Xrd Millia matchups

In general, most of her good matchups from the Guilty Gear XX series are now less advantageous. But at the same time, her traditionally bad matchups are now less bad. The main changes are in nerfs to her neutral game(pin, j.d, far slash, backdash) and her significantly toned down antiair game. Even her mixup is weaker because of Tandem Top disappearing on block, and less reward on a successful ground throw. On the other hand, the new roman cancel mechanics allow her to get more consistent damage off of stray ground hits and certain punishes, which alleviates one of the recurring weaknesses she had in the XX series.

Axl – Matchup still feels advantageous, but much less so than before. Maybe 5.5-4.5 now? He is harder to fight in neutral because of Millia’s pin nerf and Axl’s new Rensenbeam, but his offense is a lot easier to deal with because of no Rensen FRC and less gatlings. His DP is super annoying, and baiting it with crossups seems to be inconsistent because of its huge vertical hitbox.

Bedman – Feels like a solid 6-4. Bedman’s movement is one of the worst in the game and it is fairly easy for Millia to maneuver around the various projectiles and Deja Vu seals. His defensive options are also lackluster other than the alarm clock super. Admittedly, I have not fought much Bedman as he is an unpopular character, but it feels like she can just play passively in neutral and just wait for Bedman to overextend himself.

Chipp – Still her worst matchup by a huge margin. Feels like a 3-7 when playing, but is probably a 4-6 in reality. Fighting him in neutral is still a nightmare, even more so now since pin has more recovery and her AA options are much worse. She is basically at his mercy whenever he gets 25% meter. On the bright side, his offense is a little bit easier to block since air teleport FRC is gone. His midscreen damage output is also much lower than before since no Force Breaks and tk Alpha Blade combos are (kind of) gone. S and H Tandem Top YRC are godsends against him, so saving meter is key.

Elphelt – Matchup is probably even, but there is almost no margin of error since Millia can lose the round off of one hit. She has gorilla normals, so Millia can never win a poking war unless the Elphelt isn’t paying attention. Elphelt’s midrange is easily top class along with Faust and Ky, so even going for max range 2d is a risk. Best way to play is to be very noncommital, and try to make Elph retreat or overcommit. Then throw a pin and rush in for the offense, and ride the momentum. It is fairly important to get a height advantage in air-to-air exchanges, since Elphelt does not have any air normals that angle upwards. If she does the unblockable, it is very important to learn the proper Blitz Shield timing. Then you have to guess whether the shot will be immediate or delayed.

Faust – Matchup used to be quite advantageous in all of the XX games, but it feels dead even now. The nerfs to Millia pin, j.d, 6p, and her general hitbox all make life easier for Faust. His far slash is better, as Millia cannot run under it anymore. The new red roman cancel mechanics make it so that Faust has easier ways to convert his pokes to full combos. And the YRC system help out Faust tremendously in the neutral game. With that said, she is still much faster than him. S Disc YRC is amazingly useful when Faust is trying to fake his landings with j.2k FDC, so please save meter.

I-No – Matchup still feels good, but not as one sided as before. Maybe 5.5-4.5? Millia still runs circles around I-No, but the simplified HCL and VCL motion mean that it is much easier for the I-No player to snipe you midscreen. Tandem Top disappearing on block also means that Millia has no way of punishing I-No for doing reversal Longing Desperation. I-No’s offense is much scarier than before, because of VCL YRC and j.d FDC. Play very carefully in neutral, and don’t ever get knocked down.

Ky – eki-chan and Ruu(who plays Ky as a sub) say that Millia has a slight disadvantage here, but the matchup feels even to me. Ky’s new Xrd tools make his neutral game much stronger, especially seals and Stun Edge YRC. He can kind of play defensively, and just make Millia come to him. She is still much faster than him. Best way to play this seems to involve scaring him into moving backwards, and using the opportunity to throw a pin to start offense. He can keep you away very well, but eventually he will have to back off. That is the time to go in. The new red roman cancel also make it much easier to get full damage off of certain punishes, which was very difficult in the XX games.

