You can start the game with
any character you like. Although I would say that Joker is one of the
more challenging fighters in the line-up to use, the spectrum isn't so wide that it matters-- and having a character you
LIKE is better than one that is
easy. Liking your character is the first key to success because when you like how they look/play/feel, you are
more driven to play them and thus practice more; and fighting games are
ALL about practice. That being said, combos are an important part of the game, but they shouldn't be your only focus.
- First, get comfortable with moving. If you ever accidentally jump when you don't want to or jump back/forward/neutral when you intend to jump somewhere else, can't dash on command or have trouble getting your character to where you want them to be you're gonna have a bad time.
- Then, you need to learn how to block. Blocking is absurdly underrated at the lower levels of play. Get comfortable with both crouch-blocking and stand blocking.
- Attacks in this game have 5 basic classifications when it comes to blocking. High, Mid, Low, Overhead, and Unblockable.
- High attacks are attacks that must be blocked high, but when the opponent is crouching they will miss him.
- Mid attacks are your basic attacks and can be blocked high or low but unlike High won't whiff if the opponent is crouching.
- Low attacks are, just that, low and must be blocked low.
- Overhead attacks are attacks that must be blocked high, and even if you're crouch blocking they'll hit you. They usually have slow start-up times to allow you to react.
- Unblockables are very rare in most cases, and throws could be considered part of the unblockable category. Throws are short range, and must be "teched," where as soon as you're getting thrown you press the throw button in a window of time to escape.
So what does this information give us? The basics of blocking and mixup theory.
You can spend all day playing and throwing random strings but until you de
velop a fundamental sense of mix-up the game will be confusing and hard to understand.
When somebody is doing a jumping attack, it is always going to be an
overhead attack. So if the enemy is starting their offense by jumping in at you and you want to block, you must first block standing. Then you must react to their next move once the jump-in has finished (unless, and you need frame data for this, you can punish at this point). So here's the first bit of block theory:
- When you do an OVERHEAD attack, it FORCES your enemy to stand. Now they are vulnerable LOW.
So if you do a jump-in attack, and then do a string that hits LOW, you are effectively doing the basic mix-up dance. If the low is blocked, suddenly the defender is forced to CROUCH and vulnerable to OVERHEAD attacks. This is why some characters have absurdly strong mix-up game by default and you have to learn how they work. For example, Green Arrow's
j2->f2d13 is an incredibly potent mix-up. The j2 hits overhead, the f2 hits middle, the d1 hits low and then the 3 hits overhead. So it goes OVERHEAD, MID, LOW, OVERHEAD. This means they have to block 1 hit standing, 1 hit crouching OR standing, 1 hit crouching and 1 more hit standing.
Until you get to know the inner workings of each character, there is a baseline defense you can learn that will work in most situations and give you a solid base: If they're jumping at you, block high and then low. If they're coming at you on the ground, crouch block.
The reasoning behind this is because
overhead attacks are generally
slower so once they're on the ground you block low which deals with low, mid and high attacks and all you have to worry about are throws/unblockables and overheads, which are typically slower.
While blocking it's also good to constantly have your finger hovering over the throw button to lessen the amount of time it takes you to react to being thrown. As you play more games you'll get a feel for when you're going to be thrown.
Now that you likely have a grasp of the fundamentals, you can get into character specific stuff.
First things first, in reply to your post precisely,
And all of the combos and set ups people talk about or show are really difficult for me to try in a game situation.
Yeah. That's the nature of the beast. You gotta take those bad boys into training mode and grind them out a million times over until you can do it perfectly every time. You HAVE to commit them to muscle memory before you're ever going to be able to try and do it in a pressure situation. Think about it logically: you wouldn't go on the ice and learn to skate DURING your first professional hockey game (sorry for the hockey metaphor, I'm Canadian and it's how I'm going to relate, deal with it), because that would be ridiculous. You learn to skate, handle a puck etc at practice beforehand: a pressure-free environment where you learn the basics skills until they're memorized.
Once you've got a handle on the fundamentals, make sure you can execute all of Joker's strings and specials on their own, including meter burned versions. Familiarize yourself with the movelist, figure out the good mix-up moves, etc.
When learning combos specifically, it's sometimes best to break them down into pieces and do them. Unfortunately, the juggle properties of this game make things a bit weird and sometimes the timing will change depending on how long you've been comboing them at the time so you can't always do this, but Injustice has a SUPER SWEET SYSTEM for dealing with this: in training mode you can go to the move-list and "tag" strings and specials and normals etc. This is cool when you're learning a fighter's specials and stuff, but it's especially useful when learning combos: you can tag each part of the combo on the screen to make things easier on you. It's hard to remember the fifth or sixth input of a combo from your head when you're 3 moves in, so having it on the screen is awesome.
I wish I could hop on and show you the basics because I love teaching, but unfortunately I'm on XBL and you're on PSN.
Hope this helps!
