I know that in order to get good at fighting games, you have to practice. But what are some good ways to do so?
Read as much as you can, watch videos, ask questions, practice in the training room, practice in arcade mode, practice everything.
Most importantly - get your mindset right. Understand that you will get destroyed A LOT. If you cannot handle this, you will not succeed. After getting beaten to a pulp over and over and over and over, things will eventually slow down a little and you’ll see the match clearer.
Learn the fundamentals and basics first. The last thing you should be worrying about is a big combo. Learning how to anti-air and learning about spacing is far more valuable than any combo.
This is a pretty good video for beginners. It shows how a simple, but smart game plan can easily win.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=i5xs1lkcMlI
I forgot who said it here, but this is a great quote. Think of a fighting game as a “strategy game that requires manual dexterity”. Remember, you’re not playing against a character in the game, you’re playing against human. While it helps to be quick with your hands, a lot of matches are won because one player outsmarted the other.
If you can record your matches, do so, then when you’re wondering what to practice go back through the footage. If you see you got hit by a jump-in attack ask yourself if you could’ve anti-aired, and what specific attack you would use in that scenario. Go into training, pick your character and your opponent’s, and record the dummy doing the same jump-in attack. Switch it to playback and try to anti-air it. If you want you can put the dummy on CPU and focus on anti-airing when it jumps, or go into the VS CPU mode and do the same. If the person you initially fought against was local or on your online friends list, then ask them for a rematch sometime and try to apply it in a real match against a human.
One very objective way of improving is having control of your character. Being able to execute the inputs to make your character perform the action you want, like being able to do special move X on either side of the screen. A lot of players who aren’t really familiar with the game, myself included, tend to kinda break down execution-wise once we’ve passed a certain nerves or stress threshold. Like when both characters are only a single hit away from losing and you mess up your anti-air special move command and get hit. It’s not that the command for the move changed because the character was low on health, it’s that other factors interfered with your brain telling your hands/fingers to do the move. If you’re having this problem then there are two main things you can do. Get more comfortable with the inputs and get more comfortable with the situation. If you tend to
The biggest misconception I see from new players, or players who aren’t used to fighting games, is that if they practice and get better then they will win. While it’s great if you can get the win, it’s not the sole factor in seeing if you got better. Fighting games are player VS player, there are very few objective “I have gotten better” moments and they’re usually execution-based. Some games reward good execution more than others. Ultimate Marvel 3, for instance, has guaranteed unblockable setups that can kill an entire team if the conditions are met, but Street Fighter 4 doesn’t have a similar reward for execution of that level. Every fighting game, though, rewards being able to know what your opponent is going to do, and having enough control of your character to take the appropriate action to counter it. In time knowing the ins and outs of your character’s combos is going to help, but if you can’t hit them in the first place all you’re doing is training your hands, not your thought process, and since this is a PVP game your hands aren’t the most important factor.
One last thing. Everyone learns differently and though there are common tactics for training that work for many people, if they don’t work for you then you might have to improvise. If for some reason doing push-ups before practicing helps you get better then do push-ups before practicing. I practice best when I have a list of things I want to work on. Just because it’s weird doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
This is a really helpful Advice, I’ll try to think about that when I want to get better(bolded words).
Also I learn visually, so I like record my matches or watch other players using the character that I use to see my mistakes or their mistake.