I've been trying out Xrd again the last week or so and working on picking up Leo. I've been having a lot of fun with it, since Leo's definitely been an easy character to click with. It's been really nice having "confirm a grounded hit into rekkas, get into backturn stance, then just run caveman shit" as a simple and effective day0 gameplan to orient myself around in an otherwise complex game. It also doesn't hurt that I find the inputs for his rekka series to be pretty fun to execute.
It's been funny noticing though that even though I enjoy sitting in training mode and running drills of confirming into his rekkas, it's a bit hit or miss whether or not I feel motivated to boot up training mode and run some execution drills and maybe put some work into learning a combo. And I think what I'm realizing is that a standard training mode session I've been running of "warm up by drilling inputs of stuff I'm familiar with but could improve my consistency on, then spend some time learning to execute something new" is great practice and at the end of a session I'll have come away being slightly less likely to drop stuff in real matches and a little closer to unlocking something new, those are both very incremental gains that add up over time but aren't really immediately satisfying drops of motivation.
And so realizing that "immediate gain" is something I've been feeling a lack of, what if I add "gain a new bit of understanding" to that regimen, since that actually is an immediate take-away. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of times I'll be bussing home from locals or cooking dinner or whatever and have "what if I tried X in Y situation to solve problem Z" pop into my head about fighting games, but I'm not really in a position to immediately test it out and so it often just slips back to the back of my head. But realizing that those musings aren't just about the immediate question at hand, but also a potential way to get myself into training mode and practicing, they suddenly get a lot more valuable. So why not write that shit down to hold onto for later? After all, figuring out the answers to this stuff is fun!
A little bit ago I was building some gunpla and started musing about what sorts of things I could try and do to extend my pressure on Leo. I had a moment of "well do I want to boot up training mode right now to explore that? Not really, I'm enjoying what I'm doing and want to finish this kit". So instead grabbed a notebook, jotted down the thought, and then added in a few immediate guesses at things to try, and now am looking forward to getting into lab later tonight to test that stuff out (and then might as well put in some work on the execution stuff I've been working on while I've already got it going).