Lack of Newbie-Friendy Guides for VF

Firstly, I'm a newbie at VF

Okie, maybe not a newbie, a beginner. I've been following VF on and off since its first incarnation, but never caught on to any significant depth of gameplay. Right now in VF4, I am still trying to get pass the basic gameplay of attack/guard/punish/recover.

I depended heavily on easily accessible and understood FAQs. In VF2, while struggling with Jacky, I found James M. Ross' FAQ on Gamefaqs very useful, primarily because he made the effort to go through most moves in detail (there were other good VF2 faqs, but I only played Jacky then). He was very kind to explain some elementary concepts to me through email. During VF3 days I was sidetracked by another blockbuster title from Sega, so only play bits here and there. I dabbled in the other characters but only picked up Pai to any playable extent

When VF4 came out, once again I struggled with all the new things. Unfortunately, there seems to be a dearth of VF4-For-Dummies documents. After mucking around with my surface knowledge using Jacky and Pai, I started shopping for a new character to try out and settled on ... Kage; I wanted to learn his cool DPK and TFT. As luck would have it, a M. Ramsan has made a special effort to write a very comprehensive Kage FAQ that I easily found on Gamefaqs. I never could master the timing for TFT-Knee combos (and am stuck with + combos), but thanks to his FAQ, Kage became my third character and I started playing a bit of attention to frames.

Basically, I wrote up my VF history as an example of what a casual gamer in VF might be like, and it highlights one of the greatest fustration of being a VF beginner: A Lack of Newbie-Friendy Guides for VF (at least in the English-Speaking World)

Easily accessible and comprehensive guides to introduce VF to new players seems to be an increasing RARE commodity. The only VF character that does not seem to suffer from lack of detailed FAQ is Akira, which unfortunately is a relatively challenging character for newbies lacking in finger dexterity like me.

I personally feel that the English speaking online VF community has yet to make a serious effort into making VF4 more accessable to the average beginner like me and many more. VF already has a rather steep learning curve and is unfriendly to button mashers. A lack of easily-understood guides leaves most casual gamers without a means to venture beyond the beginner stage (or even become a beginner), and, disappointed at the lack of progress they soon move on to something else.

There is little productive stuff that can done for VF4 now. What I really want as a response to this post is a willingness to create newbie-friendly guides for VF5, which has yet to be released to the majority of the English speaking world, and to release them on somewhere easily accessible, e.g. Gamefaqs (maybe you have something against that site, but, face it, the first place most gamers would look for a FAQ will be there, braindead simple).

I like VF, despite my beginner status. And I want the English speaking world to appreciate it better. Were I a more conversant VF player, I would write a FAQ myself - but I am not. For the record, for the other Sega game I played seriously, I also harassed the better players (I was in the lower-middle echelon in terms of gameplay standards) in my neighbourhood to write FAQs, but after repeated failures, I threw in the towel and wrote my own FAQ for the game character I favoured, which I promptly sent to Gamefaqs where it remained arguably the most comprehensive FAQ for that game that is easily accessible to the English speaking world.

VFDC contains a lot of VF4 game information, but most of them are middle to high level stuff out of reach of newbies or beginners like me who have yet to master the basics: What good is it to know the most damaging float combo when I can't even hope to connect the float-starter consistantly? Also,when most VFers move on to VF5, what will happen to the acumulated VF4 knowledge if you do not put it on Gamefaqs or some other long-term FAQ storage location? Most probably it will be lost to time. I want to ask: what happened to all the VF3 guides the VF community had created in the past? Where can I find them on the internet now?

If playing VF is like climbing a mountain, many of you guys on this forum have already climbed up to the halfway mark and beyond, and are setting up base camps and making plans to climb even higher. However, for passerbys who wander by the base of the mountain and wonder whether it is worth the climb, they see little more than a steep and inhospitable slope with very few signposts indicating the easier ways to reach even the lowest of the base camps that you created.

Footnote: After Jacky, Pai, and Kage, I've begun to try out Aoi and Jeffrey; I want to thank those who wrote some easy to understand stuff on the characters that I have seen here on VFDC (GaijinPunch & Chanchai for Aoi; Hiro & Ice-9 for Jeffrey). Even though I am bashing FT now, it is a lot easier to pick up the new characters thanks to the stuff you wrote, and I hope to learn more when I am not practicing Kage's Jumonji or Jacky/Pai's Hit-Throws.

