Combo Troubles of a complete beginner

Hey, FTG Community

I used to only play Fighting games very, very casually but watching some amazing tournaments motivated me to try to learn a fighting game properly. I bought Guilty Gear Xrd on pc, but even though I learn and memorize the mechanics I run into big trouble concerning combos. I either input the commands too slowly, or I become inprecicse or even mash trying to input the moves quickly enough.

I know these are bad habits that come from playing FTGs casually but it is incredibly discouraging to not be able to beat trials consisting of 5 moves or failing jump cancels into a combo 8 out of 10 times.

What was your approach to learning how to input exactly what you wanted to get back in your novice days?

Any tips, advice and constructive criticism beyond “suck it up and practice more” is very welcome.

Greetings from Germany.

Can you be more specific of which combo is giving you trouble? Also maybe you are waiting to see every button you press screen, when you should just input everything right after the other fast.

My Problems are not with one specific combo, but executing combos consistently in general. You are propably right about not relying too much on the moves being shown on the screen.

Start with jump in normal to super combos. Then work on cross-up or overhead to super combos. Learn follow ups from Dust for air combos. Learn some basic quick foot/slash low to standing slash to super. Work on substituting specials for super. Learn to combo super into special. Finish by using optimum character combos in different scenarios.

Generally whenever new players encounter this problem it’s because they are inputting things too quickly. This means moves don’t come out because they couldn’t be cancelled yet, or you simply did the wrong input. Try to slow down and do the inputs at a more lenient pace and make sure you’re doing the right inputs. There’s a bigger time window for this than you might realize.

for complete novice advice

  1. stick with one chracter, fighting games take a lot of time to be good at you’re not doing your self any favors by chopping and changing chracter, also make sure the chracter you pick is right for you.

It sounds stupid but i think many people drop games because they don’t spend time finding out which chracter is right for them, a prime example is with myself when i started playing guilty gear i was amendment that eddie was the chracter for me i would watch a-cho matches in amazement how great eddie can be, i liked trap characters you know putting shit on the screen unblockables and so on and i thought yeah eddie is for me.

However i did not realize how difficult he was to use with all the negative edging you needed to be able to do, i did not have the dedication to stick with it, i’m pretty confident i had the skills but because i played so many other fighters i wanted somebody easier to start with, so i can see why people drop games, it can be kinda disheartening, but i was not a complete novice and i really liked guilty gear so i was determined to find somebody else and i ended up using faust instead, who in the end i ended up enjoying much more than eddie.
So do your research and find out if you think you’re picking somebody you might enjoy using and stick with them, when you get better you can switch to whoever you like, hopefully by then you’d be at a good level with your one chracter

  1. For combos, lets say you are in trial mode in GGxrd, when you see a combo lets say for example you get a trial where for example you have 10 different commands, 10 commands different commands is alot to take in, i had this problem a lot when i started playing blazeblue, you’re brain is trying to take in 10 things at once in a specific order it’s easy to mix up the order not to mention the fact you have to execute them to.

What i found helped me was to break the combo down into sections of two so then rather than remember 10 things you’re remembering 5, yes it’s still the same but you’re breaking it down in more manageable chunks, so just do 2 at a time so for example (this is just something to explain)

faust and foe in corner

Jumping K
standing lp

standing s
standing hs

pogo
flower

going my way (roman cancel)
standing LP

down S (jump cancel)
Jump K ( air jump cancel)

jump Dust

so on the face of it it’s a fair old bit to remember which is what i would do it back it into 5 sections of 2 commands and only focus on 2 at a time, getting them right till i can move on to the next to, even to go far as analyze why it works and more importantly how can it go wrong or possible issues i could have, so something like this

Jumping K
standing lp

This is the start of the combo it’s pretty easy but some problems you could have are you press K to early meaning you standing LP wont combo.
Or you can press K too late meaning you don’t even landing the jumping K.
or issues could be you press the wrong button after the jumping K, so to eliminate this and the other issues i’ll just keep doing this 2 commands over and over until i fck it up until i understand the timing so that i will nail it 10 out of 10 times

Standing s
standing HS

so you nailed the first two now onto this part the only real issue you might have here is pressing the wrong buttons, again just keep repeating until you nail it non stop, these are gatlin chains there should be no timing issues