Leo – Fairly certain this is a 6-4, but it’s a very weird matchup. Millia has a huge advantage in the neutral game, as Leo’s movement is lackluster. He also has a super low jump. However, his ground normals are surprisingly strong and he has great defensive options. He is also unique in that he has a way of punishing Millia’s midscreen blockstrings into disc, and even pin! Matchup boils down to playing non-commital and winning through small gains. Leo’s offense is quite scary, especially if you have no meter. It also doesn’t help that Millia’s fastest ground normal is 5f. He can win the round very quickly if he corners you, so avoid this at all costs and play a very safe neutral game.

May – I really have no idea, it’s probably even? Her damage output is a lot more manageable this time around, as you don’t lose 80% of your health off of one CH j.h. On the other hand, her new beachball and dolphin assists make her very difficult to approach. I find that it is best to play a slow, reactionary style and only go in when she overextends herself.

Potemkin – Probably the only good matchup that got even better in this version. Feels like a 6-4. Pot has lost a lot of tools: it is much easier to fight him in neutral since you don’t have to worry about j.s knocking down or CH j.h giving him a groundbounce. Offense is also easier to deal with: no more 6k overhead, and getting hit by Heat Knuckle isn’t so painful since he’s forced to always go for Extend. On the other hand, it feels impossible to antiair him now, and the new 6k Hammerfall Break strings build up guardbar super fast. It’s another matchup that boils down to playing a safe, low commitment neutral game.

Ramlethal – Matchup felt pretty even in GGXrd 1.04, but now feels like slight Millia advantage in 1.10. Maybe 5.5? Millia is much faster than Ram, and Ram’s neutral game has been severely weakened in 1.10 because of hittable swords. Her damage output is also a lot more reasonable in 1.10 too. Playing patient in the neutral game really helps. Ram will often try to fake her landings with sword set/recalls, so instead of aggressively going for antiairs, just back off and stay at midrange.

Sin – Matchup feels like a slight advantage, maybe 5.5. Sin’s damage output is crazy, probably the best in the game. However, he has trouble opening people up, and his offense is greatly dependent on the calorie gauge. His ground normals are also amazing, so it is pretty hopeless to try to play footsies with him. I have a lot of success with forcing Sin to chase Millia and to waste his calories. It is scary sometimes because of how fast he can crank up the guard bar. Sin’s air-to-ground game is quite poor, so this is one of the few matchups where Millia can aggressively pursue antiairs.

Slayer – Traditionally bad matchup for Millia, still feels like Slayer wins but it’s a bit easier than before. Maybe 4.5? No more FRCs and FBs mean that Slayer’s damage output under 50% meter is fairly manageable, but his toolset and normals are as effective as ever against Millia. Blitz Shield is quite strong against his offense and removes some of the guesswork out of dealing with Dandy followups.

Sol – This matchup… changed a lot. Millia had a good advantage in AC and AC+R, but it feels like Sol has the advantage now. Probably a 4.5-5.5. Basically, this was another matchup where Millia had a good advantage if she played a perfect, low commital neutral game, winning with small gains. But if she ever made a mistake, things could go south immediately. In Xrd, Sol’s neutral game is much better, as he has a divekick to delay his landings and crossup hitboxes on j.k. Divekick even goes into full combos in the corner. His ground normals also seem to have better hitboxes, as I can’t win poking wars against him anymore, not even at midscreen. Along with the many nerfs to Millia’s antiair options, the neutral game interaction is a lot scarier now. It feels like Millia has to take big risks to get her offense started, when it was the other way around in previous games.

Venom – Matchup used to be quite good for Millia. It’s still good for her, but not as one-sided as before. I’m gonna go with 5.5. Basically boils down to nerfs to many of Millia’s important tools(j.d, pin, 6p), and Venom getting a great metered, non-commital neutral game option with Stinger YRC.

Zato – This matchup hasn’t really changed, still as even as ever. Both characters can completely destroy the other off of one knockdown.

