Guilty Gear XrCise - Mobility 2

Difficulty Intermediate

Focus Adaption to Mistakes and Opponent's Changes

The intention of these exercises is to help players more acquainted with Guilty Gear to learn various mobility concepts and how to adapt during the mobility phase of a match. All of these exercises require a specific character to be completed. These exercises are more about adapting to small variations or mistakes in execution while still keeping focus on the opponent's actions. As a result, these exercises are designed to help players build the foundations of confidence and emotional flexibility through understanding their reaction to various emotional responses to mistakes, and gives the player a space to learn their coping mechanisms for dealing with such.

These exercises are all under the Match Up section of the Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 Missions. These missions can be found by going to Battle > Dojo > Missions, from the Start Menu. Be sure you have selected Match Up missions and not Universal missions, in order to get the correct exercise.

These exercises are a supplement to the Missions content and are not intended to be replacements. If you find yourself confused by some of the terminology used throughout this exercise guide, or if you are new to Guilty Gear, we strongly encourage you take a look at the Universal missions first, before using ours.

While you can attempt these exercises with any character, not all of the advice is applicable to certain characters, due to the high variability of character abilities in Guilty Gear. The most important thing to note in these exercises is just as much when an option cannot work for you, as when it can.

We highly encourage trying the End Goals of the exercise even if they may not utilize the most optimal approaches for your character, as the End Goals are meant to teach a broader concept. Just be sure to note when said approaches are less optimal.

As these exercises are intended to supplement the game's existing tutorial content, not all of them actually require completing the goal given in the Match Up mission. Mastering these exercises is less about completing the mission given by the game, and more about how you approach the situation that the mission presents.

Match Up Exercise 45 J

Character Requirement

Jack O

Goals

  • Starting Goal - Learn the rhythm for activating her Projectile Shield, setting down Houses (Ghosts) to get a minion (Servant) at the correct time, and activating the minion speed-up boost.
  • Secondary Goal - Learn how to walk your minions to land a strike on Dizzy, using the projectile shield to keep them safe as you move forward
  • End Goal - While doing all of the previous goals, additionally look for timings where you can pick up the House and move it forward.

Exercise Summary

The Jack O version of this exercise is a bit simpler and more rhythmic (than the Answer version, given below). The goal of this exercise is to pay attention to Dizzy's opening gambits while still keeping mental awareness of your own execution of Jack O's house placement and organ activation. When done correctly you will eventually be able to consistently land strikes on Dizzy.

To achieve the end goal of this exercise first requires that you learn how to activate Jack O's projectile nullification field and walk the minions forward, protecting them with the field. In order to reach Dizzy in time you'll need to find the right moment to activate the minion speed-up boost as well. This is a very rhythmic version of the exercise and still requires you to be observant of what Dizzy is doing so you can recognize when you need to put up the shield versus putting down the house. Therefore the first step in learning this exercise is learning to achieve all three activations: the house, the nullification field, and the minion boost, all while still reacting to Dizzy's possible icicle threat. The other projectiles are less relevant if your execution is clean as the projectile field can nullify them and they take longer to make contact, so they are not as threatening as the early icicle.

Mastery of the first step of this exercise would be recognizing when you have time to first set the house and then activate the nullification field through playing Jack O's organ. You can ignore doing so at first, to get a hang of the tightness of the interaction as the execution itself can be difficult on those not used to the character. The key to the first part of this exercise is to make sure you are good enough at keeping track of Jack O's completion of the moves you desire as well as Dizzy's attacks, such that you can recover the situation without getting hit and resume the plan of getting out your nullification field, minions, and then the minion boost.

Once you get used to this, start learning how to walk forward with your minions. If you walk forward too aggressively, Dizzy will just backdash. You want to balance moving forward with not causing the opponent to percieve a mix up incoming, such that the minions still land the strike while being protected. As a result of the cpu's backdashing, in order to achieve a minion hit there is a small moment where the minion MUST leave your shield. Learn the timing and spacing for this. Mastery of the secondary goal requires that you be able to recover and adapt to any mistakes, just like the first.

Lastly, there is a moment where you can pick up the house as a result of evading and dealing with her attacks correctly and throw the house closer without it getting hit since she is in the middle of an attack animation. As the final test of this version of the exercise you will want to learn this timing while still doing all the required defensive motions and paying attention to how your own mobility affects the opponent's spacing.

Additional Notes

Overall, this version of the exercise is more so for players who lose their calm due to execution errors and emotionally disciplines them enough to learn to adapt. It is the easier version of the exercise, especially for players who are less affected by execution errors. You can skip the Jack O version of this exercise of you feel more confident in your emotional control in reaction to execution drops. Otherwise, the Jack O version is a good introductory version to this concept, while still training you to keep track of your opponent.

Minions must be out in order for minion boost to effect them and therefore will always be last. House can be destroyed or stored but minion still active and minion boost will still work. Minion boost also speeds up the spawn rate of additional minions if house is out when you use it.

