Nitaku, Fuzzy Guard, Pre-Checking & Reactions (Eating Vegetables with Juicebox This Week)

Hyping up how good @Juicebox_FGC #VF5FS training sessions this week is! I have tried to illustrate these concepts to A LOT of players I try to help with in Final Showdown!

Juice is illustrating it and saying it eloquently too, and he’s realized how essential it is, all together

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/941497907

Here’s a breakdown that I wrote in my Discord:

This week’s Juicebox streams... is how you gloriously eat your vegetables in VF ^_^
You will arguably get the greatest gains in Virtua Fighter if you improve both your fuzzy guarding and your nitaku game.
I’ve said it in recent time, but this stuff is like the 20% effort you do (but it’s a lot of effort still) for 80% of the productivity you will do in your games.

So fuzzy guard and nitaku. But also being applied is pre-checking. Pre-checking is, in my opinion, a better form of hit-checking. Many people hit-check to the moment of impact hit and the yellow flash from a counter hit. This is great. But Pre-Checking is actually trying to interpret your opponent’s animations as they will collide with the animation of whatever you are doing. Instead of waiting for those 2 frames of hit frame and yellow flash... you could be interpreting 10 frames of animation with a little prediction to forecast and confirm in advance what you should do.

There is another thing, Juicebox asks Shidosha at some point about when he’s doing crouch dash in the fuzzy guard whether to hold a direction like 3 or not. I think he asks that anyways, but this is important. This goes to being able to react to low attacks in VF while you are fuzzy guarding. For me, by default when I fuzzy guard I’ll do the 5G right away first. But.... if the opponent has a habit of doing sweeps or a low I can react to, after a few of these, my fuzzy guard changes to sometimes ducking a little longer and then it is easier to react to a slower low attack like a sweep. And then instead of 3235G, I end up doing 323_3G when I see a sweep. I will admit that for me, this process is not totally conscious. I just find myself blocking sweeps after awhile.

And then there is another cool detail that I believe Juice also touches on with this way of using fuzzy guard. Juicebox now sees why I like the 3 (diagonal down-forward) direction attacks in FS, and why I think the designers moved some attacks to this input direction. A lot of these attacks are great when you fuzzy guard under a high attack (or even under a throw) and you have a fast access attack that is good at punishing a whiff. So you can fuzzy guard, realize you ducked something good, and since you’re already at the 3 direction you can just hit P or P+K as a reaction to ducking something good.

I am not saying I’m good at any of this. But in FS, these things are all very powerful and so I advocate for them ^_^ You get such huge gains from these nuances,.

Literally what Juice says in the video as he is doing these drills: “Excellent... I think this is a key thing that I will need to teach people to get beyond a beginner level... this training needs to happen... it’s a combination of pre-checking, watching the opponent’s animation, clean diagonal inputs, and reaction time.”

 

Thanks so much for the feedback, it is really appreciated snd important