So the title's a little bit of an exaggeration at this point. I was having a bit of a character crisis, where I realized I'd have better luck competitively on literally any character other than Terumi (Jin, specifically, honestly). But I had a few heart-to-hearts and came to accept that I started playing because of Terumi, I enjoy playing Terumi, and as much as I'm playing to become competitive, I don't care if that's going to take me longer because I chose a bottom tier character. I am, unfortunately, going to feel it and whine about it when I lose when I think I should be better than this already, but it is what it is. I'm not known for picking the easy route.

Haz coaching

G also pointed out that if I were to swap characters at this point, I'm going to have to put all that time I put into Terumi all over again on that new character, and that's just going to delay me becoming competitive more.

Which, yeah.

I thought that maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration, but I hit the point where I really needed something to change in my life (stress) so I decided fuck it, I'm going to try and get some mentoring in Hazama. I mostly wanted to get some mentoring -- I watched B get mentoring on Susan and thought it was the coolest shit and I wanted to have that experience too, but I didn't want to have mentoring in Terumi. I've reached out plenty about help on Terumi and no one's offered before. At this point, I'm going to learn Terumi on my own and just ask for advice, and no one will have the right to claim that they taught me Terumi.

Anyways.

I reached out to someone I trusted for advice on who I should ask for mentoring on Hazama, they recommended the person I was thinking about. Which was really exciting, but I was hesitant to ask him to begin with because I remember him (amongst other top players) mentioning that he only likes mentoring people that meet a certain minimum level of playing the game or else it's just kind of a waste, and I really don't think I'm at that minimum level of playing the game. But, I went ahead and asked him, and he said yes, and we managed to schedule a time.

And holy shit it was awesome.

I'm definitely still not at the point where I can use all his advice, as I was struggling to keep up with him especially when it came to describing combos and some short strings I should be using in certain situations. But! I still learned a lot from him! We also had a solid 35 game 1 on 1 session, and I'm sure I've mentioned before how that's the best way for me to learn things.

It seems like that with Hazama, my biggest issues are:

• Being able to control him

Straight up I just can't move the guy right. A big part of his movement is being flexible and unpredictable with your trajectories, and I actually hadn't really processed that I can and should interrupt my chains with another chain to change my trajectory. I'm trying to now, but I just don't have the timing or the muscle memory to do it in reaction to what's going on in the game.

Plus, it seems like Hazama has to mostly move around the ground using 664AB, which was something I had already pinpointed that I was NOT nearly good enough at doing on Terumi and now I HAVE to do it to move around as Hazama. I also need to learn 664AB29 (microdash jump on haz), which that's. Going to be a while to learn. I've just put it off to the side for now 'til I'm comfortable with microdash barrier block.

• Microdashes

This is a given. I'm working on it.

• Being fast

This also seems obvious, but it seems like a lot of Hazama's gameplay is PARTICULARLY about being unpredictable. With Terumi pressure, for example, I can 6c, rc, do a few 5bs, throw out an overhead, like I deadass can take some time to process what's going on because they have to respect my pressure and my resets. That's not the case with Hazama. He doesn't do extended blockstrings (it seems?), so I need to be able to do some shit like j.6D(whiff)C straight into gasseishou the moment I hit the ground in front of them.

A lot of these is probably just me needing to grind out several hours of gameplay on him until I get comfortable with what his inputs are and how to control him, but that's making me upset at myself again because I get used to these things so slowly. I can already guesstimate it's going to take me at least in the 10s of hours to start getting somewhat comfortable with his movement, and probably way more than that to stop having to actively think about my movement options.

There's also a lot of social aspects of the whole mentoring thing I'm a little nervous about. He seemed down for long-term mentoring, but I don't know how often I should ask for training sessions without being annoying, but I feel like if I don't ask often enough I'll seem not dedicated. But also if I ask too often, I don't think I'll have sufficiently learned what he taught me the last time and then I'll seem not dedicated anyways and it'll be a waste of his time!

