The following is a collection of posts published on Cohost between April and August of 2024.

1. I swapped characters in UNI and I’m taking it seriously
2. I Picked up a Notoriously Hard Zoner After 6 Years of Playing Easy Rushdown Characters. Here’s What I Learned!
3. Progress updates:
   1. random UNI2 Yuzuriha progress update [25 April]
   2. More Yuzuriha progress notes [30 April]
   3. Yuzu Progress Update [8 May]
   4. Yuzuriha progress update [26 May]
   5. Yuzuriha progress update [2 June]
   6. Yuzuriha progress update [11 August]

I swapped characters in UNI and I’m taking it seriously

22nd April, 2024

The Problem

So as of a few weeks after UNI2’s release I ended up fully swapping characters from my old favorite fighting game character of all time, Wagner, to Yuzuriha. It’s been challenging but very rewarding!

I wanted to do a whole writeup about the experience of swapping from a low execution straightforward rushdown character to a notoriously difficult zoner, but I keep getting too distracted by other games to finish it. oops. I’ll try to finish that off sometime soon, because it covers a lot of my approach to learning fighting games!

Anyway, a particular one of the challenges that’s faced me has been execution consistency. If you know me you might have heard me talk about my execution before: it’s actually pretty good, but my issue is consistency — I can hit reasonably hard stuff, but have a pretty poor batting average even on easier combos. This is especially tough for a character like Yuzu, who is both executionally demanding¹ and also has pretty bad defense – so dropping any combo could (and often does) spiral very quickly into a round loss.

The Solution

Having had enough of this, I opened my Notion and wrote up this little list of drills to do in training mode a couple of times per day, with an extra rule: I’m not allowed to play ranked unless I’ve done these drills in the last few hours.

I’m hoping that putting a large amount of extra time into straight-up reps of these combos and pressure sequences will help me really iron out this long-time weakness of mine. I’m serious about improving with this character, even if I don’t intend to enter brackets, and I think this’ll be a big step in that direction!

If you’re interested in doing something similar, some notes and recommendations:

• Keep the list readable! A lot of Yuzu’s combos are different in the corner, but I didn’t want to flood the list by separating everything out by midscreen and corner, so I bundled them together unless the difficulty was very drastically different.
• Get your easiest, most basic routes in the rotation too unless you’re absolutely certain that you don’t need to. I was surprised by how much I was dropping my basic day 1 BNBs when I started doing this!
• At the same time, don’t stress if your success rate is lower than you expected. If you’re anything like me, your in-match execution might actually be better than in training mode — but the important thing here is the reps, not the success rate itself.
• Don’t worry about optimizing your combos when you’re doing this. If you know a better route but don’t actually do it in matches yet, practice both of them! You can still put as much time as you want into learning new routes, but these drills are for reps of what you already know.
• Don’t spend too long on any one item. Give the streak a few attempts and then move on!
• If you vary up your enders situationally in matches, make sure to represent that during these drills. I usually do IW and then 236C enders on the first two reps of a route just to make sure I have those down, and I also mix between 66B and 66C enders in corner.

1. Execution is actually one of the easier things about this character. It’s still hard. ↩︎

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I Picked up a Notoriously Hard Zoner After 6 Years of Playing Easy Rushdown Characters. Here’s What I Learned!

23rd April, 2024

I mentioned that I wanted to post this writeup earlier today, so here it is. I actually wanted this to be a bit bigger and slightly more formal, but I kept getting distracted and even several months in, I’m still learning quickly enough that anything I write about my progress is obsolete by the time I get back to the draft the next day – so I figured I’d do a few quick(?) bullet points instead to get across how it’s been for me.

If you’ve ever been in the position of wanting to play a harder character, but not being sure about how to approach it: here’s some thoughts from my own experience on how I approached swapping from from one of UNI2’s easiest characters to one of its hardest.

