Alex Jebailey had a Persona 4 Arena (P4A) stream where he wanted to see how many matches of P4A that he could win while playing as Chie… one-handed. I had a lot of fun watching the stream. He ended up losing more matches than he won, but he did manage a couple of really good wins. I was also pretty impressed with how many moves he could pull off one-handed. Sure, anyone can just mash A, but it appeared that he was doing a lot more than just mashing A. Tyler, Dani, and I were watching the stream while Tyler and I worked on assembling my new media shelf for all the video games I brought to my new place. Alex eventually opened up a lobby where, if people wanted to join, they could send him a message and play some P4A on stream.
I was tempted to join, but I still think I’m pretty terrible at the game. Everyone else playing on the stream seemed significantly better than I was. I watched a bunch of the matchups, hoping to learn some new tech. I’m still feeling a bit intimidated, but I guess it could be worse.
I bumped up my win/loss percentage today. It was mostly due to a relatively scrubby Yosuke and a couple matches against my friend Ben who I met through Twitter and met in person at EVO. I’m still sad my percentage is so dismal, but I did end up playing a bunch of matches while I was drinking yesterday.
I think I’ve settled on Teddie being my main and Elizabeth being my sub. I’m pretty good with both, but I think there is a lot more opportunity for me with Teddie. He is freaking adorable, not to mention he’s one of the best troll characters. Nothing makes people mad more than Teddie’s baseball bat and the Teddie Circus.
There are some days when I want to go back to playing BlazBlue because it’s safe for me. Then again, while I’m pretty good at executing a couple of combos with Lambda as well as setting up a few combos (not to mention that my corner combos are absolutely GDLK). Even with all that being said, my blocking is still weak, I’m not great at punishing random hits, and I do tend to play Lambda as a rushdown character instead of how she was meant to be played–zoning. I want to go back to BlazBlue for a little while, but that isn’t going to help me with P4A.
Since I’ve pinned down my characters, I think I’m going to start looking up character-specific matches, combo videos, combo lists, and frame data for the characters I want to play (Teddie and Elizabeth). This research should give me a little more to work with. Even though it seems like a lot of reading and a lot of extra work, I noticed that when I did my research with Lambda, things paid off. Practice helped, sure. Challenge mode helped, too. Understanding the deeper fundamentals of the game as well as watching higher level play always opened up more ideas and opportunities for me. Even if I couldn’t master the higher tier combos, it would give me an idea for ways to punish the opponent if I ever caught them off guard.
I really need to devote more time into playing against other people, watching matches, and doing my character research. I think I’ll start doing that today, along with all the other things I have already been doing.
I’m far from even considering myself decent at the game, but I’m definitely having a good start. Week one has been more successful than I could have ever hoped for.
(I never meant for my personal blog to turn into a solely P4A blog, but this sure seems like a good place to ramble and rant about my personal experiences into yet another fighting game for me.)
Tags: FGC, P4A, Video Games
Practice makes perfect, after a month i think youll solidify your knowledge of the game and its mechanics as well as how and when to use appropriate combos. A new experience is always hard to grasp but i think youve got it pretty well!
I can’t believe we’re already as decent as we are, without as much fighting game experience as many other people tend to have. We just have to keep on practicing!
(I beat my friend Ben up with lots and lots of Teddie and Elizabeth. It bumped my overall win/loss ratio up, but man… I’m still pretty sad looking in ranked matches. ;-;)