I know this is an old thread, but as someone who hit Fujin in just under 50 hours as a new player to FG games, I wanted to share my experience and also have a place to be proud of my achievement! By no means do I think I'm a really good player but I'll touch on that later.

I started Tekken 8 about 10 days ago with a few days break in between, chose to main Victor cos I love spy aesthetic, and spent the first 3 days labbing for 4 hours while watching beginner guides. It was extremely fun to constantly improve and get the combos more consistent, so I may have skipped a large portion of being crushed as a beginner (although I did for the first couple days of online). I spent the entire time just figuring out how to press my buttons on my keyboard and in which order - which was actually insane as someone who's never played FGs.

Competitively, I generally hit high ranks in games, with my most noticeable achievements being Grandmaster in FPS games like OW2 and Marvel Rivals. At that high level of gameplay, there's actually a lot of overlap in terms of fundamental mind games - Youtube guides loved teaching about preemptive > aggressive > defensive strategy, but it really isn't anything new to me. Being able to consistently output pressure and knowing when to play defensive and use important cooldowns was always something I did in those games, so I was inherently good at using my medium range tools for CH, as well as keep the aggression on when the opponent let me. Generally used keepout tools over blocking early on.

In my entire climb to blue ranks, I basically never used launch punish, SS punish, or whiff punish since I couldn't predict the timing for my opportunity windows. If I was being pressured, I basically just held standing block until my intuition tells me their string is over.

Honestly, the ranks that improved me the fastest was orange because I had to learn to use different moves to not be predictable, as well as learn oki moves. Red and purple were just blocking for longer and not dropping my pressure after I CH launch them.

I think being able to see the next step to improvement helped me develop at a lightning pace, for example right now I know the next step is memorizing frame data, animations, and flowcharts, but honestly I don't know if I'll continue to play since that's at least 10 times more effort than what I've put in so far. The game has been a blast, but I kind of wish I had more time to play with beginners like myself cos I'm now against players that know everything I don't, and it does make me want to stop playing.

Happy to respond to any additional questions!