because of the steam sale i've finally picked up tekken 7 (and soul calibur 6) on pc as well. i messed around with tag 2 for a while when it was new, but felt like i never started to "get it," and for a long time i considered 3d games (at least what i'd consider "the big 3" (those two and VF) since i've never really touched DOA or a lot of weird smaller games) to be something i didn't really understand. but after my experience playing splatoon 3 and learning from almost nothing to reach a point i've gotten really happy with, i feel like i've completely changed my mind, and want to spend some time playing fighting games i can really forgive myself for feeling weak at again, and ones where i'll have a chance to start building up that knowledge, and my own attitude, in a constructive way, focusing on thinking positively and understanding what's happening over my...sort of machine-learning-esque approach to 2d games over the years. just doing stuff and trying to do more of things that work and less of things that don't. and even when i figure out "what people want to do" not actually having good ideas of how to counter it
i kinda dove into this on old soulcal games first though because those are what i have nostalgia for, and it's been interesting coming back into that with a few ideas of what's important and the stuff i struggled with before but realizing i'd still get a chance to basically build totally new habits and ideas. there's a real "zoning" aspect to characters with big weapons like nightmare/siegfried and astaroth, where even against the CPU you can't rely solely on trying to run in to close space on them like works on many of the other CPUs. of course, running straight in is silly anyway, because a lot of the longest pokes for any character are direct mid attacks. and i've quickly realized the sort of defensive interplay of various options as well, like the way that guarding and sidestepping/backdashing are somewhat mutually exclusive. trying to organize these ideas into something along with attacking and setting up situations is tough! but it's exciting. i'm not even sure how much i'll try to play people in the game, although i know a couple people who netplay 1 (which has GGPO fightcade) and/or 2 (which seems to be a bit more popular but only has delay-based on dolphin)
tekken i just started poking at, i think i want to play lidia the most for now, but i've been just kind of messing around to get used to some ideas and watching videos to get an idea of baseline stuff
also when people say a character is boring they really do usually mean "good and not super technical/flashy" which i very much agree with being a good place to start learning