@pattheflip is making me accountable for posting here, so I'm doing it! I'm catching you all up on where I'm at now first, before I start talking about my training log.
My main game for now is Melty Blood Type Lumina, and I’ve been playing it longer than any other fighting game by a good margin, making Akiha, my main, my most played character by default. I want to talk about what I like about her. I deleted a paragraph about gameplay and came back with this, which is much more succinct and accurate:
I’m incapable of thinking that boys are cool and I have to be a bitch.
Being snobby and arrogant also suits me…and in the game too! In the case of Akiha she really lives up to her reputation as a strict, cool-mannered, bossy little sister who runs at insane speeds to knock down her idiot brother and disobedient maids and place them in inescapable lockdown so she may brutally enforces her whims upon them. As a tsundere control freak, it makes sense her gameplay is about staying out of reach and making a space hostile until she sees an opportunity to berate her opponents and not give them an opportunity to breathe. Her weaknesses are she's attention starved and cannot admit it, so she does terribly against characters who are good at keeping her at bay and her defense is lacking because she can dish it out but she can’t take it.
Akiha suits me very well but she’s against the sorts of archetypes I typically play. I tend to want to play all-rounders that do well in neutral and have big buttons because they are considered beginner friendly, and I think what this actually means is that they win in ways that beginners can easily imagine.
When you’re starting out it’s hard to imagine yourself doing advanced execution and memorization because it's also hard to imagine that part of the game might be enjoyable. Specific win conditions feel abstract and hard to understand, and you have to perform them consistently and know a flowchart of scenarios to get into it and out of it. This can be difficult to imagine yourself doing and hard to comprehend the utility of.
Neutral makes sense to your intuition; the interesting thing about setplay, though, is that it is set! You actually don’t have to understand it at all; you can just do it! If you’re used to doing combos and practicing, you can look at setups other players have developed, and just do them with the right timings. Do them enough you can do them in a real match, and they just work. Akiha’s lockdown is contingent on specific setups but once your fingers can perform the combo and the setup, it all flows out of you without a second thought. It does not make intuitive sense; it makes sense once you've already done it. Then you can innovate on and understand better what you just did, not before.
The feeling of being right and in control is generally what people get out of strong neutral; since all you know is neutral, being more right in neutral feels good. Akiha makes offense feel the same way. I control the situation and no one else tells me what to do! I’m right! You have to listen to me now!
The phenomenon of doing first, learning after, is common in teaching. It’s the other side of playing around and figuring things out by experimentation. Both of these are key types of learning and I think any healthy teaching strategy uses both of them, but I also think people tend to gravitate towards one or the other depending on circumstance and history. It’s easy to teach someone to hate learning and that often comes from them not getting enough play and experimentation.
I’m learning to learn again with fighting games, which is a great feeling. As I poke at programming more and more, I really have come to like the discovery and joy of learning that comes with imitation. It doesn’t make any sense until you do it, and then you feel like a genius. Which is what I get out of playing Akiha.
