people you know, to play it. I realize this is difficult, but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you actually care about this problem. Caring about the problem should result in trying to fix it.

Hashtag thug life. Er, was there a question in there?

The question isn't whether Japanese fighting game makers care about the US market. They don't. That's been settled for at least a decade. They don't care and they will never care. The question is whether you want to actually play the game, and the actual effort required is minimal. You may believe there is a value in being stubborn. I am here to tell you that in this case there is not.

Meh, AC was a pretty balanced game compared to most games, Eddie included. People always get an exaggerated impression of just how unbeatable the top tier character in a given game is. Internet echo chamber makes mountains out of molehills, consistently.

1. Justice has some tough matchups. The worst ones I can immediately think of are Dizzy, Zappa, and Axl, in order, with Dizzy being the worst. Dizzy-Justice is pretty bad because Dizzy has a lot of mobility and screen control, and thus can keep Justice locked down pretty well. Laser fish basically completely invalidate NB shenanigans you can do, and although your normals in the air are better, Dizzy basically gets to run circles around you. Combine that with the fact that you're a character without many reversal options, and you're going to be blocking the Dizzy oki death blender basically forever. Your one saving grace is that you have a bigger throw range than her, so she can't fuck you up with asymmetric range throw mixups (IE a tick throw you can't throw her out of) like she can with a lot of the cast. Throw range is an important consideration in any matchup, and it's one of the best things about Justice. In GG, matchups can be hard. I think it's hyperbole to call a matchup unwinnable, even if it's something ridiculous like Zappa-Johnny. People are going to use a lot of hyperbole when discussing tiers and matchups, so take words like "unwinnable" and "garbage tier" with a grain of salt. Justice is also a very unusual and technical character, so even a year into the game, it's hard to say where she'll fall in the tier list. She does seem to have a lot of trouble with her bad matchups, but most of why she's considered low-tier is because most of her matchups seem to be just slightly in the opponent's favor. Definitely don't be discouraged from playing Justice. 2. High level play in guilty gear is far more complicated than that, no matter what character you're playing. You've described a few setups that seem like something I would do in some situations, but not all the time. For example, if you have to FRC your NBs all the time in some matchup, I'd suggest that it might be more worth it to save your meter for something else. Justice in particular needs to play very differently depending on the matchup. Some characters you can knock down and put down a bunch of nukes. Some characters you shouldn't be throwing out nukes hardly at all. Some characters you want to use your nukes for spacing. Some characters you want to use your nukes for pressure and to set up your high-low game. Some characters you want to be relying on your throw setups and hit-throw mixup a lot. Some characters you're trying to force into air exchanges. Some characters (TE, FA) you want to stay on top of. Some characters (SL, JA) you want to keep as far away as possible. It's tough to give general advice on your overall gameplan as Justice, because you're going to have to learn a lot of different gameplans to succeed. I will say this: Don't rely on people misjudging the hitbox of anything too much if you're planning on winning tournaments. Good players learn that shit fast. Learn your real options to open people up and trap them instead. However, it is valid to say that it's sometimes useful to explode a nuke to control more space than it would just by continuing on its path. Looking for a single Justice flowchart will do you more harm than good. 3. That works, I use it all the time, it's a great mixup when you can set it up. However, remember that in guilty gear, they get to block both directions for one frame while turning around. You need to make sure to set it up so that the explosion happens at an ambiguous time that is nonetheless always either before you cross over or at least one frame after. Otherwise they don't have to guess.

No, but it's true of all characters. You get infinite jump options until a certain point in your dust arc. It's why you occasionally see combo videos where slayer seems to have two airdashes after a dust.

I think people (myself included) need to realize that in some matchups, missiles aren't really a thing you should be doing most of the time. This is true against Testament, Bridget, Faust, and Sol off the top of my head, and is probably the case with others too. Roll up your sleeves and learn to use your entire toolkit, especially your air normals. Matchups like this might not become easy, but I guarantee they'll become easier. Missiles are pretty cool when they're working well, but they're a tool that is slow, predictable, and high-risk or high-meter-cost for Justice to throw out from a neutral situation. Start to think of missiles as an oki tool, and a thing you can abuse in certain matchups. They are not the core of your gameplan in high level play.

It was my first tournament in a while, so I focused on Axl mostly, but I got a few rounds as Justice in against some people and it went okay. I need to get faster with my guesses, and remember what my setups are. I'm hoping we can start streaming in Portland soon, so hopefully I can get some footage so y'all can see how fraudulent I am.

