The UNIEL Thread(st)

[misterBee]

Heh sorry I haven't been as active in this thread lately.

PM me if you wanna play this weekend!

[GetTheTables]

No worries. I figured this would be mostly tumbleweeds but I'll hold down the fort. 😀

 

I'll let you know about the weekend. Next time we play I want to try out the rest of the cast I haven't yet just for shits and grins. Might stumble on another Enkidu.

[GetTheTables]

In the interest of actually getting games in with UNIEL I tried an experiment yesterday. I know that UNIEL is waaaaaay the fuck less popular online than SFV and its even less popular than Rev 2 (which is already a ghost town compared to SFV). So its not the kind of game where you can just hop on and find a bunch of people playing Ranked or whatever.

 

UNIEL has lobbies, though they're called Player Matches which threw me at first, so I figured that similar to Rev 2 that was going to be the best way to find people and get games. The million dollar question was if anyone would be around when I was going to have time to play. If they aren't, then I'm screwed outside of becoming a training mode monster (which at least in this game is quite fun).

 

So at 5pm EST I fired the game up and checked Player Match options. 3 lobbies going, all with at least one free spot and decent connection ratings. I picked one arbitrarily and hopped in.

 

The good news: even in a lobby with 4 people rotating through I managed to get 20ish games in the span of about an hour and fifteen minutes. All of the connections felt solid; the game reported ~2 frames of delay throughout and it never felt like the game really hiccuped or slowed down.

 

The bad news: learning this game is sort of like learning Rev 2. There is a lot to take in at first and most of the people playing have been playing a far sight longer than I have. So there were *a lot* of ass beatings. The guy hosting the lobby had a fierce Wagner - if you weren't careful it was first hit into lockdown into combos into death - and another guy joined that played at least 3 characters at a very competent level. I knew he was a motherfucker when I saw he was on PS3; you know all he does is play UNIEL. 😉

 

The good news, redux: even when getting rocked this game is a lot less frustrating than SFV, for whatever reason. I think its that even when you're getting mauled you have 3-4 really good reset points where you can try to escape and take the momentum back, and they are easier to identify and act on than they are in SFV. Also, staying in that same lobby for awhile I saw a few other players rotate through so its not like I was playing the exact same couple of people over and over (though I don't mind that so much). And one of those guys was someone using Enkidu that was even more of a noob than me so I had someone I could get wins on. 😁

 

Quick capsule experience playing against some of these characters with people beasting with them:

 

Wagner: I remember seeing her at the top of tier lists and I can see why. The one fella hosting the lobby was routinely converting hits into 30 hit combos and she seems to have a pretty good suite of normals and specials. I unfortunately didn't learn too much about fighting against her; it was more like surviving. But I think she is more of a rushdown, up close pressure monster. The times I did better were when I could keep her at sword's length and the only games the Wagner player dropped were to a Gordeau who murdered him from half/full screen.

 

Gordeau: Speaking of, this dude has some reach. Edgelord vampire Dhalsim with a scythe. Seems like a pretty rad character though and honestly he didn't give me as much trouble as I thought he might (not that I did super well but I expected to die weeping in the corner without doing anything). Only got to play against him once or twice so I'm not sure about where he excels (other than "far") or what do to against him with Nana, but I damn sure watched this guy shred the other noob several times (they were all double Perfects, it was painful to watch).

 

Chaos: Fuck that lizard dog. For as much as anyone in this game can lock you down, Chaos was the worst, primarily due to so much pressure coming from the lizard dog and me not having a great idea of how to deal with it. Of any character this is the one I feel like I'd need to lab against the most to figure out what in the hell do to in order to regain some momentum. The upside here is that he seems a little more binary: when the dog is out he can run some ugly game, but if you can banish the dog you can get a lot more aggressive.

 

Carmine: When people think of anime, Carmine is one of the things they think of. I've seen very little with the character previously so having my first experience be against the PS3 guy was illuminating. I expected more of a rushdown character but he was sort of like a Lambda or a Nu-13 with some rushdown but also a fuckload of lingering projectiles and shit like that. Only played against him once so I learned almost nothing other than "block a lot and pray".

