Boba @TapiocaPearl@mastodon.art

these ghosts i carry

There's a reason that special moves are called Special Moves, a category separate from Normal Moves. Special moves are special; it's that simple. You're not supposed to treat specials as normal moves and try to do them every time, and you're not supposed to be able to do them correctly 100% of the time. Even in games where specials are a single button press like Fantasy Strike and Granblue Fantasy Versus, you can only use them under certain conditions, because they're Special. I hope this helps.

You think "I can't possibly do all these specials correctly one after another" and that's right! It's by design. Even if your execution is perfect, these moves have long recovery animations which give your opponent plenty of time to smack you back if you try to do a bunch of them consecutively. Some games may have a mechanic that lets you spend a resource to cancel the end of one special animation so you can SOMETIMES do two specials in a row. You're not supposed to be able to do 6 in a row.

I think a widespread misconception in the Smash community is people think that in traditional fighters, combos are done by chaining a bunch of specials, while in reality they're mostly normal moves. Specials are usually used as combo finishers or to create an opportunity to start a combo. But what happens is Smash players see these specials and think "I can't do combos with these!" not realizing that combos in most fighting games is just hitting AAABBAA maybe with some directional inputs.

I think a lot of people are intimidated by fighting games because of an outdated understanding of what some games were like 20 or 30 years ago.
The genre has a reputation for being obtuse but every game from the last 15 years has a beginner-friendly tutorial.
Also a lot of people only watch high-level play and don't understand that that's not what's expected of them. You don't need to play a sport at a professional level to play with your friends in the backyard. Fighting games are the same way.

Y'know really the key to enjoying fighting games I think is to not stress over winning and losing because at the end of the day unless you're in a tournament, whether you won or lost doesn't matter. Not that you can't be competitive and have fun but like, you should be evaluating your performance in comparison to your past self not your opponent. If you win, you were better than your opponent, and if you lose, you were worse. But that doesn't tell you at all if you're better than you were before

💯

Yes

Vahnella Stehk is no more. long live Midnight Snak #ffxivnames