Man, even the slightest bit of guardbar gets you so much damage. On Sol, set to block "First": c.S(Blocked)-6H(2)-41236H, 6H(2)-j.D-j.41236S (1) (FRC), land 6H(2)->sj.S(1)H-41236S: 326 damage and knockdown. Granted, this combo has guardbar, but it comes from a decent frametrap that you can also mix up from. c.S, 6P, and j.H all will set this up for varying amounts of GB, and can all also go into e.g. 2K, rejump P, ground string to michael for pushback, tick throw, etc. Having a high-damage confirm like that for so little meter is nice, even if it is a slow, mid-hitting move. If they do block the 6H, it's not like you can't JC it. :p

That's been true for quite a while IIRC, though it's not been true of every j.D (And in fact it being possible for Baiken's is a known bug in the console port)

Although it's a complicated game, Guilty Gear has a bit of an exaggerated reputation of being hard. What I would specifically tell you to do as a new player is this: First and foremost: Get familiar with your movement options. Neutral game in Guilty Gear is very strongly centered around movement, so getting a good grasp of it will help you understand the whole game, not just your own character. Sol has very normal movement options for Guilty Gear. He has a run, a double-jump, and an airdash. Get very comfortable moving around the screen. I specifically suggest practicing two technical kinds of movement: instant airdashing and dash braking. An instant airdash is done with 956 or 754, which is to say, a forward or backward jump, then letting the stick go to neutral, then hitting forward or backward again. This is a little tricky and most players need to practice it a little before they can do it reliably. A forward instant airdash is a quick and universal way to approach when you are at advantage and want to attack. A backward instant airdash is a relatively safe way to build some distance from your opponent if you have space to do it safely. These are not the best tools for every situation, but they're good tools to have in your kit, and more importantly, they're tools that a lot of characters use and you want to be thinking about how to deal with it if someone does it to you. Dash braking is cancelling your run on the ground with Faultless Defense. Running forward slightly and then braking is the safest offensive option available to most characters. It gains you distance at very low risk, and it's crucial to the neutral game in Guilty Gear. Practice braking as quickly as possible after starting your run. You will want to be blocking low almost all of the time, so the specific motion you should practice is 6561P+K. That is, double tapping forward to run, then hitting down-back and tapping two buttons simultaneously to FD. If you aren't sure what you should be doing with a very small window, this is a very safe bet. While you're still thinking about movement, you should drill into your head where your throw range is, and remember that throws are instant. Throws are a big part of this game for the same reason that movement is, and I would consider remembering throw range to be a part of the movement game in high level Guilty Gear. Secondly, get familiar with your character's normals. You want to know what distances you can cover and how quickly, where you're invincible, and what you get from landing your attacks. Sol's 5K starts up in 3 frames and has a great anti-air hitbox. Sol's 2D is low-profile and reaches pretty far in front of him. Sol's 5H has a ton of range. Sol's j.H recovers in the air and thus allows you to airdash afterwards. Play around with your normals some. A lot of the difficulty in Guilty Gear is knowing your matchups, and what you should be doing against specific other characters. The first and most reliable way to have a good idea of how to do this is to be very familiar with your own character. You should be thinking of this in a defensive context: What moves can you get away with throwing out when you have 5 frames? When you have 2 frames? When you're 5 character widths away? When your opponent is way above you? When should you block instead of attacking? What range is your character comfortable in? How fast is your character? Compared to other characters? Watching match videos can help with specific matchups. Don't try to watch what the players are trying to do, just watch what happens in the match. When Sol throws out a move against Testament and loses, what move did he throw out? Did he lose because he threw it out too early? Spaced it wrong? Or did Testament just choose an option that beat it cleanly? Same with when he throws out a move and it wins. Third, get an idea of your character's offensive gameplan. What are you trying to land? What do you get off of it? A lot of people say Sol plays kind of like a grappler. This is because he has a very good command grab that nets him a lot of damage when he lands it. You should know some setups into your command grab, and then learn how to get some damage from it. You should know what Sol's lows are and what they'll beat out. You should know that Sol has three slow, grounded overheads (5D, 236[K], and 214K), but that most of his high-low game comes from air approach with his air normals. You should know that Sol has a fireball that he mostly uses to keep up pressure. You should know that Sol has a very invulnerable dragon punch that's useful for setting up frametraps with. This is where watching match videos is extremely useful. You can watch other players to get a good idea of what setups people generally use, and how you would use them differently. Once you're to this phase, I suggest looking at any footage of Japanese Sol players you can find. On a specific note, one major pattern you'll notice in Guilty Gear is that okizeme is a big deal. Okizeme, if you don't already know, refers to the situation where your opponent gets knocked down. You should definitely know what you want to do when you get a knockdown. You should also know how to get a knockdown from a lot of situations, or at least from a lot of moves that you commonly throw out. This is more important than knowing your big-damage combos. It is a very valid and strong move in Guilty Gear to confirm a sub-optimal damage combo in order to secure a knockdown. I would seriously contend that if new players learned their okizeme setups and knockdown combos before they learned their huge damage confirms, they would start reliably winning matches against stronger players sooner. So do that. Once you get those three things down, you're an intermediate player. The rest is all about learning matchups and playing headgames. Play against whoever you can find to play against. If you have trouble with a specific matchup, try to figure it out in this same order. What are the opponent's movement options like? What do they use them for? How big and how fast are their normals? What can you throw out to beat them from neutral, and when? What is their offensive game like, and how do you block it? At this point, it's helpful to watch match footage of the specific matchup between Sol and whoever you're having trouble with. I think this is the best and fastest way to learn Guilty Gear. Good luck!