Prior experience & Context

• I’ve played UNI on and off since late 2016, meaning I’ve been playing it to some degree for about 7 years. Most of that time, from 2018-2023, was spent on Wagner, a rushdown monster who is incidentally very easy to play. However, I very rarely played UNI at all after COVID, and basically only picked it up again after UNI2 was announced.
• I’ve played fighting games in general for about as long, starting with BBCF. Most of my playtime has been in UNIST, Xrd Rev 2, MBAACC, BBCF and a decent helping of Tekken 7. I almost always play fast, straightforward rushdown characters because I like to win as much as possible as fast as possible but I also want to pretend I’m honest.
• At the moment, I only play UNI2!

Why swap?

• Yuzu has been my favorite fighting game character of all time since i discovered UNIEL in late 2016 via this CMV. At the time I made efforts to play her but ultimately bounced because she was too hard, in favor of easier characters like Eltnum (UNIEL), Phonon (UNIST PS4->PC), and eventually Wagner (later UNIST PC).
• I started learning her again in late december of last year as a secondary because the upcoming release of UNI2 got me off my ass and wanting to play the game again – and what better time to give Yuzu another shot than after spending 4 years away from UNI?
• After just a few sets – I’d say less than 50 or 60 games in total – it really became clear that the amount of effort the character required was more than I could put into a secondary.
• By that point, I’d built up just enough confidence in my ability to learn her that I decided to swap outright, committing to playing her exclusively for at least the next few months.
• Wagner is still my second favorite fighting game character ever! I just really wanted to give my absolute best to Yuzuriha.

Why is she hard?

• Primarily, her heavy reliance on a powerful and highly specialized, but restrictive stance. While in stance, you can only use each of your three attack buttons a single time, requiring a lot of practice and awareness to be able to smoothly play neutral or pressure with her without running out of options and putting yourself in a bad situation. Stance jumping has its own restrictions too, which are easy to bump into when you’re trying to stay mobile in neutral. I really can’t stress enough that this is what’s really hard about this character.
• Execution is a small part of it, too. Her combo difficulty isn’t exactly staggeringly high, but she faces the usual UNI execution challenges like sensitive delay timings and a heavy reliance on linking into dash normals.
• Additionally, she comes with her own list of tricks like button holds and “negative edge D-pair” (releasing the D button at the same time as the button press for a special move), as well as some quirks that aren’t so much hard as they are peculiar like rapid strings of special moves (236A > 421C > j421B > j6A sequence is an absolute killer in this regard, because 421C and 421B are both super-fast teleports that sideswap you), the need to hold 6 after 236 motions for some strings and combos (j.236A>j6C>j214C for example), or rapid button presses for her 236BAB~236AD and 236ABAC~236AD enders.
• All this said, her execution has become easier between versions. It’s still pretty challenging overall but she’s a fair bit easier than any reputation from previous versions might suggest.
• Defense is hard. Her reversals are 214C (which has a huge deadzone right in front of her), VO and IW. Yuzu lacks a basic normal in the crucial 7-8f range and struggles a lot to contest at mid range without turning to somewhat more unorthodox (though effective) abare tools like 66B and rising j2C. Even after teching a throw, which leaves her at +7, she can have an difficult time taking initiative because of the awkward range she’s left at.

