I mentioned that I wanted to post this writeup earlier today, so here it is. I actually wanted this to be a bit bigger and slightly more formal, but I kept getting distracted and even several months in, I'm still learning quickly enough that anything I write about my progress is obsolete by the time I get back to the draft the next day - so I figured I'd do a few quick(?) bullet points instead to get across how it's been for me.
If you've ever been in the position of wanting to play a harder character, but not being sure about how to approach it: here's some thoughts from my own experience on how I approached swapping from from one of UNI2's easiest characters to one of its hardest.
Prior experience & context
- I've played UNI on and off since late 2016, meaning I've been playing it to some degree for about 7 years. Most of that time, from 2018-2023, was spent on Wagner, a rushdown monster who is incidentally very easy to play. However, I very rarely played UNI at all after COVID, and basically only picked it up again after UNI2 was announced.
- I've played fighting games in general for about as long, starting with BBCF. Most of my playtime has been in UNIST, Xrd Rev 2, MBAACC, BBCF and a decent helping of Tekken 7. I almost always play fast, straightforward rushdown characters because I like to win as much as possible as fast as possible but I also want to pretend I'm honest.
- At the moment, I only play UNI2!
Why swap?
- Yuzu has been my favorite fighting game character of all time since i discovered UNIEL in late 2016 via this CMV. At the time I made efforts to play her but ultimately bounced because she was too hard, in favor of easier characters like Eltnum (UNIEL), Phonon (UNIST PS4->PC), and eventually Wagner (later UNIST PC).
- I started learning her again in late december of last year as a secondary because the upcoming release of UNI2 got me off my ass and wanting to play the game again - and what better time to give Yuzu another shot than after spending 4 years away from UNI?
- After just a few sets - I'd say less than 50 or 60 games in total - it really became clear that the amount of effort the character required was more than I could put into a secondary.
- By that point, I'd built up just enough confidence in my ability to learn her that I decided to swap outright, committing to playing her exclusively for at least the next few months.
- Wagner is still my second favorite fighting game character ever! I just really wanted to give my absolute best to Yuzuriha.
Why is she hard?
- Primarily, her heavy reliance on a powerful and highly specialized, but restrictive stance. While in stance, you can only use each of your three attack buttons a single time, requiring a lot of practice and awareness to be able to smoothly play neutral or pressure with her without running out of options and putting yourself in a bad situation. Stance jumping has its own restrictions too, which are easy to bump into when you're trying to stay mobile in neutral. I really can't stress enough that this is what's really hard about this character.
- Execution is a small part of it, too. Her combo difficulty isn't exactly staggeringly high, but she faces the usual UNI execution challenges like sensitive delay timings and a heavy reliance on linking into dash normals.
- Additionally, she comes with her own list of tricks like button holds and "negative edge D-pair" (releasing the D button at the same time as the button press for a special move), as well as some quirks that aren't so much hard as they are peculiar like rapid strings of special moves (236A > 421C > j421B > j6A sequence is an absolute killer in this regard, because 421C and 421B are both super-fast teleports that sideswap you), the need to hold 6 after 236 motions for some strings and combos (j.236A>j6C>j214C for example), or rapid button presses for her 236BAB~236AD and 236ABAC~236AD enders.
- All this said, her execution has become easier between versions. It's still pretty challenging overall but she's a fair bit easier than any reputation from previous versions might suggest.
- Defense is hard. Her reversals are 214C (which has a huge deadzone right in front of her), VO and IW. Yuzu lacks a basic normal in the crucial 7-8f range and struggles a lot to contest at mid range without turning to somewhat more unorthodox (though effective) abare tools like 66B and rising j2C. Even after teching a throw, which leaves her at +7, she can have an difficult time taking initiative because of the awkward range she's left at.
My approach to learning
- I focused for a long time on only the absolute basics - hit confirming from 236B, j.236A zoning, then learning stable, universal routes I could do from most starters. I always do this when I'm learning a character, but for Yuzu I dedicated even more time than usual to this part of the process. If I can't be completely confident in my ground floor gameplan, then it'll be much harder to develop and apply more advanced strategies!