If you want to support ASW in the west, buy a copy of the US version. If you want the game now, buy the JP version. Doing one doesn't stop you from doing the other.

Honestly maniac CPU in general is a great way to grind your raw reaction time if you don't have access to a good player of a particular character. You'll learn bad habits as far as what you expect to happen in a given match, but if you're good at sandboxing your expectations and just reacting to what's happening, you'll definitely get faster. Of course, the best way to get good fast is just to find the best person in your area and play long-ass sets against them. Both approaches will get you serious gains in ability if you're able to stay alert, pay attention to what's happening, and try to improve your win rate, both at the level of individual exchanges ("Huh, guess that button isn't an answer to Sol's j.S, better try something else next time". "Huh, I guess Anji can set up an overhead off that. Better watch out for that next time." Hint: If you're paying attention to what consistently works, most of your answers will converge on some form of "Block!") and of whole matches. With the exception of the rare person who just isn't capable of the tech skill required to play (Like if you're somewhere near the bottom of the human bell curve in terms of raw minimum reaction time, unfortunately it's unlikely you're going to be a top player. But lots of top players cluster near the human average, since reaction time isn't everything, and most people in general cluster near the human average of everything almost by definition), people are usually limited by either their level of available competition or their attention span (How long a set can you play before fatigue sets in and you're not learning anything anymore? People tend to assume it's infinite, but there's a lot of science that says it really isn't at all) or their approach (I've seen a lot of players fail to improve simply because they're not thinking about what to do differently. They blame their execution or assume some tactic a better player is using is unbeatable. Even if you don't think you're doing this, you might be. To really improve, you have to be thinking while you play. Like all the time. If you autopilot, you might actively get worse. If you're starting to play dumber, maybe take a break.) Of course, if you have even one person with whom you can consistently compete, and both of you want to get better, you can improve quite a bit. Similarly, if you're really determined and grind against maniac CPUs, you'll at least get to a pretty decent level compared to most of the United States, if only because you know the answers to a lot of tools of a lot of characters, and are probably close to your theoretical maximum reaction time. I've heard someone claim that's how Mahouko learned to play, for example.

Oh, you don't still have it from when I helped with the Axl script? I'll PM it to you.

From what?

I play Justice some and could take a look if you want.

Huh, guess not. That's why it's always good to check

If I recall correctly, you can definitely special-cancel into wild throw as of at least +R, though I'm pretty sure you always could.

I suspect we're simply at an impasse here until one of us manages to produce some data. However, consider this: When timing a meaty jump-in against an opponent in Guilty Gear, no matter what it is, the factors that might change your setup as I understand them are: -Your jump arc makes you land on a certain frame. It's very likely you have this timing at least roughly memorized for your character and the setup you're doing. For practical intents and purposes at high level play, the execution of this should be irrelevant. -The opponent wakes up at a set time that you may well have memorized, based on their character and which way they fell (Face-up or face-down). If we assume you've memorized it, and your setup is possible given the time you have, this is completely irrelevant. -Your aerial move has a finite number of active frames. This is one error window. Their first vulnerable frame from waking up must be during one of these active frames, or you whiff. -Your air-to-ground link only works in a 1F window, or it is not a true blockstring. These are all things that you can grind out in training mode. Once you know your setup and you know what character you're facing, there is nothing you have to adapt to mid-match, if you've practiced this setup already. The combination of multiple factors makes a setup more difficult to learn and get right, but it doesn't make it impossible to do consistently, any more than a character-specific combo containing multiple 1F links is impossible to do. It's not necessarily a good thing that these games contain things you basically have to grind to get right, but denying that someone could do it is tantamount to being unprepared for the inevitable opponent who does. Most people don't go into training mode and practice every setup and every combo against every character. Some people do. Maybe I'm just the unlucky SOB who plays the character they've practiced against. It doesn't matter. If the setup exists, and it's good, it's a threat in real matches, 1F timing or not. When I encounter one of those people, I'm not going to bet against them knowing their setups that require 1F timing.

Which, again, would be a serious problem for viability if we were operating under the assumption that humans can't learn to reliably perform 1F links. I don't consider that assumption to be one we can rely on when describing top-level play in fighting games. Do you disagree?