My approach to learning

• I focused for a long time on only the absolute basics – hit confirming from 236B, j.236A zoning, then learning stable, universal routes I could do from most starters. I always do this when I’m learning a character, but for Yuzu I dedicated even more time than usual to this part of the process. If I can’t be completely confident in my ground floor gameplan, then it’ll be much harder to develop and apply more advanced strategies!
• Playing matches was really frustrating for quite a while, because my ability to control the character was extremely poor and I was completely folding in situations where I would have 100% confidence as Wagner. This is the sort of thing I personally find very hard to deal with, so I was aware that it was going to be an issue going in.
• That said, I could give myself some grace when it came to finding her hard to pilot because that is exactly what is hard about the character but knowing it didn’t completely allay my frustrations. This and the above are part of why I kept her as just a secondary at first – I could go into a set with Wagner, feel things out and sate my ego a little bit before hopping on the Yuzuriha Struggle Bus if I felt up to it, which I usually did.
• I have enough experience in fighting games by now (about 7 years!) that I know what my weaknesses are and I know how to play to my strengths when it comes to learning. As a result I dedicate a majority of my practice time to execution consistency, not just with combos and confirms but also for things like nailing tight stagger windows or even reaction IW after CSing on defense – and most of the rest goes to learning & practicing the real character-specialist stance stuff for neutral & pressure because I trust myself to improve my general awareness & matchup knowledge just by playing, reading and talking with only minimum pmode time. This is an entirely personal approach that I know works for me because of my prior experience in the game and genre in general.
• Speaking of learning just by playing, match experience was obviously huge. It’s easy when you’re playing a character that everyone describes as “training mode is your friend”-tier to just sit in pmode all day, but as always you can’t know what’s relevant to practice without seeing what situations you’re actually struggling with. Yuzu wins matches by dominating neutral, and you can’t do that without an absolute ton of in-match time.
• I mentioned above that I can improve my awareness by reading: I seriously mean this. You can gain a lot of character understanding by finding your character discord (if there is one: most modern games have them). It kind of sucks that you have to do this to get information, but it’s really invaluable to be able to read live conversations between experienced players. You can really boost your game literacy by paying attention to these places and taking care to absorb the information you see. In my case, Ctrl-Fing character names in the UNIST Discord’s Yuzuriha channel every time I felt lost in a matchup was a huge help and gave me a lot of direction in general, even without posting a single time in there.
• Early on, I really had to rewire my brain to focus on staying in stance in neutral. Initially I was running basic zoning with 236B, j.236A and otherwise playing fairly normal UNI, but I quickly ran into the limits of that approach! Yuzu’s most commanding neutral options — her defining tools — are dramatically slower if she’s not already in stance, and I felt in a lot of situations that I just couldn’t contest particular neutral options like nanase 236X, kuon slide etc. It was only when I started internalizing my stance frame data that I realised I can very effectively contest these sorts of tools on the condition that I already be in stance. I still find myself having this revelation repeatedly, because being in stance keeps turning out to be even more important than I think it is at any given moment.
• From there I started really working on learning specific stance sequences for neutral outside of layer 1 zoning. To run stance neutral smoothly takes awareness and practice that I’m still working on now, but taking it once sequence at a time has been an absolutely massive boon. It’s much easier to fill a gap in your gameplan when you have some big building blocks already prepared.
• I’m still in the above phase, but I’m now starting to put more time into optimizing beyond my basic gameplan with new combos and confirms, though stability is the main concern. I don’t want to put a lot of time into learning a new combo unless it’s going to make my life easier and not just do more damage, unless the difference is really substantial.

Big lessons I’ve learned & what I’m working on next

• It’s really not quite as bad as I thought. The character is definitely hard, and until very recently I felt that putting the same level of effort towards Wagner would see better results thanks to her relative ease of use, but now I feel very confident that I made the right choice. I’m having a blast and improving rapidly!
• Playing a character you love really matters a lot. I really do like Wagner, but Yuzu is something really special for me. Without that connection I definitely wouldn’t have put this much effort into another character.
• I noticed that I have a long-standing tendency to downplay my efforts & say things like “haha, yeah, I’m totally carried” to deflect complaints towards my usual character picks. It’s become especially obvious that I do this because I get the urge to say “she’s not that hard really” about Yuzu despite the fact that she really is, in fact, that hard.
• There are still some big gaps in my gameplan. My 6X pressure in particular is weak and my anti-air game really needs work (though her new 2FF helps a lot). For the most part I’m really just battling against inexperience, which is a great place to be because it means any time at all spent playing the character will be productive.

