For a bit last week it was feeling like I was starting to push myself too hard in terms of feeling a need to get better in guilty gear, so the other day decided to just drop that, forget about the grind and just play around with some new stuff. So spent some time just playing around with Testament in Strive and getting a feel for them, as well as picking up Granblue Versus and playing around in that a bit.
And it’s been really good for my mentality in terms of relieving any sense of internal pressure I’d accumulated, but also it’s given me some really nice perspective on my own play too! It was really striking picking up Testament and pretty quickly feeling comfortable using their entire kit of specials as well as the bulk of their normals, and realizing that oh yeah, when I first picked up Bridget a month ago, an entire character worth of moveset was too much to wrap my head around at once so I only used half her kit or so, got comfortable using that, and then found it hard to break out of my established patterns to incorporate the parts of her kit I wasn’t using because I’ve gotten attuned to playing without them, but also with some conscious effort can probably find ways to make use of the tools I haven’t been using.
And on a more micro level, I’d been conscious of the fact that I never really used 6P much on Bridget which felt weird since it’s such a strongly defined button with a clear use case. I think on some level I’d seen it as this hole in my skill set (which it is to some degree for sure!), but spending some time on Testament had me realizing that no it’s just that Bridget’s 6P is pretty mid and I generally prefer using her 2H to anti-air, but give me a completely busted 6P like Testament’s and I’m more than happy to put it to work. It’s not that I “can’t 6P”, it’s just not a go-to tool for me on Bridget (though with that no longer hanging over me, there probably are places to use her 6P where it’s better than 2H that I can find!)
Playing Granblue has also been pretty satisfying too. Starting off in a new game is really giving me an appreciation for how much I’ve learned in Strive. The first month or two that I played Strive as my first ever fighting game definitely felt overwhelming as hell and I think it was hard at times to feel like I was learning when so much of my experience was “haha what the fuck is going on”, but starting out in a new game has given me so much more appreciation of how much learning goes into picking up even just the broadest strokes of “what’s this character I’m fighting trying to do, how do they move, what space do they threaten and how quickly, what do I need to watch for?”, especially multiplied across the entire cast.
It’s also been really rewarding seeing how much quicker I can pick things up this time around. Just having a basic understanding of how fighting games work and the different game states you experience makes picking up a new character in a different game so much smoother. Rather than “this is a shit ton of moves”, I’ve got a lot more context for mapping tools to situations when I’m want to use them, and it makes learning so much more approachable. Plus having that context gives me a better appreciation for options that felt unappealing before. When I was first learning Strive, throws felt impossible risky because “I have to be HOW close to them? but can’t they just hit me if I try that?” and so I never really learned to use them, but after spending a whole bunch of time getting pressure strings blocked, it’s cool having a totally new context where everything’s fresh where I can get used to sometimes just stopping a pressure string midway through and running up and hitting throw instead and start to feel more comfortable in that.
The last few days of messing around have been really fun and a great mental reset. I think it’d been easy to fixate on trying to go deep on a single game/character to “maximize my learning”, but it’s been really cool seeing how branching out and trying new characters and games can give me new perspective to take back with me and break me out of fixed patterns (and also just be enjoyable in their own right! not everything has to be super focused on linear improvement all the time)