Ok since you're making a chorus of responses, I'll reply to both of you in one post, hope you don't mind.
The game does tell you how you fail, it just doesn't do so in an idiot-proof manner such as "people die when they are killed" or other silly comments. If you blocked her attacks, it would NOT have connected. What you should have taken from that experience is that you did NOT block the attack properly, maybe it was an overhead, maybe your reaction was too slow (probably the case) maybe the attack has some property you are yet unaware of such as grab-elements or maybe it even was unblockable! Who knows! The proper new player investigates through thorough thinking all of the above possibilities and keeps going and going until the theories are proven or shown to be false. I guarantee you the time it took you to post in this topic would have MORE than made you good enough to beat this game's arcade mode (in the demo it only has like what, 3-4 stages of it).
As for the combo part, that's just practice, maybe the char the demo gives you doesn't play like you want em too. I only just use Filia so far yet I win enough and stuff, it's less about combos and more about fundamentals at this stage since all the best combos are yet not known.
scorptatious said:
It's kind of difficult to play the game the way it wants me to play it if the game doesn't let me grasp the basics of the game very well. The tutorial in the trial version of the game is VERY limited and I got my ass handed to me on the second easiest setting. At least with games like Dark Souls the game doesn't throw you straight into the fire at the very beginning of the game. It gives the basics and has you fight relatively easy enemies. If a game doesn't allow me to ease into it I can't really expect to get good at it.
If you think playing the Arcade mode (meaning AI and not human foes) on NORMAL difficulty is the equivalent of being thrown into a fire you truly have not played a proper human foe who knows what he's doing in a fighter, ever.
Simply put, AI in fighters wins through reading what you press and doing the mathematically-better option. This, being so shallowly thought out, is extremely easy to defeat by doing moves which have options that counter the mathematically best option against them.
Now, playing actual people, that's more like you pick options for the options that you think your foe picked to counter the plan-B options of your initial move. It's basically a game of getting into your foe's mind and if you actually play someone good they'll always know what you're about to do before even YOU know you're gonna do it, simply because of some patterns in your playstyle or a seemingly simplistic approach you may have or what have you...and trust me, playing someone who is in your head and counters your THOUGHTS is what is being thrown into a fire really feels like.
Point being, this and Demon's Souls have the same style of easing you into the game, fighters are just so much deeper than hacky slashy action rpgs that you can't expect to win when you're still a beginner.
That's my general thesis in all of my posts in this thread really, winning or doing well is not a prerequisite to fighting games, you first have to get good to win...at all! Don't take losses as shows of your decrepitude, take them as LEARNING EXPERIENCES! After a few tens of hours you'll be through that stage and you'll start realizing just how many cool stuff there is for you to do in this game.
In the meantime, take the pressure of "must win" off of your shoulders, replace it with "must learn!" and analyze every single round. You can learn something from EVERY single round and there's not enough things for you to analyze and ponder when you're a beginner so don't waste time feeling bad about sucking as you do, everyone sucked at first, just keep that analytical mind up and running and soon you'll know what's going on and how to counter it.