I'm probably overthinking this as usual. I'm just going to shoot him a message and see how he responds. If it's too soon he'll tell me, I guess. Anyways even if I start scheduling 3 days after the last session, chances are our schedules won't align for a little bit.

Tournaments

A little bit of an odd dilemma I'm at now is how I'm going to handle tournaments going forwards. I'm trying to go all-in on Hazama until I get him to a functional level; as of writing this my plan was to only play Hazama for the next week at least. Even when I'm running into good players on netplay rooms I'm just picking Hazama, even though I'd put up way more of a fight on Terumi.

Which, y'know, great way to force myself to learn Hazama, but that means my Terumi will get rusty. Horrifyingly so.

So what do I do when there's the rare tournament that I can actually make? (I can't do BBBO because of FFXIV raid, I can't do TMN because I will be TO'ing BBBO's Uni2 bracket on the exact same tuesdays that TMN's bi-weekly BBCF bracket is on, I can't do the rare Sunday bracket. All I can do is TRO when it happens, and perhaps Paragon's saturday ladder brackets when those happen.)

I obviously won't go Hazama. I don't feel like it, straight up. I know my Hazama is bad. I don't need nor want to go into a bracket and go 0-2 because I picked a character I know I can't play. Anyways Terumi is still my main for competitive play, I'm just trying to raise Hazama as a secondary for when I need a change of pace.

But my Terumi is going to be rusty. I'm going to be trying to play the idiot with a Hazama brain. Which is going to look funny as fuck. So if I join these tournaments, there's a very good chance that I'm going to go 0-2 against matchups that I probably could have won if I'd actually been playing Terumi consistently, and that's going to be depressing as fuck and may actually really hurt my mental.

So... I don't know. It's not like I'm going in to win, but it's still going to hurt to go in and do poorly for reasons that I know are my own fault. I've asked a friend for advice, and we'll see what he says. I think I'm leaning towards joining for the heck of it.

EDIT: My friend said I'm overthinking it so yeah I'm just going to join and play it out and what happens happens. I'm just there to play BBCF.

EDIT 2: LMFAO NVM TRO IS CANCELLED THIS WEEK. BACK TO THE HAZAMA COAL MINES.

Terumi Advice

Adding this section here too for the heck of it.

I played a bunch of sets vs very good nines, and after the last one a really good Terumi player mentioned that they wanted to watch the set because they like giving advice in the MU. It was pretty funny, I asked, "oh do you want me to DM it to you when it's uploaded?" and they said "Nah be proud upload it to the Teru-cord videos channel" to which I died inside to.

It was such a bad set. Past the halfway point I completely mentally melted and was playing like trash, and even at the beginning of the set I was kind of cooked because I had come back from PAX earlier in the day. But, people kept insisting that I shouldn't be embarassed about uploading sets, so I went ahead and uploaded it in the end.

I ended up getting a shitton of advice which was awesome! Literal paragraphs of advice and when I asked follow up questions people answered them. It was actually honestly the amount of advice where at that point, I decided I may actually need to start writing notes. I haven't started yet, but I think I'll sit down and try to write down all the advice I've been receiving lately in proper note style (maybe even in LaTeX? lmao) so I can organize it better and reference it later.

The sheer amount of advice I got also made me feel a little silly to start playing Hazama, because I'd just gotten pointed in a way to improve my Terumi, but unfortunately I'd already committed to changing something in my life and switching to Haz was the least destructive. If anything, it's not like the advice is going anywhere, so I can reference back to it once I'm ready to lock in on Terumi again.

I'm also really surprised by the performance of the video?? I only uploaded it to link it in Terucord but I made it public instead of unlisted for once (because they'd just been telling me not to feel embarassed about uploading sets, y'know?) and as of writing this post the video was at FIVE likes and A WHOLE HUNDRED views?? I also got an additional subscriber from the video?? This aren't big numbers by any means, but this was a set of me getting my ass beat by a leader rank Nine that I just threw into the youtube void and people actually liked it!

Something something I'm going to try to upload sets more often. But I've said that multiple times now LOL. The difference is I'll actually upload them as public, not unlisted, when I finally do upload them.