 

Hi, thx for the post, and I agree with a lot of things you said. You are right on the fact that VFDC lacks infor for newbies/beginners. You are also right on the fact that VFDC has good amount of infor for intermidiates and advanced level players.


The solution to this issue is within your reach though. Go turn on your PS2 and go through the various training mode the Evo disc has. Just by finishing the tutorials and understanding the information it provides, you should be ready to go on and read the documents for intermidiates and advanced players.

 

I don't have a PS2 up til the last month (and it's my sibling's). And I'm currently focusing on Final Tuned, which has no PS2 counterpart (though Evo C is close to FT).

My intent is not to simulate VF4 guides and I am not asking for any more of it either; it is to persuade the VF community to prepare to promote VF5 to the masses by releasing easy-to-understand guides on Gamefaqs or some other widely-know and popular website when VF5 debuts in the English speaking world.

 

I got your point again, and it's a good point. But, FT's almost the same as EVo, and VF5's system is from FT. The reason why there's no FT-system-break -down guide is that it's pretty much the same as Evo. What you can find is the differences between the two.


What I expect for VF5 is also something simliar to that. Changes and new features will be discussed a lot on the website, but things that are the same wouldn't be.

You should understand that people here try to find information that can't be found in the Evo disk. Sorry that I can't be more of a help, but learning what's in the disk is pretty much on your own.

 

The search is not so useful IMO. (yes, I said it lol). If you are eagar to learn but can't find some info, use PM. That's a much better way to get a direct infor faster. PM me if you got a question. I will be glad to answer it if I know. If not, I might know who to ask for that answer. Right off my head, you can also PM Myke, Jerky, SH_, or Dandy_J. I know that they'd be glad to help you, too.

 

Thx for your offer, maddy, but I won't PM now cos now my current focus is refining my joystick/button control technique and practising "VFkata" (after this do this blah blah blah). That's why I'm not asking for advice in VF4.

Myke, it is nice (and sad) to know that you have made a effort to assemble a FAQ (only to lose it through no fault of your own). I hope you can do that for VF5 instead.

I believe my original post is too longwinded, so I decided to bold the cores of my previous posts, which is: Please Promote VF5 When It Debuts By Releasing VF5-For-Dummies FAQs on Gamefaqs!

 

[ QUOTE ]
Supid said:

...And I'm currently focusing on Final Tuned...

[/ QUOTE ]


Out of curiosity, tell me where you're playing FT. SoCal? NYC?

 

[ QUOTE ]
Supid said:
. . .Unfortunately, there seems to be a dearth of VF4-For-Dummies documents. . . As luck would have it, a M. Ramsan has made a special effort to write a very comprehensive Kage FAQ that I easily found on Gamefaqs.

[/ QUOTE ]
Really not trying to be rude, but I have to call bullshit on this. That Gamefaqs guide, like most, comes across as a 200+kb glorified movelist / combo list with lots of unexplained jargon (i'm a newbie, what does mC mean?). How do I as a newbie absorb that? How do I choose which of these 100 moves to use? Comprehensive =/= newbie.

Compare that to, say, CreeD's jacky quickstart guide - here's the 4 moves you need and why, explains the basic guessing game immediately. Compare the evo training mode to any training mode in any game. VF4 has more rational, easily digestable information available than any other fighting game, hands down.

Maybe putting things on Gamefaqs would make the game more accessible for people who dont want to spend 1/2 an hour going through the tutorial . . . but i'd say the explanation is closer to what you said here:
[ QUOTE ]
. . .unfriendly to button mashers

[/ QUOTE ]

 

Plague, I don't exist at either location that you mentioned. Where I live it just so happened that FT is found at a walking distance from my home, but the local VFers seem to prefer to congregate on the Evo machines an hour's travel away. I tried playing against a coupla dedicated players on the Evo location but ... "Argh, I forgot XXX don't have this move in Evo!"

[ QUOTE ]
KoD said:

Really not trying to be rude, but I have to call bullshit on this. That Gamefaqs guide, like most, comes across as a 200+kb glorified movelist / combo list with lots of unexplained jargon (i'm a newbie, what does mC mean?). How do I as a newbie absorb that? How do I choose which of these 100 moves to use? Comprehensive =/= newbie.

Compare that to, say, CreeD's jacky quickstart guide - here's the 4 moves you need and why, explains the basic guessing game immediately. Compare the evo training mode to any training mode in any game. VF4 has more rational, easily digestable information available than any other fighting game, hands down.