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Progress updates:

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random UNI2 Yuzuriha progress update [25 April]

I think it might be fun to post every so often about how learning Yuzu is going for me more closely. It might also be cool to look back at in the future, so I can get a more concrete sense of how far I’ve come! Let’s get into some thoughts from the last few days:

• the training mode drills i mentioned here are already seeing definite results. Even a small number of reps of these combos a few times a day has definitely helped my consistency! I definitely intend to keep up with these.
• I’m struggling more in UNI2 to throw people than before, particularly against 1ADers (they changed 1AD to give throw rather than shield in this version). I still haven’t quite adjusted to this. Yuzu is fundamentally a strike/throw character and she lacks ways to open up patient opponents besides her throw, so working on this should be a definite priority.
• My overall neutral awareness seems to be getting better with every session. I had a few nice first-time moments with hitting j6B to clip people jumping over my j236A, actually going for low j214B to get + frames against players who respect j236A, and saw some success from waiting more patiently in stance too.
• It does take a lot of focus to apply new things like that in neutral, though. In longer sets I’m definitely feeling that I only have 5-10 games before I really start to wither. I’m used to being able to last much longer, but Yuzuriha is challenging in ways that make her really mentally exhausting to play for longer periods.
• I should absolutely go back to practicing new stance strings. I’ve been adlibbing these for a week or so now with decent results, but it’s also been killing me a little bit. I need to have more prepared followups to things like 214X on block, and I definitely want to practice FF unblockable feint setups even if they’re pretty fake actually.
• I’m autopiloting some really bad (if not outright non-functional) confirms here and there which will definitely take some dedicated effort to work out of my system. On the other hand, I’m also ad-lib confirming more hits into full combos than ever before, even if my routing is far from optimal in these cases.

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More Yuzuriha progress notes [30 April]

• I ended up overdoing my training drills and tiring my hand out. I play stick, and this is the first time this has ever happened to me playing a fighting game! Yuzu’s execution is pretty exhausting for both hands, so I guess it’s no surprise. For now I’m restricting my playtime as a result, so I’m focusing the time I do have on matches rather than training drills.
• I’m getting better at using spotdodge in canned situations like on knockdown, even if I’m not quite ready to twitch react with it in neutral. Spotdodging supers feels like nothing else, it’s ridiculously satisfying to get the punish that way.
• I’m pressing more 4B as well. It’s a particularly strong tool to represent vs characters like Gord whose mids and highs vastly outrange his lows in neutral, though it’s not exactly something to base my entire gameplan around. It’s not like Yuzu is wanting for anti-airs when she already has 2FF, 5C and crazy air-to-airs like j.B, but it can be useful against predictable air approaches too.
• My confirms are getting a little better, and I’ve managed to fix some of my more bizarre autopilot haibts (which I probably developed by taking things too quickly, jumping straight from day 1 basics to putting together a more advanced gameplan). At some point I think i should just sit down vs a CPU in training mode and try to work more of the “right” confirms into my muscle memory vs a moving target, because I’m losing a ton of damage off starters like 6X > 236B near corner or medium range 236B~D type hits.
• I also finally started implementing better meter dumps. Up until now I’ve pretty much just been doing EX or IW enders to combos (sometimes with CS beforehand to refund a little meter), but I’ve learned some CVO extensions now. These aren’t really a big deal compared to previous versions since raw IW damage is so ludicrously high, but they’re pretty easy to work into my gameplan so it felt silly not to have them down (I still don’t fully have them down because I have more important things to practice).
• I hit some small milestones in ranked – 1M RIP, 200 games (with a solid 70% overall win rate, 74% in the last 100 games), and A rank. UNI ranked is very much a “you rank up just by playing” sort of situation, so none of these are impressive, but they’re still kind of nice little markers of the time I’ve spent on this game. I anticipate that I’ll hit S rank in another week or so, though S+ in particular is full of killers so that might be the end of the road for now.
• My overall level of skill with Yuzuriha feels pretty good right now! I definitely don’t feel like a high level contender — that’s going to take some serious fundamental growth and an absolute ton of experience, not just more character mastery — but I’ve already come a very long way from when I was first picking this character up. The erin of 2016 who’d just discovered UNIEL would be very proud!

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Yuzu Progress Update [8 May]

Pretty short one today!