The best post on Dustloop

Ever since Guilty Gear Xrd got announced, Dustloop has turned into a cesspool of stupidity. From attracting users who are only interested in GG because of its brand new coat of paint to bringing back people who never played a GG game beyond #Reload, it is very similar to what happened to the SRK forums when console SFIV first dropped in 2009. I guess you could say Dustloop is getting its own version of the ’09ers. But even with this, it is nice to see that there are still a quality post that pops up from time to time. Such as this one, which is probably the only thing worth reading on the forums nowadays!

GGXrd Impressions

Millia by Yoshizawa

Things I like

• Milliaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa ❤ ❤ ❤  ASW has done the impossible, and has somehow made the best waifu of GG even hotter.  She was already goddess tier; now she is on a different plane of existence
• The new roman cancel system.  This is easily the most significant change that Xrd has brought upon the GG series, and I feel that it was superbly implemented.  The execution requirement for learning FRCs is gone, and to replace it there’s this new YRC/RC/PRC system that makes meter usage a lot more flexible than before.  In addition, the slowdown effect of roman cancels makes it way easier to hitconfirm stuff and assess the situation.  Lots of really exciting possibilities with this system..  can’t wait to see how things develop in the next few months.
• Updated graphics, music, etc.  Pretty much everything related to the game’s presentation was done perfectly.  But that should be a given

Things I don’t like

• Character specific changes.  Unfortunately, while the new RC system gives everyone more options when using their meter, it is clearly not the case for every character’s individual moveset.  Most characters got downgraded and/or lost options compared to their AC+R counterparts.  This is most apparent when you look at every character’s command list: everyone’s moveset shrunk!  There is NOTHING cool about losing options.  In addition, several characters lost important move properties, like the vacuum effect on Pot 2s, Pot megafist knocking down on hit, I-No’s 2s hitting low, Millia j.d knocking down on ground hit, Ky j.s having a crossup hitbox, etc.
• Using #Reload as a base.  The main reason that every character lost options is because they are based on their #R counterparts.  But there are other reasons why I feel using #R as a base is questionable.  For one, that game had a lot of stupid things that were eventually toned down in later versions, like the high stun modifier on many of Slayer’s moves and Eddie in general.  So it is irritating to see them return in Xrd.  #R also has terrible balance: not only does it have a god tier(Eddie), but it also has an absolutely terrible bottom tier.  At one point in that game’s life, the character rankings even went down to G tier!  I played #Reload a LOT, and it is definitely the GG game that I grinded out the most since it is where I made the most progress as a fighting game player.  I have a lot of good memories with that game and I had a lot of fun, but I would never want to go back to it after all the great things the GG series got in Slash, AC, and especially AC+R.
• Higher damage.  The stupidly high damage from #R is back again in Xrd, and one of the main reasons for this is because the life totals have been reverted to 420.  In AC+R, there was a universal health buff to 460, making it seem like everyone did lower damage.  I admit that it is funny and somewhat hype to see Zato do 70% damage off of one unblockable setup.  But the damage levels in AC+R were a lot more reasonable.
• Removal of throw breaks.  Throw breaks were first added to the GG series in AC, so of course they’re gone in Xrd.  Although I don’t think they make that much of a difference in the gameplay(because of the small break window), it is pretty silly to have a 2014 fighting game be missing this mechanic.
• Not being able to use 25% meter to increase combo damage.  Yes, I know I wrote that I loved the new RC system earlier, but this is one of the things I don’t like about it.  It gives more flexibility to meter usage in neutral game and defensive situations, but it is a lot more limited when it comes to combos.  Basically, YRCs cannot be used when the opponent is in hitstun/blockstun, so if you want to use meter to extend a combo, you must have at least 50%.  This is probably one of the reasons why the meter gain is significantly higher in Xrd than in previous GG games.  Anyway, this really hurts characters who relied on 25% meter options(FRCs and FBs) to do damage in previous games, particularly I-No, Axl, and to a lesser extent Slayer.
• Danger Time.  This mechanic is stupid and I cannot understand the logic in adding it.  It disrupts the flow of a match and doesn’t add anything to the game.
• Small cast size.  Well, this is something that will probably get fixed up in later revisions, but the cast size is pretty underwhelming right now.  Just 13 characters, when the previous game had 25!
• Hellfire.  This is a new mechanic added to Xrd: once you get to 20% life and below, you enter Hellfire state, which powers up your Overdrive moves and makes them do more damage.  In addition, it also makes your opponent’s IK activation a lot faster.  So fast, that it becomes very easy to combo into Instant Kills.  Basically, Hellfire is a kind of comeback mechanic, which is something GG has never had in the past.  It’s nowhere near as problematic as say, ultras in SFIV and X-Factor in Marvel, but I feel that comeback mechanics have no place in competitive games.