[/ QUOTE ]

The clinch is: At the time I started learning Kage, VF4 for PS2 has not even come out. The Kage FAQ was valuable for me primarily because of the comprehensive move analysis which explain in detail the moves, strengths and pitfalls, as well as basic followups.

For instance, through the FAQ I learned that in VF4 Ver B:
1) is better than
2) Edit is uncounterable if blocked but if whiff can be low thrown as well as being countered
3) no guaranteed combos for except on wall hit because of tech rolls.

He went through in detail what works and what does not on most of Kage's moves, even the bad ones. I never adsorbed everything immediately, but:

1) I adsorbed a little
2) I went to fool around with the little I adsorbed
3) I found what he put down to have some real basis
4) I felt more confident in the accuracy of what he wrote
5) I went back to read his FAQ again
6) *return to (1)*

He also listed both some basic and advanced/char. specific floats. The basic floats are what I learned first obviously and are more important to beginners, while the advanced floats remind me that there is still more to be had if I progress onwards. TFT-+ become valuable for me because I never could master the Knee combos which are more damaging.

Creed has a good FAQ with a newbie-important flaw, he didn't go through everything Jacky has. You might wonder why bother to go through Jacky's crappy moves, but newbie tend to go:"I like this move!" "It looks cools!" "I got big damage from it!" and if you just leave it out without some explanation on why it is crappy they'll just keep going on with those crappy moves they like and might not progress further. If Ramzan never mentioned that Kage's++ is heavily counterable unless I catapult the target into a wall and prevent the tech roll, I would have whaled on this move without realising its weakness, then get chopped up by some player who does know, and go "That FAQ's worthless; he never wrote this might happen!"

[ QUOTE ]
Maybe putting things on Gamefaqs would make the game more accessible for people who dont want to spend 1/2 an hour going through the tutorial . . . but i'd say the explanation is closer to what you said here:
[ QUOTE ]
. . .unfriendly to button mashers

[/ QUOTE ]

[/ QUOTE ]

That is the newbie's problem to overcome, but if the VF Community never make their knowledge easily accessible, many newbies will have a lot harder time overcoming that hurdle.

I stress this again: VF5 will (hopefully) come out for the English speaking world on the arcade soon, and there (probably) will be a host of newbies attracted by the new graphics, new characters, fancy moves and what-have-you-got-there, and VF5 for PS3 might not yet be available for them to learn from. The current English VF community may help promote VF5 by releasing easily accessible newbie-friendly material, or do nothing, have most newbies leave discouraged by lack of progress, and VF5's popularity becomes limited, and Sega, discouraged by the lack of sales, will be more hesistant to release future upgrades including VF6 to the English speaking world.

So, do you want to have VF6 ASAP when Sega creates it?

 

I went to the effort of translating the entire VF5 Combo guide, knowing full well that most people on this site already know almost all of it for this very reason, that people will be starting the game from the beginning and for them it would be a useful resource. Srider has done the same with several articles from Arcadia. I'm also looking to make contributions for my character from the Arcadia articles, along with combo lists for all when I get around to it. Now, that probalby varies from easily accessible to slightly above beginner level, but in any event, it will be there for people.

 

I remember speaking to Myke about this sometime ago, about making a tutorial video of some sort. I think newbies tend to prefer practical stuff than reading text all the time. But I must say I was a super beginner at the game and the Tutorial helped me immensely. Everyone whose played EVO and can play the game to an acceptable level has gone through it all with their character of choice. I'd be willing to help and write a guide for beginners myself if myself. Anyone care to join?

I do feel you need to play with someone afterwards to get better though then it all suddenly clicks(for any fighting game).

Although there is a brilliant guide i believe on VF Lau's site but its in swedish which breaks down alot of stuff and shows examples with movies.

 

If anyone wants to come together for ideas on video tutorials PM me please. If it's to be done one person can't handle it all, and there has to be some format to it as well.

 

I think I understand where he is coming from. I just discovered VF at VF4 and I can still remember when the series won me over....

One of my best friends' girl bought him a PS2 and VF4. It was totally at random. She had never heard of VF and probably picked it up because is said "Greatest Hits" on the box and was $20 and she assumed it was both good and cheap. She was right, but let me get back to the useful part...........

I was playing VF with my friend and two others. None of us knew how to play and we were choosing different characters every match at random like on street fighter. Most often we choose Akira because he looked most like Ryu from SF2. Damn, another tangent, here comes the point, I promise........

I chose Pai, because I always choose the female characters first, and I discovered how to do consistently. I won like 12 or 13 matches straight with supreme ownage (while knowing 1 move). I had no game system at all, and up until then they beat me at everything that wasn't in an arcade. So I bought a PS2 and VF4.