Match Up Exercise 45 A

Character Requirement

Answer

Goals

  • Starting Goal - Learn how to parry the icicle, punch the ice fish such that it gets destroyed and you do not get hit, and deal with the fire fish's beam.
  • Secondary Goal - Learn how to deal with all three at once, looking for Dizzy's additional follow up and how to change how you avoid or deal with Dizzy's projectiles in sequence.
  • End Goal - While doing all of the previous goals, also look for timings where you can place Answers various perches, and use them to get to Dizzy and attack her, while still dealing with her projectiles correctly and avoiding getting hit.

Exercise Summary

The goal of this exercise is to go through Dizzy's stuff with Answers parry and mobility tools, while still focusing on what Dizzy is doing.

Dizzy does not use the same pattern every time. She tends to start with fire beam, icicle, and icicle fish. Parry the icicle, punch the ice fish. Even if both are coming, you'll wan't to parry the icicle as it lets you avoid the ice fish and land on top of it. However if the fire beam fish is out parrying may be dangerous as the parry teleport can put you in danger.

Once you get used to how to parry you'll want to look for openings where you can set up Answers various perches. Get used to openings to the point where you can lay them down while still parrying and jumping to evade.

Finally, to master the Answer version of this exercise, hit her by using the perches to get close to her, navigating all the projectiles while still having the correct responses to Dizzy's opening gambits.

Additional Notes

This is mainly about keeping calm against an opponent trying to aggresively zone you out. A lot of this requires adapting to the situation while still keeping aware of the various threats on screen.

The fire fish represents one of the more stressful complications in this exercise. It is difficult to tell if it is going to move up or down and therefore requires you to be flexible and ready to adapt to a 50/50 change. If it comes out during the beginning of the sequence after Dizzy uses icicle, you'll need to decide if it's better to jump block versus parrying the icicle. Having your perches out before hand can give you a little flexibility, so a large part of this exercise is dependent on the speed of your reactions and ability to recognize new threats and openings in Dizzy's timings as a result of her summoning the projectiles. Try to stay calm while keeping an eye on her side of the field. Once you get used to the rythmic motions involved in dealing with the ice projectiles, dealing with the fire ones becomes a little easier as you will find you have more mental time available to react since you no longer need it for the ice.

Match Up Exercise 19

Character Requirement

Jam or Baiken

Goals

  • Starting Goal - Experiment with the different possible responses to the start of the exercise sequence. Jump, move forard, block, use mobility tools. Learn where there are gaps in Venom's field, and how far forward you can get without being hit.
  • Secondary Goal - For Jam, walk forward and block the projectile such that the Just Defense message shows up on the left hand side of the screen. For Baiken, Dash forward and then crouching parry the first two projectiles.
  • End Goal - Learn to command dash after Just Defense blocking or parrying, and then land a hit on Venom. For Baiken, additionally learn how to walk forward and do a third parry into parry attack.

Exercise Summary

The goal of this exercise is to learn how to use Just Defense and mobility options to navigate Venom's difficult screen control to land a hit on Venom.

First experiment with Jam or Baikens various options at the start. Get a feel for what movements are possible and not possible. Spend a lot of time understanding what does not work and why. Once you do, start practicing your walk up instant block with Jam or dash into crouch parry for Baiken. For Jam this should be Just Defense (blocking the first hit of Venom's field well enough that the "Just!" message shows up on the left hand side of the screen). For Baiken you should end up parrying the first two hits. A lot of this has to do with trust in your advancement and your defensive response as you move. Therefore the first part of this exercise is designed to show you the general process for gaining the confidence required to move forward while there is still a lot of things going on the screen.

Once you get a hang of blocking or parrying you will then want to incorporate Jam and Baiken's command dash to procceed through the rest of the projectiles. Part of why this is difficult is because you must time it perfectly enough that you can land a strike on Venom afterwards. This is a bit harder on Jam than Baiken, but the principles are still the same on each in terms of the timing involved. To do the hardest version of the exercise, try to land the hit without getting hit at all yourself. In order to do this correctly your timing in the walk forward/dash into block/parry needs to be perfect. For Baiken she has multiple ways she can achieve this. She can walk forward after the two parries and parry a third time into a parry attack or she can time her command dash perfectly. Try to be able to do both and figure out which works better depending on the level of clean execution in the first part of the exercise.

The ultimate goal of this exercise is not to 'get it as perfect as possible', although 'aiming to be perfect' is part of the focus of the goal system. Mastery of this exercise would actually mean that you properly recover and adapt in situations where you did NOT execute perfectly, while remaining calm.

Additional Notes

The reason Baiken uses crouch parry instead of stand parry, is that she will be hit if she does not, due to her height.

This exercise requires the ability to switch from a twitchy reaction, ie the block/parry, then calming ones self enough to properly input the command dash into a strike, as twitchiness may cause you to do it too early, late, or input it poorly.

In the first part of this exercise, if you walk forward, you can test the effect of green block on this sequence. Do so to get an initial understanding of the differences in the different types of block push back on your ability to do the rest of the sequence. You can additionally crouch block and stand block to get the same idea.