• I have new, much better routing from corner stance starters! This has been a major gap in my gameplan for a while, since a lot of my autopilot confirms here are using early 236B wallbounce, which the routing options I’m already familiar with don’t let you add a ton of damage to. I’ve had to learn the j.2[C] land tk236A combo part, which I thought would be hard but is actually pretty easy thankfully – and I’ve hit it once or twice in matches.
• I’m pulling better confirms from out of nowhere with no practice, which is nice. Confirming frame trap 6Cs with another 6C into a full combo feels great (and that full combo in question is the 236A double TP route that I adore so much). I’m seeing similar unpracticed confirms from air-to-air hits and anti-air 5Cs!
• I started to drop my basic day 1 hit confirm a bit in matches, which I (wrongly) thought was due to weird/hard hits that I would need to make adjustments in order to confirm. After some training mode time and querying the Yuzu channel in the UNI main discord though, I found out this was purely user error! I’ll have to start practicing this confirm again to make sure I have the slight delay timing down perfectly in future – this is one of my most important execution drills!
• I’m playing vs much better players in ranked now, many of whom have basic grasps on the Yuzu matchup past layer 1. This is really good! It feels nice to be winning on my own merits and not just because they don’t know my character at all. On the other hand, I am also getting my ass fucking handed to me by some of these players. It’s humbling, but I know I’m still getting better quickly at the moment.
• This is prompting me to start thinking much more about matchups in the same way, not just about my own character & how to beat other characters’ layer 1 basics. At the moment Carmine, Hilda and (perhaps counter-intuitively) Waldstein are my three biggest issues. I think as soon as I run into a seth player that knows how to bait my 2FF vs blink I’ll struggle in that matchup too, since my movement in neutral isn’t all the way there yet and you really need to leverage that aspect of Yuzu’s kit vs Seth.
• I’m seeing some overall awareness growth too. I’m baiting and whiff punishing some stuff with 236C that I would never even have looked for before, which is sick. I’ll be able to carry this skill over to any other game!
• Oh, and ranked point gain seems to slow down a lot after you reach A+, so S rank might be a little while (but I’m still seeing steady progress in that direction). As before, ranks aren’t something to worry about at all in this game, but I still think it’ll be a nice little progress marker to get that fancy pink letter next to my name.

Finally:

• I want to play more sets against people! Ranked is great for getting a lot of games in, but you don’t get to communicate with the other player at all and don’t even have a way of tracking them down afterwards for a GGs. At the same time, I really don’t like using or answering matchmaking pings in public discords – so, if anyone here on Cohost wants to play vs my Yuzu & talk about the game, hit me up and we can try it out!

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Yuzuriha progress update [26 May]

can’t sleep let’s fire off one of these real quick

• double tp route too hard! what the fuck! keep grinding
• i have some events lined up for summer (and I’m intending to go to both frosty and combo breaker next year) so I want to keep working on this character at least for that period!
• improving my conversions is getting really hard. At some point I’ll need to dedicate a whole lot of training mode time and maybe even vs CPU time to get better 236B confirms into muscle memory
• i have gotten worse at double tp route. need to grind it
• I made S rank! it wasn’t hard but A+ took a while to get through compared to every other rank as I started to play much more against relatively stronger players.
• I’m having mixed experiences vs stronger players. I definitely feel outclassed on a fundamental level by a lot of people, but I’m confident that experience is the biggest difference. I just need to keep playing and I’ll get stronger!
• i should grind double tp route more

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Yuzuriha progress update [2 June]

