My Ranked Notes
Abstract: After about six weeks of being a completely new Tekken player and hearing what different people had to say about reaching Ganryu, I wanted to see what the experience was like and see how far my own approach would take me. This is just my personal take on what it was like to achieve in Ganryu in Tekken 8 with less than 96 Ranked Games
Before Tekken 8
Prior Experiences
My Melee Career
I've been playing SSBM seriously since 2006 (gamefaqs) with Break The Target (BTT) runs until 2008 (SmashBoards & AllIsBrawl briefly)when I started to attend tournaments and began competing locally. Took a break from 2010-2013 until the Smash Doc/EVO boom started another revival.
For the majority of my time, I played Falco and Fox competitively. Melee does not have a traditional input buffer system. The situations where something can be buffered are few and have limited options or outcomes. Combined with a lot of experience speedrunning and playing time trial games (like Dustforce), I've spent a lot of time practicing quick inputs in succession.
The highest I placed was top 15-17% at Genesis 3 and Genesis 4 for a national major; and the highest I got in my region was holding 1st in CPP's Power Rankings.
Melee Labbing
Besides speedrunning and competing, I spent a lot of time labbing and learning about frame data. I am spoiled in expecting dedicated labbers like M2K, SuperDoodleMan, Magus420, Kadano, and more to fully dig into and map out the entirety of the game. Modified isos, like the SSBM Training Pack, gave players access to the Debug Mode and a plethora of additional tools to control every aspect of the game. Even now, I have yet to see a fighting game with debug and labbing tools as comprehensive and powerful as Melee's.
Fighting Game Communities (Melee)
Unlike other gaming communities, fighting game communities (Melee specifically for me so far) have been much easier to join and contribute back to. Making friends with and being exposed to the top players at your local fighting game tournament is something you can't as easily do with FPS games or primarily online games. The additional experience of being in person where the feeling and stakes are much different compared to playing faceless strangers online gives a significant advantage when playing ranked games in general.
Creating a Sense of Neutral
For the longest time, the Smash community didn't use or describe the game with traditional fighting game terminologies. While we've come to simplify concepts and borrow terms from other fighters to explain our Neutral game, many aspects of the game are still actively being defined. Although the concepts are generally the same, the way they're defined, applied, and generally interpreted can heavily differentiate depending on the individual, their skill level, and character they play. A lot of our discussions about neutral and improvement look like Wobble's thought piece on Local Maxima. You can call it local maxima & minima- I've heard Valorant friends call it the dragon curve of learning, and it resembles the Dunning-Kruger Effect's graph. In short, he discusses how the technique he created, Wobbling, was a local maxima he had scaled but had to climb back down because of how it caused him to avoid aspects of neutral game. Wobbles has been a prominent Arizona smash player for years and placed 2nd to Mango in EVO 2013- meaning he isn't a bad player, but there are so many aspects of the game that it's possible to miss or ignore parts of neutral even at a higher level.
My experience with playing what people call legacy fighting games (or fighting games that don't patch or update) is that you must learn to make your tools work. There are no useless moves. Rather, there are situations where moves can or can't work. And those situations are created through movement and conditioning.
Reaching Ganryu as Reina
Coming into Tekken 8
While SSBM is the only fighting game I've played competitively, I've learned to play MVC3/UMVC3, Street Fighter (general), Guilty Gear Xrd &Strive, and some random kusoges. My exposure to Tekken is playing Tekken 4 as a kid and occasionally getting destroyed by my friend who has been playing Tekken for more than 10 years now and is currently a Tekken God in Tekken 8.
I got to see a lot of my friends pick up Tekken 8, including a friend who has never played a fighting game before and only played FPS shooters, and I was able to see how different people approach and learn the game.
I started playing Tekken 8 on February 29th. I took long breaks between Strategist and Cavalry until I finished recording the Reina videos and went from Cavalry/Warrior to Ganryu on March 11th.
I went into Tekken 8 in a similar way to how I approached Melee. I spent a lot of time watching every resource I could find about the game from its mechanics and terminologies. Thanks to this site, I've been able to use learn and memorize my character's moves (Reina). Helping upload videos for all of Reina's moves also doubled in helping me know Reina as thoroughly as possible in as short of an amount of time as possible.
Depending on what you're counting, Melee only has 17-40 moves/actionable inputs to learn compared to Tekken's larger move list. Learning all of a character's frame data (as well as the whole cast's frame data) is much easier to do in Melee, but it's an approach I applied to Tekken as well.
Parsing Advice
I'm fortunate to have a friend that is a legacy Tekken player and is a Tekken God in Tekken 8 to refer to whenever I can't find anything. I'm also fortunate to have discussed significantly about neutral with top level Melee players for years.
A lot of older players have a similar experience of wanting to share the information they wish they had access to when they were starting off in their game- regardless of genre.
Ultimately, it seems the conclusions I and a lot of other people I've met have come to generally align-
- Learn, practice, master Fundamentals
This can be said about the Game Mechanics, your Character, and anything connected to the game. The concept can be further extended to include:
Basic Fighting Game Strategies, Pattern Recognition, Self-Analysis, General Labbing, and Finding Answers on Your Own
There is nothing in life that allows you to succeed for long without mastery of fundamental skills or principles.
Most of the questions and hiccups I see my friends and people have are basic knowledge checks- not about what your opponent and their character are doing to you, but things like not knowing how to utilize the Practice Settings or how to fully leverage the Match Replays. Essentially, most questions can be answered by labbing it out. Fortunately, it seems that Tekken 8 has more than enough tools to make labbing effective in that regard. Even though the complexity and availability of certain tools may differ between fighting games, the fundamental principles in how to use and apply them do not.
For newcomers and people playing Ranked for the first time, a lot of the advice is about mentality, basic strategy, and overall approach to the game. The higher you go, the more nuanced that advice becomes to address specific habits or gaps in match-up knowledge.
For me, parsing advice for Tekken 8 was a process in translating(forcing) what I learned from Melee and other competitive games into the mechanics of Tekken.
The questions I had/have focused on "how" to think about the mechanics and how other people think about the mechanics in Tekken 8. Most importantly, I wanted to figure out what are the means of adapting in a Tekken game. A lot of the general advice given can be helpful for those starting off and wanting something to work with, but it can also limit newer players to playing in a narrower and more predictable playstyle.
With a game as complex as Tekken, there are few things more helpful than simply taking the time to fully learn your character and their options against your opponent. There is no shortcut to practicing the basics and having complete control over your movement and buttons. For fighting games in general, there is almost nothing more advantageous (and universally applicable) than learning how neutral works at a fundamental level.
Besides being told to learn more about the hard details of the game, the next best class of advice givable is to learn how to adapt. For learning the game and its mechanics, advice about how to conceptualize timing and ergonomically do inputs are the most valuable. Advice for adapting to your opponent are fundamentally based on game knowledge and how to respond to your opponent's changes to you.
Beyond that, the discussion starts to focus on individual strategy and choice in how to apply what you know.