 

Seth: Also didn't get to play against him a lot, but he is pretty damn cool. Works a lot of weird angles and is all over the place. One of the big things I learned here is that Nanase's DP covers her in both directions which is great against sideswitch mix ups. 

 

Hyde: Ryu ass Ryu. Still cool, but also didn't get to play against him a lot. This was another match where I learned a bit about Nanase's DP - although it doesn't seem as strong as a traditional DP in some ways, her popping straight up also doesn't leave her open in the same ways a traditional DP does. Just a weird little thing I noticed.

 

Overall, very fun, and I'm glad I was able to get games in. I am garbo at the game and need to learn combos and conversions, but that is easy enough to practice when I get time. 

 

I want to do something similar with Rev 2 but I'm thinking that I need to pick a new character to focus on in that game. I'm not sure how much Ram is necessarily for me and I don't think going back to Slayer is the answer either.

[misterBee]

Keep it up! 😃

[GetTheTables]

Long weekend + wife working = time for animu!

 

Hopefully I can get a little training time in on this and hop online a bit again. Its a really fun way to take a break from SFV while still playing fighting games. I also want to start working on May in Rev2 but I'm anime torn between that and UNIEL with only so much time to go around.

 

@misterBee If you end up with time maybe we can get another batch of sets in.

[misterBee]

I'm actually home this weekend so should be good!

[GetTheTables]

Rad.

 

Saturday may be the best day for that. I'll let you know how that shapes up.

[misterBee]

@GetTheTables

 

You put up a good fight today.  I will start training soon to maintain dominance. 😈

[GetTheTables]

GGs! Was very fun. 😄 That last set was a great close out one. I was happy to be able to keep it that close with Nana.

 

I need to practice more myself so I can keep up. This game is fun but fucking rough sometimes. I did feel like I learned some good things this time through though. Hopefully I can remember them so I don't have to re-learn the hard way. 😉

 

I've never played Seth, Carmine, or Byakuya before tonight. More detailed thoughts on them later but they all seemed cool and varying degrees of weird.

[GetTheTables]

As promised, some more fleshed out thoughts on the new chars:

 

- Seth: Easily the weirdest of the bunch mechanically but also oddly straightforward. He has a lot of interesting movement - Naruto run, dive kick, his backdash is actually more of a full on handspring to backflip that gets him air - and his specials make some sense out of the gate. Where he gets weird is that he has relatively short reach for this game and none of his specials seem particularly powerful on their own. Having been on the receiving end of a good Seth he is all about using that mobility combined with the built-in game mobility to come at you from all kinds of angles with weird pressure. Seems like a lot of fun but definitely not a pick up and play character.

 

- Carmine: This guy on the other hand was pretty easy to get a really basic handle on. Good/great normals, relatively straightforward specials, and his blood gimmick wasn't too hard to figure out once I started looking for it. The fact that he bleeds himself to get his awesome pressure is something to get used to, and I kept using the wrong version of his set up projectile (which makes it sort of not work at all and get him bopped) but those things aside he seems like a strong character.

 

- Byakuya: I expected this guy to be weird, and he was, but not nearly as weird as he turned out to be. I actually expected him to play like Seth: do a lot of set up stuff and come at you from weird angles and with hard to read pressure. Y'know, like a spider. He may or may not be able to do that (I'm a noob) but what Byakua damn sure can do is control the screen with his webs and normals and convert into pretty straightforward damage with his rekka specials. So still a little weird but mostly in the usual anime.

 

Out of the three I could see playing any of them more, but Byakuya and Carmine of course made the best first impression. Seth I think is one of those characters where you need to take them into training mode just to figure out what the hell he does. Sort of like Yuzuriha but I think still more generally accessible.

 

Not like I have the time though. Mika and Nanase continue to be great and if I get the time I'm gonna work more on them before fucking around too much with anyone else.