• I mentioned last time that I had to grind double TP route, and I did, and it’s seen results! My combo consistency is pretty great right now compared to usual! Some of the routes I used to drop a lot (double TP, j.2[C] > tk236A on p2) I’ve been hitting far more consistently over the last couple of days as a direct result of the practice I’ve put in. Always nice to see work directly paying itself back.
• stronger players are really pushing me (and I’m losing a lot) but it feels great to adapt! playing vs stronger opponents forces me to stop overthinking my basic gameplan and put my effort towards scouting and capitalizing on their habits. I think the fact that i can put my basics on autopilot with this character and not completely fall apart is a good sign of how far I’ve come. Feels great!
• there are still some pretty clear gaps in my gameplan. some examples: I’m not doing a great job of handling people who dashblock between every saki, and I’m also not implementing 2FF when already in stance (I’m always pressing 6A, which is much more linear even if it’s still a fantastic AA).
• throw OSes with this character feel pretty bad. I’ve been using 2FF~AD primarily, but it has a fairly annoying execution demand built-in: if you plink too quickly you get VO, and if you do it too slowly you can’t remain in stance and end up -13 on block. There are other OS options too, but they all have their own caveats. I think I have to practice the 2FF~AD input timing!
• where did all these hyde players suddenly come from

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Yuzuriha progress update [11 August]

Hi! Been a while. There hasn’t been much to say on this subject recently even though I have been playing a lot! My progress has slowed a lot recently, which isn’t a good thing in itself, but is a sign that I’ve already achieved most of the easy improvements, so it’s gratifying in its own right. Anyway, here’s everything:

where I’ve been, where I’m going

• In July, I went to Sweden for a week to hang out and watch EVO with some friends, most of whom were strong (but mostly retired, to various degrees) UNI players, so I ran a few sets at least. Nothing special to say here, but I think I played pretty well and learned some important things.
• I hit S+ rank! I’ve been playing much less ranked as of late, so it was slow going, but it wasn’t especially hard either. My next long-term ranked goal is 2M RIP, which will probably be really hard!
• In a week or so, I’m off to Birmingham for VSFighting! I’m not entering the bracket, but I’m hoping to get lots of sets in. After that, it’s Drowning Pools in early October, and that’s my event schedule for the year.
• I’m planning on going to Frosty Faustings again in January, and I’m lightly debating the idea of entering the UNI bracket there. We’ll see!

in-game climbs and plateaus

• My awareness and mental stack have improved considerably. I’m still making some mistakes, but I feel far more comfortable than ever freestyling my stance usage in neutral and pressure, and coming up with strings on the fly. The new FF feint mark refresh is great for this!
• My overall movement have improved as a result. I’m making better, more creative use of my teleports without throwing myself into RPS situations unnecessarily, and also applying stance jump much more, including threatening more empty jump lows and the like.
• I’m blocking so, so many more overheads recently than ever before. I still have bad sets where Orie 6B gets me nearly every time, but my overall block rate on overheads is much higher than usual.
• Other benefits of my slightly cleared-up mental stack are my continued growths in the arena of winning vorpal. I’m playing for cycle more often and more effectively than ever, and I’m even going as far as deciding to back off and stop pressuring to secure the cycle, which is something I’d never have done before.
• Speaking of winning vorpal, I’ve also made some explicit efforts to scout my opponent’s green shield habits. This is slow going, but it’s extremely strong (it’s how Yuzu wins vorpal, which is what wins sets) so it’s important to keep working on it.
• I mentioned last time that this character’s throw OS is annoying and that I’ll have to practice it. Well, I’ve practiced it.
• All this said, I’m still not applying spotdodge well. It’s a ludicrously powerful tool that is mostly absent from my gameplan, but I find it really hard! It shines most when used on reaction to specific options, which is something I’m not great at in general. I think I need to put a lot of training mode time into this, so I’ll work on it!

new stuff

• Yuzu survived two patches without getting hurt badly (in fact, she’s still probably the best character in the game). Still Getting Away With It!
• There’s a really cool new combo route which breaks UNI’s normal combo rules and allows Yuzu to do two jump cancels For Some Reason. It’s a relatively small optimization (most Yuzu optimizations are), but it’s fun and silly and does a couple hundred more damage than my current DP punish routes, so I’m using it.
• As I mentioned above, Yuzu received a change to FF feint that refreshes all of her stance marks, but she also got better frame data on her stance walk which does the same thing. There are both somewhat hard to apply, but I’m already implementing the former into my gameplan and intend to squeeze the latter in at some point.

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