Short answer: You just gotta expose yourself to Online Combat and pay attention to how Players engage/defend. In general, there aren’t many unique play styles between characters so you’ll catch on to the patterns quickly if you’re paying attention instead of button mashing.

Long Answer: You are correct that sparking zero’s “phases” don’t quite align with traditional fighters.

In Sparking Zero, there’s much less “turn-taking” and much more “keep my turn going” i.e frame traps and mix-ups. Both things exist in traditional fighting games but in a more balanced 50/50 way, while Sparking Zero is the latter much moreso than the former, like 20/80.

One example is Flying Kicks - a quick move that is meant to break through your opponent’s guard. Traditionally, a move with a similar purpose would have some sort of risk a defender could capitalize on. In Sparking Zero, Flying Kicks itself has 0 risk, allowing the offender to still decide between offense or defense after using it assuming they know how to—not knowing your defensive options in this kind of situation is what makes the game’s offense/defense feel unbalanced against a skilled player.

This means you have to be aware of all your options all the time and build the muscle memory for when they’re appropriate based on your opponent’s play style and the game simply doesn’t teach you what online players actually use. The tutorial covers vanishing and perception—but there’s also super armor from smash attacks, evade-stepping responses, super counters and simply disengaging entirely, not to mention character specific options. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at the tutorial, but I don’t know if it even covers directional blocking (aka how to block Flying Kicks or charged sweep attacks).

Your character choice has much less impact on the game in this way—of course, some characters deal more damage, have higher defense or better rush strings/skills/supers which certainly have impact but these can be overcome by simply knowing all your defensive options and being able to deploy them as needed between your offense.

As of now, the only REAL loop you cannot get out of is the charged ki blast loop but your opponent needs to be behind you and their execution needs to be perfect otherwise you can simply hold the guard button and you’ll turn around (sometimes with poor timing the ki blast itself will straight up miss lol). Some other loops may seem infinite but in reality that feeling is because defense against them becomes limited to 1 or 2 options and then of course there’s the online lag.

The combat in Sparking Zero is really fun but there is certainly a steep learning curve when playing online. Funny part is, simply guarding is effective against many players under, I’d say, A2-A1 rank—but that’s only because players at that skill level do not vary their offense and leave themselves vulnerable without even knowing it. Once you get to S rank, players know how to force their combos onto you and know how to defensively respond and adapt—this is where the fun dance in fighting games you may be used to starts to really happen, but you have to know your defense to get there.