If we want to add players to the VF community we need to create a guide that make the the game more masher-friendly. I think you guys have bee playing VF for so long that you don't remember what it feels like to be truly ignorant. I have read countless VF guides, not one of them is noob friendly. The contain all the moves reversals, stances, etc. Simply being able to understand the document makes you more than a noob. In order to make a truly noob friendly guide you have to condense the move list. greatly.

If we want to grow the VF community, we should put up a FAQ on VF that is extremely simple, contains only the most easy and most flashy moves, is labeled VF for beginners, and only contains at most 10 attacking moves and 2 grabs per character.

It should be overly simple and not do anything to take away from the flashiness of the game. It should leave room for players to leave gaping holes in their game and take stupid risks that none of us would do now.

For example, I would suggest something like this....

<font color="blue">Guide to having fun with VF4: Evo for <u>Absolute Beginners (People with less than 500 matches played)</u>

Pai Chan Section
Most important moves

Part 1 - Attacking standing opponent

- high, high, high, high
- high, mid
- high, high
- high, high, high, low
- high, high, high, mid
- high, high, high, high


Attack standing or croughing opponent.

- low
- low
+ - low
- mid, mid
- high, high, mid, mid

Throws

+ - Standing opponent who is guarding.
++ - Crouching opponent who is guarding.

Aoi Umenokoji - Section

........</font>

I suggest something like that. It is ridiculously simple and quite frankly has bad strategy. (I think doing the PPKK string against someone who is crouching is a bad idea. But is my opponent is slow on the counter-attack the KK will land) Moreover it doesn't contain what we really consider to be her most important moves. But it gives absolute beginners something they can use to smack each other around the ring a few times and have fun in a brain-dead way. That is what the series needs, people who haven't got a clue but are still having fun playing the game.

There could be other guides for the people who want to learn more or begin to wonder why the occasionaly do move that they don't know. This series of guides could progressively get more complex as they aim for people of different experience levels.

 

Training mode and Practice

 

Screw this i'm changing my signature to reflect how to get good at VF.

 

[ QUOTE ]
Kingofcarnage said:

Training mode and Practice

[/ QUOTE ]

That's not going to work. That's what we had last the generation. It made people who were already interested better but it didn't pull in anybody who wasn't already interested or only had a slight interest.

 

[ QUOTE ]
Darrius_Cole said:
For example, I would suggest something like this....

[/ QUOTE ]

I kinda like that idea. I think it could be organized into chapters/lessons. Chapter 1: Pai: The Basics. In it would be only the staple, easy-to-execute stuff needed to win a game.

Chapter 2: "Now, we'll add this..."


I think it could be made to work well.

 

as for me, a VF noob, i honestly agree with what "stupid" posted. i think that most of you here speak from a verteran point of view, telling us noob to go through the training mode as a way to get better at VF. i have to disagree with this. After i spend some time with soul cal II and tekken 5, i see how easily it is to pick up and play. in fact i learn a lot from tekken jsut by watching some matches played by tekken veterans. VF, however, is a different story. Just by moving around (dashes), evade attacks and counters, throw escapes, and tech rolling (i guess thats what its called) are intimidating and overwhelming for a lot of VF noobs. over the past two weeks or so, i spend time with Jacky. i went through the training mode with him. but when i play against the AI in quest mode, i basically used my own instinct and tactics to try and win. its not that i cant comprehend what the training mode is teaching me, its just that i cant fully master what it's shown me in the training mode if i am not comfortable with the gameplay "basics" (the things that i mentions above).

 

It's "Supid", not "Stupid"! I know I'm still a VF newbie, but I don't appreciate people calling me "stupid"! /versus/images/graemlins/crazy.gif

Yes, at last, a fellow non-veteran who understand my grievances. Thank you thank you thank you ...

Newbie guides should focus on the very basics:
1) Simple attack (give simple & effective canned combos)
2) Simple defence (NO SIDESTEP, NO FUZZY GUARD, NO REVERSAL OR THROW REVERSAL, just standing/crouching guard )
3) SImple throws (up to 2-direction throws including low throws and basic catch throws; NO HALF-CIRCLE OR 270 DEGREE THROWS, NO HIT THROWS)
4) Simple attack followups (basic floats using canned combos and ground attacks)
5) SImple ground defence and wake-up attacks (struggling, high/low wake-up attacks. rolling wakeups)