tinyvalor

will never have the shoes

  • she/her

reflecting on the dota 2 all hero challenge so far a bit...because i said i was hoping i would learn something from all this

after the barcade opened i had some night where i got mad at xrd and i went over to play mushihimesama futari and i was like "wow, this feels so natural now! it's so easy for me to think about stuff and react in time! how come i never feel like this in fighting games?" it's a game i'd played a lot, but not for quite a while. and like, obviously there are elements of fighting games that don't really come up the same way in most shmups...i'd say futari in particular is a game that feels pretty free and open to play; it's easier than usual to correct for unexpected mistakes or other deviations in your plans and you don't have to react to rng or anything like that. the situation in fighting games changes really fast and i've struggled a lot to adapt to that.

and playing dota has been a kind of similar experience. like, there's hard parts, but in terms of the moments that feel like they singularly define the outcome of a game...for most heroes it feels very straightforward. i need to react to the enemy's move with my stun, or follow up on my ally's stun, or...obviously there's plenty of factors there still, but since each character only has a few moves it's often easy to pick out what the most important reactions are and focus heavily on them. and that zooms out to a broader scale where it's easy for me to look at what the enemy has and think "so this is how we win" unless i'm playing a really wacky hero. (every time i've won an invoker game i feel like i need to lie down for a few minutes, then i'm pumped for the rest of the day.) and especially because i've been switching heroes so much, focusing on the enemy's gameplan and outplaying it is the easier and more reliable way.

and yet i'm realizing i've never thought this way in fighting games...if anything the fact that i started rushing down more was like trying to avoid approaching the game this way. and yet this kind of "i'll just force my gameplan" approach is deeply limiting in its own way. maybe true freedom is knowing what might be coming and what you can do about it. maybe there's not forbidden knowledge i've just been unable to see this whole time and if i just open my mind to what actually happens instead of imagining how things are supposed to work i can play better.

i think long ago i started to feel like not learning combos and setups as well as other people was what was holding me back. and it certainly doesn't make things easier, but i've known for a long time that there was something i just couldn't figure out but was missing. i think playing things that aren't fighting games have taken me closer to seeing what that was, but the only way to reach those last steps is to try again...i've been excited about the new games coming out this week because it feels like a chance to force myself back out of my comfort zone with fgs, and return to something i've given up on before because i felt like i would never "get it" and agree with how it works. but i don't have to feel that way. it was always my choice. i can choose differently. at least in theory...it remains to be seen how that'll actually go i guess


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