Neutral

• Blitz Shield.  I’m not really sure how I feel about this yet.  Personally, I never felt that GG ever needed a parry, and it was fine that it was a char specific mechanic(for Jam).  But right now, the parries look ok.  They don’t look problematic like they are in Third Strike.  And the main reason is that the GG blitz shield has 1) a cost, which is 25% meter and 2) a whiff animation.  I’ll have to see what gets discovered with them in the future

GGXrd comes out tomorrow

So Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN- comes out tomorrow, and while I am definitely happy to see Guilty Gear rightfully take the spotlight again, I’m not really too hype for the game.

For one, there’s the drastic cut in the cast size: Xrd is a 13 character game(14 if you count Valentine who is almost guaranteed to be unlocked in the future), which is a big step down from AC+R’s 25 characters. It’s also missing series staples like Baiken, Johnny, and Dizzy, and even the character who completely dominated the Arc Revo GG popularity poll: Bridget.

But more important is the system and character changes. While some of the changes are nice, their general direction seems to be taking the series backwards instead of forwards. The characters are based on their #Reload counterparts, which means that many characters lost the great tools that were gained in the next three versions(Slash, AC, and ACR). I can never understand when developers take away things: I am all for adjusting and changing tools that are deemed too powerful or useless. Removing tools just means decreasing the number of available options for players, which is always a bad thing in my book.

I suppose one of the reasons for my bitterness is where I live. Specifically, it’s not living in Japan which means that my first taste of +R was when the Japanese PS3 port of Accent Core got the update. AC+R had a great run in Japan, but I feel that the game never got a real chance outside of Japan because of the nonsensical release schedule for the console ports. The +R patch was advertised to have improved netplay as well as lobby support, something the game was sorely lacking. But then the patch took way longer than anyone expected. Once it finally got released, there was an air of collective disappointment at realizing that the netplay had not changed, and that the promised lobby system was absent. It’s just my hypothesis, but I think one of the reasons for the ridiculous delay is because of the promised lobby system: ASW probably had a very small team working on the +R patch, as its reasonable to assume that the majority of their efforts were on Xrd already. I’m sure the team tried their best to implement the lobby system, but ultimately failed resulting in the delay. This is just for the Japanese PS3 version too: XBox 360 players didn’t get the patch until several months after, and even as I’m writing this the US PS3 version still does not have the patch.

There’s also the timing of the Xrd announcement. Xrd was announced at Arc Revo, which was before the +R patch even got released. I feel that this really stifled the potential growth of the +R scene in America. There are a lot of players who lose motivation to learn a game when they know they’re playing an old version, or if they know that there is going to be an update in the future. I am sad to admit that I am guilty of this as well in the case of +R. While I did play the game a lot and support it at all of my local tournaments, I really did not put in much practice time. I pretty much got by with pure Week 1 tech. There was a lot of useful Millia tech that got developed later on in +R’s lifespan, but I never bothered practicing it because I knew that it was all going to be obsolete in Xrd.

But yeah, I am pretty sad to see +R go. The game really felt like a love letter to GG fans: it fixed a lot of the common complaints that people had about AC. More importantly, it managed to achieve the impossible, which is to make the game easier without dumbing it down. With a few exceptions, every GG character got easier to play in +R. The overall execution barrier was lowered while characters still retained the plethora of useful offensive and defensive tools from the previous game. In contrast, my initial impressions of the Xrd changes are not as favorable. But I’ll be quite pleased if I am proven wrong in the upcoming days, so here’s hoping.

