I like playing Lilith because she's cute and annoying and a little bit hard to play. Sometimes you pick up a character not because they're good, but because part of the fun of fighting games is doing something hard for no good reason.
Players of fighting games are differentiated by which hard things they like doing and their bad reasons for doing it. Lilith, pictured in this gif beating up on herself with herself, is considered relatively weak but decent enough to be competitive . She has a theoretically simple gameplan that requires a lot of skill to play effectively and at the high end demands execution to what is pictured in this gif: tapping someone gently with a punch and then teleporting into a rainbow so she can do succubus tag team pro wrestling moves on herself but boobier for 6 seconds. That's cool. It does a lot of damage, it can catch people flinching, and if she fails to hit it's a free dash she can do in the air that's basically impossible to punish. It is very cute and annoying and more annoying and dangerous the faster you can pull off. That's worth working a little bit hard for.
To preform Luminous Illusion, you have to press a bunch of buttons in a weird order, which, yes, is generally how you play fighting games. In this case, it's Light Punch, Light Punch, Forward, Light Kick, Heavy Punch, in order, which are especially weird buttons in an especially weird order and certainly more awkward than the smooth curves you'd be swerving a joystick in. The biggest problem is pressing Light Punch twice. You are much faster at pressing two different buttons in order than the same once twice, so much faster that the problem becomes not pressing those buttons at the same time or fudging the order, but that's for another day. The double tap is very hard to do quickly, and while there's a window to do the input that's comparatively generous, you could theoretically do the move in about 4 frames. That's almost impossible, but you need to be much, much faster than the max window if you want Luminous Illusion to combo off of a move like the crouching Heavy Punch I'm doing in the video.
So what you end up having to do is pressing the Light Punch button with your pointer finger and then moving your middle finger off its normal position (generally Medium Punch) to tap Light Punch, because while awkward it's much faster than tapping a button with your pointer and then having to lift it up to tap it again. That can take as long as 1/10 of a second! We don't have that kind of time.
So I've been spending the past half a week trying to get it as quickly as I can as correctly as I can. The material reward is doing a cool move that does a lot of damage. The spiritual reward is that your hands and brain feel nice when you pull it off. A pretty little finger dance that gets quicker and lighter the more you practice. What a joy after spending half a week begging the fightstick to accept what you're trying to tell it.
It's easier to win with the other characters I play, Felicia (a catgirl with big hair and loooooong normals) and Q-Bee (whose shmoovement and shmix is both shnasty and shnot very hard to do). There's just something irreplaceable about working hard for a weaker character than both of them because she's fun and very cute. Lilith is rewarding if you're hardworking and think you're kinda clever, and she seems to attract players that feel the same because the best Lilith players are some of the best at vsav. A lot of people will tell you that tiers don't matter, that you can win with anyone if you're determined enough, and it's true, but who's going to make you that determined? Working harder than I have to, sometimes, makes me want to keep working.
Even if I give up or lose focus and play someone else, at least I learned how to do one pretty hard thing for no reason. What's more fun than that?
This is my fgc sideblog. The last time I did something like this was on Ello (lol). I actually miss good old longform posting a lot, and this was fun to write. Mostly this blog is to help motivate me to practice consistently, but you can read it too if you want.
