Well, it was only a matter of time before we tackled a Leffen post. You all may know Leffen as a Melee evangelist. Or maybe you’re like me and remember him from that weird beef between him and Chillin over a Fox color. Honestly, it was pretty entertaining to see it go from a horrible diss track to a humiliating 5-0. I suggest watching it if you haven’t seen it. However, since then, Leffen has branched out to other games with varying degrees of success. The game in question today is Guilty Gear Xrd:
Now, if you look up “Leffen Guilty Gear”, you see him playing a lot of Guilty Gear Strive and a wee bit of Guilty Gear Accent Core XX +R. But you don’t see him playing a lot of Guilty Gear Xrd. You can see for yourself that he doesn’t seem to like Xrd’s teaching tools specifically. Mind you, have you played Xrd? Have you seen their tutorials? Their matchup guides? The mission modes? Xrd is one of the best at teaching new and returning players anything they want to know and is probably one of the best game tutorials ever made. That aside, the clip in question shows Leffen trying to do an air combo with Johnny. When I first saw it, I thought it was one of the harder ones… but the clip zooms in and shows that it’s a basic Dust combo.
For those who’ve never played Guilty Gear, Dust combos are pretty easy to do and hard to mess up unless you’re going for the super hard ones. Which, this one is not. I could do this. Many people who spend ten or so minutes can do this combo. Leffen is having some trouble, and to be honest, I’m sure he did it. But what makes this discussion worthy is blaming the game for not being able to do it immediately. Furthermore, blaming the game for not being “beginner friendly” is a bad look. What’s worse is praising Strive for being beginner friendly while being this bad at a basic Xrd combo.
Having bad execution isn’t a mockable offense. Execution can be practiced and polished. But what makes this, especially funny is that this is a player who plays Melee and has the nerve to talk about “fuck beginners” or what “depth” is because he couldn’t get the combo first try.
That’s not to call Melee shallow, but it’s FAR from beginner friendly. It’s okay if a combo is a little different and hard for someone. You don’t have to be good at every game. But don’t blame the game for not being good, especially with a claim that’s just not true.
If you have Xrd and you need a refresher, I implore you to boot it up and see how newcomer ready those tutorials are. Xrd might as well have training wheels on it before it yanks them off and tells you to hit training mode. For someone as high profile as Leffen is, being this salty over a mission mode combo, then going off the rails like this is silly when you take what Xrd does for the player into account. Even as he explains himself, it’s stupid. Mission Modes are meant to give you a foundation of what a character can do and allows you to go from there. It is a starting point, not a final destination. So why does Leffen expect this mode to hold his hand? Just say you’re bad at Xrd.
As for you all, don’t listen to drivel like this. The FGC is a gold mine in fighting game knowledge. It doesn’t take long to look up things you don’t know or find someone to train with to tighten up your fundamentals. Most games do give you the tools you need to do well. Mission Modes and Tutorial Modes are getting better and comprehension is increasing. These things are good, and I hope they go a long way in making sure we don’t sound as stupid as Leffen does.
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