Welcome back to the second part of my training mode guide. If you haven’t checked the first part of this guide, check out the links above! Anyway, last time we talked about the most well-known use for training mode: Repetition. Basically how to maximize and perfect your combo and set-up execution. That was the easy part. Now we’re going to take the training wheels off a bit and show you some of the other uses of training mode, more specifically we’re going to look at how you can learn more about and understand the characters and the game through the eyes of training mode.

Have you ever had a moment in a match, or been watching a video and you thought to yourself “Wait, what just happened right there?” That is the purpose of training for understanding. This is the utilization of training mode; to gain knowledge or understanding about the game. Personally I see this as a kind of defense-centered training. Why defensive you ask? Well, in a game like Street Fighter, knowledge is a weapon. If you don’t know how to react or what to do in a certain situation, you will quickly find your life bar depleted. For that reason, having a solid understanding of not only your character but the game’s system mechanics as a whole is vitally important. This kind of training can be supplemented however. Luckily, we are in the technological age, combined with the growing popularity of street fighter, you can find tons of informational videos online about almost anything. Of course, these are helpful, but I really believe you should go into training mode and try these things out for yourself, so you can learn all the intricacies of the situation yourself. Below, you’ll find a very simple situation, that should ease you into this sort of thing.

• Choose Yang in training mode, and choose Ryu as the training dummy. Move Ryu as far as possible into the right corner.
• Do Yang’s standing medium kick close to Ryu. As Ryu is falling down do Yang’s standing heavy punch canceled into light teleport [quarter-circle-forward + Light Kick]
• What side is Yang on when Ryu recovers? Now try it on ryu crouching. Try other characters. Is there a difference? What about the character that you use? How can you beat this set-up? There are tons of questions just begging to be asked here. Finding the answers will help your understanding of not only the match-up, but also the game.

The situation is pretty simple, but there is a lot of knowledge to be gained that the average player might not know. Once you find a situation to analyze, look at step 3 and ask some of the same questions:

• Does this change depending on if I’m standing or crouching?
• Does it work on every character? only a few? why?
• How can I escape this situation? What is the lowest risk way to beat this situation?, etc.

Good players use training mode to practice combos. Great players use it as a kind of lab to study different situations that arise in their matches.

Do this for all kinds of scenarios and situations. If you want a hard-mode version, check out the Tokido option select video below that even stumped Xian. See if you can understand the situation. This will really test your understanding of the game.

As always, you guys can send out a big thank you to Gootecks [@gootecks] on twitter. He was the one who prompted and asked me to do these guides, so show him some love! Anyway, if you have any questions, or would like to submit ideas for another tutorial series, please hit me up on either my twitter [check to the right] or my ask.fm account. I’ll be happy to hear you out! Anyway, stay tuned next week for the final chapter to the training mode guide. Here you’ll see how the elite utilize training mode. Stay tuned for next week!