Summer begins

So summer has started, and so far the most noteworthy thing that’s happened is that I’ve gotten accepted into my Masters program at Cal Poly Pomona.  I’m pretty excited about this as the school is pretty close to home and a lot of my friends go there as well.

However…  dealing with this school has been nothing but a pain so far, as there’s been all sorts of complications.  In my acceptance letter I was asked to contact the department advisor so I could get an idea of what classes to take my 1st quarter, and the letter only provided me with his e-mail address.  So I e-mailed him, and didn’t get a response.  I looked up his contact info on the department website and got his office # so I would periodically try to call him.  3 weeks later, I finally get ahold of him by phone so I set up the appointment.  It turns out that the reason he didn’t respond to my e-mail is because for whatever reason, it got sent to his spam box.  I also found out that I wasn’t even allowed to register for classes before meeting with an advisor so this effectively delayed my registration for 3 weeks.  There’s also other stuff like not getting a straight answer from anyone about registration fees and their deadlines, and having a time conflict with the classes that the advisor suggested that I take.  So it’s been a huge headache.

I’ve been playing the fan translation of Persona 2 Innocent Sin on PS1 recently and I’m pleasantly surprised with how good the game is.  It also has the most badass main character in an SMT game, helped by Takehito Koyasu providing his voice.  I thought the battle system was really clunky at first, but in retrospect it really fits well with the game because of how big team order and fusion spells are.  I also initially thought that I wouldn’t like the game as much as P3/P4 because of the lack of social links, but it turned out to be just as engaging.  In true SMT fashion the game is also quite difficult, and in some ways more of a grind than P3/P4 because of the lack of persona fusion.  In P2 new personas are obtained by collecting tarot cards from demon negotiation, and you have to level them up the traditional way so you can’t have your Lvl10 social link do the work for you.  I guess my only complaint with the game would be the lack of a minimap, as some of the dungeons are pretty confusing.  I don’t think the hardware at the game was capable of supporting it, though.

I suppose I should talk about a tournament I went to about a month ago called Revelations.  I was only able to go for 1 day because it ended up falling on the weekend right before my finals.  I really wanted to join the AH3 tournament but it was scheduled to be on Friday so I couldn’t work that out.  I ended up going on Saturday only with Jeff, Brett, and tenkai.  This was probably one of the best tournaments that I’ve been to solely because there was so much space for casuals.  The venue, which was actually a restaurant near LAX, was also really big so I didn’t feel cramped like I normally do at tournaments. 

Anyway, by Saturday AH3 was already at top8, so the only tournament I could join was the GG side tournament.  I didn’t get to play any AH3 casuals because I couldn’t find anyone with a spare PS3 pad, so that made me kind of sad.  I got to play a bunch of GG casuals, and I did pretty well in the tournament too: got 3rd, only losing to Latif twice.  I was also surprised that I was able to beat Purrin, since I generally never do well against him.  Latif’s Eddie really threw me off, as I’m not used to his style of Eddie play.  I’m generally used to a more conservative and safe style, but he had a balls to the wall approach that I don’t see very often.  He would also literally do panic bursts whenever his momentum was thrown off which I wasn’t expecting.  Anywho, I had to play Latif twice, as he sent me to losers and also eliminated me in losers finals(3/5), so we played a total of 5 matches.  Each of them basically played out the same, going down to the 3rd round, but I could never clutch it out to win the match.  Japanese player Satoshi, who is known for playing Potemkin in Guilty Gear and Makoto in Blazblue was also in attendance, but sadly I wasn’t able to play him in GG.  We were on total opposite sides of the bracket.  He ended up playing a bunch of characters in this tourney: Pot, Faust, Venom and Slayer.  I had heard that his main is actually Faust now, and it seemed like he mainly went with that character unless someone requested he pick Pot.  Anyway, it was a good tournament, and probably the best I’ve ever placed in my GG career.  Too bad it had to happen after the game’s prime!