Me using Sarah

Yay, more Sarah players

Thanks for coming here to ask for tips, it's great to see players seeking to improve. I''m not the best (yet), but i'll give you my opinion.

That being said, it seems like both of you in the video are pretty new into VF. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that, everyone of us started somewhere. But neither of you were 'playing VF' or using much of the game's fundamentals, rather.


The good points:
==You were very aggressive with offense (that is what makes Sarah a scary opponent).
==You had decent combos that did good damage.

The bad points: The TL;DR of it is that you neither of you guys know the basic fundamentals. Go to the wiki and learn.

==LEARN OKIZEME AND HOW TO DO MEATIES after you knock your opponent down. That is pretty much central to playing a good Sarah


==Round start of the first match, the first move you do is 9K. 9K is a 20-frame (really slow) move that is both launchable on evade and punishable on block. Now there's nothing wrong with using whatever move you want, whenever you want in fighting games, as long as you know the risks involved. When it comes to round start ("round x, READY! GO!"), SPEED is what usually wins, and a more experienced player would either block, elbow, 2P, High Punch, Evade-->ECD, or used some other attack with 15 frame start up or less, and all of that would have beaten your 9K. Heck, even a launcher would have beaten your 9K for 1/3rd to half your life in Counter Hit damage.



==Neither of you ever used evade/sidestep. You guys were playing a 2D game, rather than a 3D one. Evade is definitely NOT always the right answer, but if you never evade at all, you open yourself up to being forced to deal with mixups that you normally wouldn't have to.



==VF is all about exploiting habits. That's pretty much the core of the game right there. Its important because there are so many different options that your opponents can use at any given moment (evade, backdash, block, fuzzy guard, attack, low attack, counter, throw, sabaki, etc). If you're not spending time in your matches looking for patterns in what your opponent commonly does most often and blowing him/her up for it, you will be spending alot of your time guessing each turn, particularly when its your turn to be on defense. In defense, it either means you will be making hard read guesses all the time and getting hit for it WAY more often than you should, OR you will sit there and block until you feel like its safe to press buttons again. I often saw the later.

For example, watching your Sarah, I one habit I noticed was that you had pretty much ALWAYS finished your strings, especially in Flamingo Stance. Armed with that knowledge, if that was me playing against you, I could just sit and block until you do a long string (SOME of Sarah's mixups are hard to see and block, but not the ones you used in that video), and when I see something I can evade/crouch block for a free launcher combo punish. I'd do that and it would work on you, guaranteed. Another habit you had was that you didn't have a problem throwing out punishable moves, such as 9K+GPPK, 7K, and those long strings you'd finish until the end.

The point of that last paragraph was NOT to tell you to never finish your strings or don't use punishable attacks at all. The point I was making was that you should be sure to mix things up. Don't be so predictable. Delay some of your string attacks, finish your string sometimes but not all the time, and have a plan for all of your decisions. That being said, you can play any way you want in VF, as long as you know the risks. And since your seemingly inexperienced Akira opponent let you get away with many of the exploitable strategies you used, as well as let you win, your style of play was perfectly ok against him/her. However, you will need to learn to play differently against a better opponent, or they will blow you up.


==After you do half-circle forward throw and your opponent hits the wall, you can get nearly half life damage off of your opponent if you immediately hit 1K and do the 3K down hit/soccer ball kick. That works on almost every character.

 

Yeah, upload more if you want us to critique.

Also, about your habits, its perfectly logical and understandable, because many of those same habits I have had before or still have now (such as freezing up on defense), so I can call it out easy. Like how you pointed out the reason you use 9K to blow up 2Ps and such, a big reason its easy to fall into bad habits is because opponent skill overall in the west is kind of low for VF imo, of course with exception to the top players.

 

I watched your other videos, and the only advice I can give you is to play better opponents. The guys you played here straight up let you get away with first-degree murder with no problem. You won't get better because you won't learn anything playing guys of this skill level. Not trying to diss. But these guys wont teach you anything or force you to make intelligent decisions