- Playing matches was really frustrating for quite a while, because my ability to control the character was extremely poor and I was completely folding in situations where I would have 100% confidence as Wagner. This is the sort of thing I personally find very hard to deal with, so I was aware that it was going to be an issue going in.
- That said, I could give myself some grace when it came to finding her hard to pilot because that is exactly what is hard about the character but knowing it didn't completely allay my frustrations. This and the above are part of why I kept her as just a secondary at first - I could go into a set with Wagner, feel things out and sate my ego a little bit before hopping on the Yuzuriha Struggle Bus if I felt up to it, which I usually did.
- I have enough experience in fighting games by now (about 7 years!) that I know what my weaknesses are and I know how to play to my strengths when it comes to learning. As a result I dedicate a majority of my practice time to execution consistency, not just with combos and confirms but also for things like nailing tight stagger windows or even reaction IW after CSing on defense - and most of the rest goes to learning & practicing the real character-specialist stance stuff for neutral & pressure because I trust myself to improve my general awareness & matchup knowledge just by playing, reading and talking with only minimum pmode time. This is an entirely personal approach that I know works for me because of my prior experience in the game and genre in general.
- Speaking of learning just by playing, match experience was obviously huge. It's easy when you're playing a character that everyone describes as "training mode is your friend"-tier to just sit in pmode all day, but as always you can't know what's relevant to practice without seeing what situations you're actually struggling with. Yuzu wins matches by dominating neutral, and you can't do that without an absolute ton of in-match time.
- I mentioned above that I can improve my awareness by reading: I seriously mean this. You can gain a lot of character understanding by finding your character discord (if there is one: most modern games have them). It kind of sucks that you have to do this to get information, but it's really invaluable to be able to read live conversations between experienced players. You can really boost your game literacy by paying attention to these places and taking care to absorb the information you see. In my case, Ctrl-Fing character names in the UNIST Discord's Yuzuriha channel every time I felt lost in a matchup was a huge help and gave me a lot of direction in general, even without posting a single time in there.
- Early on, I really had to rewire my brain to focus on staying in stance in neutral. Initially I was running basic zoning with 236B, j.236A and otherwise playing fairly normal UNI, but I quickly ran into the limits of that approach! Yuzu's most commanding neutral options — her defining tools — are dramatically slower if she's not already in stance, and I felt in a lot of situations that I just couldn't contest particular neutral options like nanase 236X, kuon slide etc. It was only when I started internalizing my stance frame data that I realised I can very effectively contest these sorts of tools on the condition that I already be in stance. I still find myself having this revelation repeatedly, because being in stance keeps turning out to be even more important than I think it is at any given moment.
- From there I started really working on learning specific stance sequences for neutral outside of layer 1 zoning. To run stance neutral smoothly takes awareness and practice that I'm still working on now, but taking it once sequence at a time has been an absolutely massive boon. It's much easier to fill a gap in your gameplan when you have some big building blocks already prepared.
- I'm still in the above phase, but I'm now starting to put more time into optimizing beyond my basic gameplan with new combos and confirms, though stability is the main concern. I don't want to put a lot of time into learning a new combo unless it's going to make my life easier and not just do more damage, unless the difference is really substantial.
Big lessons I've learned & what I'm working on next
- It's really not quite as bad as I thought. The character is definitely hard, and until very recently I felt that putting the same level of effort towards Wagner would see better results thanks to her relative ease of use, but now I feel very confident that I made the right choice. I'm having a blast and improving rapidly!
- Playing a character you love really matters a lot. I really do like Wagner, but Yuzu is something really special for me. Without that connection I definitely wouldn't have put this much effort into another character.
- I noticed that I have a long-standing tendency to downplay my efforts & say things like "haha, yeah, I'm totally carried" to deflect complaints towards my usual character picks. It's become especially obvious that I do this because I get the urge to say "she's not that hard really" about Yuzu despite the fact that she really is, in fact, that hard.
- There are still some big gaps in my gameplan. My 6X pressure in particular is weak and my anti-air game really needs work (though her new 2FF helps a lot). For the most part I'm really just battling against inexperience, which is a great place to be because it means any time at all spent playing the character will be productive.
