Learning Baiken taught me a valuable lesson

It’s been a little over two weeks since I picked up Baiken, starting from when the day she was released, as I wanted to learn a new character. I made it to heaven with her on the second day of this month (February) and I am currently just over Level 400 and sit at 155 celestial wins (at the time of writing). None of these figures are either impressive or important, but it does allow for some sort of picture to be painted within your mind to kind of grasp what I have been up to. So much for the update on my progress. Let’s talk about how Baiken’s arrival opened a door for me in fighting games that I never really thought of being an option for me.

Learn a new character; for any reason

When I started playing Guilty Gear Strive and even throughout all the open Betas, I had only picked Ramlethal. Her visual design just immediately spoke to me. A female, visually appealing, character with swords the size of cars. For the Betas and the first couple of weeks playing the actual game, I was having fun playing Ramlethal. The more I played her, I realised that the gameplay the character wants to play, was really at odds with what I wanted to do though. Which in the ranked tower wasn’t much of a problem, as you can just brute force your way through the majority of people there. It wasn’t until I actually managed to clear the celestial challenge with her and started to play in heaven; that’s when I had to face the fact that I chose a character that really wasn’t fun to play for me. I didn’t quite give up yet and just kept playing until the end of June, but at that point I was done with her. It felt more like I was forcing myself to play the game, as I liked the game, but had all my joy and interest disappear the moment I had to control her in a match.

Apart from two exceptions, the rest of the cast didn’t really interest me, so my choices to learn a new character to allow me to continue to play were kind of limited. So following June and for less than a week even, I decided to give one of my two other choices a test run. I picked Sol and boy was that a mistake. Everybody kept repeating how fun he is, because or despite being absolutely busted (NOTE: this 1.0 Sol I am talking about here), but I honestly couldn’t find the fun in this character and thus it still wasn’t for me. So I decided to just stop playing for a while.

Learn a new character like I-No

Around mid-July roughly two weeks later I decided to boot up the game again, and give my other choice a try — I-No. Considering how different a character I-No is in general, having no traditional dash or run, being a pure mix up monster, an archetype I’ve never actually tried before and that her inputs seemed quite difficult to string together for me (at the time), I wasn’t sure how this was going to pan out. So on and off until the end of the month, I would boot up the game, just hit training mode and play around with her. It wasn’t until the first of August that I decided to learn her properly, so I went online, to the park mind you and started playing people.

It was a relatively slow learning experience as the whole concept behind the character was absolutely alien to me. Interestingly enough, for once, choosing a character that I usually wouldn’t really be drawn to actually worked out this time around. Even today I absolutely love playing her, it is so much fun when you get your mix and have them hold that. It is unbelievably satisfying. It’s this experience in particular that made me even consider to learn a new character again, Baiken in this case. So let’s move on to that.

Learn a new character after the first few days

As I picked up Baiken from day one and decided to not even touch I-No for the entirety of February, the first few days were rough. You see with I-No, I had the luxury of just looking up what Daru, Sonicsol and Diaphone had been doing to learn a new character, just to get an overall understanding. That was not possible with Baiken, as everyone was learning her at the same time and I made a video about that already so you can go and check that out if you are interested.

The first few days are very different than the ongoing process to learn a new character and learning more and more about that character after you have a more solid understand of the basics. This is also the time where I now decide if I want to continue playing this character or not. I don’t really ever want to be in that situation with Ramlethal again, where I in some way gate-keep myself from playing and enjoying a game. Luckily I am having a tonne of fun playing Baiken. I am not sure if I enjoy playing her more than I-No, but at the very least it’s a breath of fresh air and in the long run a character I will always have in my daily rotation. There are still some kinks in my basic game-plan with here that I need to even out though.

For one and that’s only during matches, quite frequently on hit, not block, on hit, my HS Kabari’s follow up is blocked and I don’t know why as I cannot reproduce it in training mode. No matter if I am mashing or timing it, it always connects. The only times it does not is when I hit the follow up so late, that it might as well have been the start of the next round. So that’s one thing I have to figure out and correct so it doesn’t happen anymore in actual matches. The next one is my use of Tatami Gaeshi— I don’t use that move nearly enough in neutral. It’s mainly in combos and block strings and that’s not good enough, as I need to be using this tool in a way to force the opponent to rethink their approach. S Kabari and Hiiragi both are also moves that I hardly ever use, but that’s more because I am scared to do so. Whenever I do use either of these moves, I tend to die almost immediately after, but I’ll try to work on that. So those are the issues on the execution side of things, there are are also matchup issues though.

Nagoriyuki, Ramlethal, Leo, Chipp and Axl almost seem like impossible matchups to me. They’re not, I’ve checked the replays of the top ranked Baikens and they seem to be doing fine, but I honestly cannot deal with those five characters at the moment. Especially Ram and Chipp are just so insanely frustrating to fight against, that it actually gets so mentally exhausting that by the third match I usually don’t do much anymore as I am drained mentally and probably have run out of ideas too.

The door that Baiken opened for me

As I mentioned in beginning, Baiken’s arrival really changed the game for me and that’s a good thing. In that Baiken video above, I said that I will try and learn Happy Chaos in March. That I will do with looser restrictions when it comes to picking I-No and Baiken though. The reason being that I won’t have played I-No in over 30 days at that point and Baiken is still relatively new to me. That’s to say that I don’t want to risk losing some of the muscle memory I’ve built up with both of these characters. What makes this thought process so special to me is that Guilty Gear Strive is probably the first fighting game ever for me, where I am willing to learn more than one character and continue playing all of them.

I can use my history with the Street Fighter series as a great example here. In Street Fighter 2 I had played Ryu and in Super Turbo I switched over to Boxer. In 3rd Strike I started with Denjin Ryu and then later on switched over to SA2 Makoto. In Street Fighter IV I started out with Boxer again, but roughly two months in I switched over to C. Viper, lastly in Street Fighter V I started out playing Karin and then switched over to Lucia. What all of this has in common, I never ever went back to play my original choice and while I don’t intend on ever picking up Ramlethal again, the reason I switched characters in Street Fighter, is different. I straight up didn’t like how Ramlethal needs to be played, in Street Fighter it was always just “I want to play a new character”, but to me that always meant to scrap my initial choice. The reason I am so happy about this change in mindset is that it actually opens up more games to me.

I gave up playing Marvel vs Capcom 3 even before ultimate came out, simply because I couldn’t grasp how to learn a new character three times over, plus my choices also probably didn’t have much synergy. That problem made me drop the game very quickly. While a three on three kind of game probably still isn’t for me, 2v2 games are starting to sound a lot more appealing and that means when Project L gets released in 2028 or whenever, I might actually be able to play that game without any negative thoughts in the back of my mind, holding me back and that’s kind of cool in my opinion.

Closing Words

I really don’t have much to say here anymore today, but if you take anything away from this, let it be this. If you feel like you’re getting annoyed with the game you really like, try a different character, that just might be the issue. If it’s not, it’s also ok to just play something else, maybe just take a break and then try a new character. Either way enjoy the game you are playing and have fun! See you next time.