Part 4: You Want Me to Fight a What?

1Yr. 5Mo. 2Wk.



So I got up this morning to get started with the whole training thing, when Yuri confronts me with... a Mew doll. Which may seem redundant, but we're talking about an ordinary stuffed doll here, not one of those animate doll monsters. Naturally, I wondered why.



Well, as long as she has a good reason. Apparently she thought it'd be a good idea to get a little practice in against an opponent that won't fight back. I'm all right with that.



I think she might have been taking it just a bit too seriously, though.



Mechanics corner: this is our first tutorial fight, covering the basics of combat. In the upper left, we see Chucky's health; in the upper right, Meowser's. Between them is the timer; we have infinite time for this fight, but tournament fights have a time limit, and the side with the most health remaining, percentage-wise, is the winner if time runs out.

In the lower left is our selection of moves; we can set three sets of moves, each of which contains a far, medium, and close attack, and cycle through them. As we're in medium range (indicated by the green dot above the moves), we can use Tornado, which currently has a hit chance of 79%. (As Guts increase over the minimum required to use a move, its hit chance increases.) Below this is our Guts meter, currently maxed out at 99. Meowser technically has moves, but it doesn't actually attack during this tutorial.

There are a few areas on this HUD that haven't activated yet, like the 'History' boxes; I'll cover those when those mechanics become available.

During a fight, we can slowly advance or retreat, use a jumping move to cover ground quickly in either direction, or attack; if we get too close to the opponent, we can also perform a shove to open up some distance. As previously mentioned, managing distance is important; we want to stay out of our opponent's most effective range and stay in our own.

I decided to have Chucky hit it as hard as he could.



She seemed happy with the results.

Note that Chucky's range to Meowser has changed. This is fairly common; a number of long-range skills bring the attacker closer, while short-range skills can knock the opponent back or have the attacker clear out afterward. The change in range can even depend on whether the move hits or not.



With that out of the way, it was time to resume training. Chucky didn't do so well, though.



I could see he was trying...



...but he didn't seem to have the energy to complete the drill. I felt kind of guilty about punishing him.



He had plenty of energy to protest being punished, though, so that got rid of the guilt pretty quickly.

At any rate, it's time to do some thinking about the future. Specifically, I need to think of a training regiment for Chucky.



Garu typically do best training Power and Defense, and I've always thought Accuracy training is important no matter the monster. Chucky's shown some special aptitude, though; it might be worth working on his other attributes, at least to some extent.



There's also the question of tournaments. Yuri's ready to go right this second, and she's hooked me up with a calendar of upcoming tournaments. I could rest Chucky up--he needs it anyway--and have him ready to go in the Raspberry Cup this week. On the other hand, he's still pretty young; maybe I should focus on training him for a while, aim to get him into the official cup in late October.

What do you guys think? What training regimen should I use? (For reference, right now I'm considering POW/ACC/DEF; you can also suggest weighted plans if you want to get fancy, like POWx2/ACCx2/DEF/SPD/LIF.) Also, should I go to a tournament right now, or spend some time training Chucky first?