Learning Leverless: Week 1 - Stick to It?

As I've promoted in this blog, we are now fully in our leverless phase and it has been... challenging.

MidNite

Part of learning leverless, was also learning a new game as well and as we previously mentioned, it was going to be Under Night In-Birth 2 Sys:Celes (hereby referred to as UNI2). Now I had a good idea it would be a struggle but since I was doing pretty well using my new controller of choice in DNF Duel and being able to pull off some of the harder combos with it I figured I could work with it.

However within the first couple days of using MidNite (the name for my Flatbox) I realized how different UNI2 felt compared to DNF Duel. For the people who do not play DNF Duel (on that note, shame on you! Its a amazing game just let down by its parent company Nexon) DNF Duel has motion inputs as well as 'simple inputs'. So yes, you can do a quarter circle forward and attack but you can also do just forward and attack and get the special move (at slight more mana costs but that's DNF system rules and we don't want to get stuck in the weeds). DNF Duel also does not have anything more complex then a Dragon Punch motion (aka forward, down, down forward) and does not even have a half circle forward attack.

So when I started using MidNite to practice UNI2 movement and specials I realize just how much more effort is required to do some of the more complex motions the game has like half circles, full circles and even charging up to down surprisingly. I quickly picked up the quarter circle forward and back motions without much issue but even the dragon punch motion for me is hit and miss which normal is not an issue when I was using a stick. Even more worrying was the half circle motions (another motion I had no issue pulling off with a stick/ I play Clark in KOF and King in Tekken) was coming out 1 out of 4 attempts. I know, I know, it is early days and I just started using leverless but for stuff that was once as natural as breathing for me to feel much more foreign was a step back. With that in mind, I decided to keep at it and using MidNite to complete all the trials in the Tutorial for UNI2 and was able to do most of them. Some trials required a lot more attempts but eventually I completed most of courses ranging from Novice all the way to some of Expert.

At this point, it is time to talk about my experience so far with UNI2. I have had a passing interesting in UNI series and always wanted to give it a try and with the new one coming out I thought it was a prime time to try. All this was previous discussed in other blogs leading up to this one so if you want the full story, make sure you read those. With this being my first UNI, I of course decided to go into the tutorials and learn about the game and BOY... is there a lot going on there.

UNI2's tutorial is extensive and a bit overwhelming to be honest. It also has a lot of just theory tutorials and not stuff that can be shown in-game and just a wall of text was not always the easy thing to retain. With Learning Leverless this series will be about not just picking up a new controller but also picking up a new game but I also wisely decided to do both it in 'chunks' so I did not get completely overwhelmed with info dump but even with chunks and not doing multiple tutorials back to back it is still a lot.

UNI2 also uses a lot of abbreviations like CS and D.I and tons of others but no glossary in the menus where you need it the most and instead I have to have a wiki up so I know what it was asking me to do. This I must say is a big mis-step and something that should be corrected. Say what you want about Tekken but the glossary is accessible during menus and is very detailed.

I really noticed these abbreviations became a real issue when I started doing the combo trials and even through you can use the 'demo' to show you what it looks (aka delay this hit here, charge this attack here) it still helps to know what the game is asking of you.

Despite this, I did enjoy learning the combo system and realized just how deep it was. I had made a decision before I even picked up the game I would main Wagner and she has a lot of cool stuff. I can honestly say, I always enjoy combo trials the most in every game I play so it is no surprise I was having fun. This all came with a big caveat tho. I was doing all these combos with my Xbox stick and not my MidNite.

Hello Old Friend

So confession. As I got closer and closer to the end of the Tutorial and in the Advanced section, I consciously switched back to stick (which is how I learned how to play fighting games) and started doing much better of course, I even re-did the previous sections with a stick and everything just felt more right. Now I do not want to say 'screw it' I am going back to stick because I really do enjoy using MidNite for DNF Duel and I think I can make it work in that game but I do not think I'll be playing DNF Duel competitively and I might be trying with UNI2 since its a new game and there are people actually playing it actively so I want to be at my best when I do play.

However I am not completely deterred so I have decided to use MidNite and see how I do with the combo trials and I might even go half and half for awhile and make a final decision before I go to my next competitive event. By then hopefully I had spent enough time with the leverless lifestyle that I can make a more inform decision. This will also be covered by this blog as this is an ongoing series which will be added too every week.

Before I go through, during this week of experimentation, I realized I might have been wrong. I really tried to justify choosing UNI2 over Granblue as my initial game pick up (I always intended to pick up both through) but I realized that Granblue has simple controls too similar to DNF Duel and since I am doing well in DNF Duel with leverless it might have been more suitable for me to have went with Granblue and leverless as opposed to UNI2 and leverless. In the end I might be picking up Granblue Versus Rising during my next pay period so I can practice that with MidNite and seeing if I am more comfortable with it but we will see come week two of Learning Leverless.

AV