Pogo
flower

You possible might not cancel fast enough into pogo for it to combo, but if you proficient in any fighter you should not be messing it up it’s a two in one cancel, the flower part might whiff if you do it too slow or it might now connect against all chracters ie potemkin yadda yadda, again you repeat it until you can do it

going my way (roman cancel)
Standing LP

now this is where things might start to go wrong, so now you should be able to do this other parts in a row you would have done it so much it’s in the muscle memory.
The issues you could have is mainly at what hit do you roman cancel going my way, and of course making sure you go into it fast enough after the flower pops them up, so if you do it too late going my way misses, but lets say you get it you now have to roman cancel at the right hit to make sure you fall before they do so you can continue the combo so lets you cancel at the third hit of going my way to make sure you fall first
other issues might be you cannot get the standing lp connect because you do it too early or too late

Anyway you get the picture, it might seem very long winded but these things take a long time especially if you are a novice,
It really is just practice and muscle memory, and knowing why you are fucking up the combos, i find that is the thing that helped me the most when i started playing blazeblue, why couldn’t i get it to connect? and most of the time you figure it out, ie i’m doing something too fast too slow, or even something as stupid as i’ve misread something

Goodluck and don’t get discouraged

Welcome to SRK. These kind of questions belong in the newbie dojo. Moving.

I recommend you read the stickies.

Trial and error to figure out the timing for each button press and then repetition to drill it into my muscle memory. Then hit confirming drills after that because it trains the brain to do the combo without thinking about it. Then to make sure I could do it under pressure, I would turn on the AI and practice on it.

It’s mostly that their inputs are all over the place.

-I’m training my friend to play FGs. It took me 3 weeks to get him to stop mashing a button 4 times when it only needs to be pressed once.

-I had to tell him “Even though you’ve been doing a Hadoken for 25 years, you have NO idea how to do a Hadoken”. His inputs were all sorts of half-circles. I had to force him to go into training and slow QCF’s over and over again.

He’s slowly starting to clean up and he can ALMOST do a simple combo in a real match now.

btw trials in Xrd have a “sample” feature that allows you to see exactly how to perform the combo (timing etc.) and shows even the exact motions and button presses that you have to do on your stick/pad. Sometimes a combo won’t work because it requires you to link normals after a specific number of hits or to do a jump forward instead of a neutral jump. That should help you clear any doubt.

And jump cancels are not really easy compared to many other things in fighting games. The better thing for those combos is really to memorize the sequence by splitting it into different parts with a certain logic (ex. S S S - K P K - jc - K S) and yes, the execution is still not very easy, so it will take a little practice.

That’s a huge factor. Most people who play video games are mechanically really, really bad at video games. If you sit and watch your non-fighting game pals play anything, they’re usually mashing around like an idiot. It’s just for most games, it doesn’t really matter. Mashing or no mashing, they get Dante to swing the sword or they kill the bad guy in Skyrim.

Then they come and try to play a fighting game and they have years and years of bad muscle memory to overcome. While in most games people and derp and mash wildly and still rescue the princess or whatever, in fighting games mashing creates a negative feedback cycle. Not only does mashing actually make doing most things harder, but they’re robbing themselves of any positive feedback when the succeed as they’re just pressing too many goddamn buttons to have any way of knowing how they were successful.

What do you think is a good way to overcome this? Because this is barnone my biggest issue when playing these game. That and not panicking when I get a hit and immediately dropping what ever combo I was going for.

First off, don’t ever mash in training mode. Try to build good form.

Secondly, practice what you’ve learned and what you want to do against the CPU. The AI isn’t comparable to fighting a human, but you’ll learn to do what you want to do under pressure.

Lastly, it still just takes time, so there is no easy to way to just stop doing it. Just try to recognize what you’re doing wrong when you do it. As long as you’re actively trying to break bad habits, rather than giving into them, you’ll improve.

I dont really mash in training mode, my problem is not mashing while in a match. I can get to a point where I can do a combo on both sides with my eyes closed, but the second I get into a match all of that mussel memory gose away and I just start mashing like a scrub.

Play more matches