I play mostly Ken but last week I decided to pick up Akuma and tonight I played it online for the first time against a guy for 2h30 and we had some pretty interesting games (at least for me), he is way better than me overall (4k pp and I have 1k250 pp) but I’d like to know your opinions and advices about my gameplay.
So far as you’ll see my execution sucks but I think I did ok overall for my level compared to his, only things that make me facepalm from my noobs eyes other than the execution are my punishes.
It’s hard to analyse anything at this level you are. You don’t master the character enough to put yourself in situations and a lot of what you do is either mistimed or at a wrong range.
And you could probably play this guy 2 days straight and wont learn anything but to become better at what you do right now. Because he obviously doesn’t master these 2 chars he has played, or he was toying I don’t know, but he wasn’t punishing hard your mistakes, and wasn’t showcasing how he could shut down your strategy, but blocking and baiting alone.
Thus nothing prevents you from keeping doing it wrong all day.
There still a pretty long way to the next level. Don’t think to much about that, improve your punish combo first, know when to punish biggest mistake for every char in the game. Next year you’ll do it without thinking about it and there will be spare brain cells ready to think about what’s happening in the round, etc.
I am a bit better than that usually (not that good tho as you see with my points), I picked up Akuma a week ago and I wanted feedback mostly to know where to start with the learning. So I guess I start with his punish combos.
I actually added this guy after our session and he gave me feedback too. I did play his main twice (he mains Sagat) and lost 2-0 both times as you can imagine.
Maybe Akuma is not the best char for a relative beginner.
You walk/jump back way too much putting yourself in the corner. You need to stand your ground and move forward, but like shabrout said, focus on learning the character better. Practice some basic combos and work them into your play. You jumped right over dudley’s ultra and only punished with a throw when you could’ve done a lot more damage.
So- learn combos and use them. don’t worry if you screw it up, the more you try the better you’ll get. Don’t bite off more than you need to, just focus on one thing and work on that.
I started with Akuma, so won’t say it’s not suited for beginners. But I read, watched a lot ! And I was really motivated to learn the background basics of the SF games. And it took years to be able to maintain a certain level. I also had offline friend to play with the first year. Helps to get some fun unlike the online constant blow ups.
The thing is though, at you stage, you wont really improve from people feedback much. I always said that. You can’t understand really before you reach a certain amount of game experience and before you, by yourself, start feeling the issues you face. And start to seek solution to these one by one.
Execution will be on your own training course for a long time.
Then there’s basic safe universal game plan against scrubs. To anti air, and punish unsafe shit. (The punish to find on every other character unsafe move can take a while as there’s very tricky one abuse-able unsafe moves online).
Only there, you can force opponent to play smart and according to the matchup.
That’s when and only at this point if you can apply the above things fine, you will have to fight better opponents that wont give you much chance to score punishes. You can then step up your game with spacing, reading opponent next move, footsy, whiff punish.
And in all these area, people feedback is usually the only way to go. Because there’s not much you can figure out yourself. Unless you watch a lot of your own replay but most people don’t, I don’t. But I no more care about leveling up. Will be a scrub forever
