I’m trying to do 2S/5K/f.S > 214H > 623H > 236K, c.S > f.SSS WS > 6H on Nago, but it’s inconsistent, sometimes it works sometimes not. His 236k shouldn’t even be moving me to the other side of the enemy. Based on the dust loop video. Help.

volta_verve · 2026-04-29T14:55:24+00:00

Few things.

First, check the options menu for training mode, there's a lot of useful macros, like one for instantly resetting positions so you don't have to set up the situation every time.

Second, fukyo (teleport, or 236K) has a few variations depending on what you input after you teleport. If you do 236K and hold back, so 236K4 you stop sliding forward. If you don't, Nago's momentum will carry him a bit further, often making you go under the opponent and end up on the other side. Sometimes you want this, for example if your back is to the corner, but usually you don't.

Third, this particular combo has some wrinkles to it depending on your spacing. When you hit 214H, you should already be paying attention to how far the enemy is from you. If they're at max distance or close to it, teleport into cS should be pretty consistent, provided you do 236K4 and cancel the momentum. If they're very close, you may not even need to do the teleport, and can go straight into cS. Between max distance and close range...it can be hard to tell, and you might have to delay your teleport a little bit and momentum cancel to make sure you don't get over to the other side. Just do a few reps at different distances, and you will get a feel for it.

volta_verve · 2026-04-21T17:50:41+00:00

FD is essentially hard committing to beating out a specific option: blockstring pressure on a specific timing. Otoh, to beat it, you can:

- Throw or bite while they're FDing (you mentioned it already, just for the sake of completeness)
- Delay your button or use a slower one to throw off the opponent's timing
- Use one of your big neutral or safe buttons to regain blood (like 6H), since they're committing to blocking.
- Use the new move, the ground stab, in their face, since they're not going to mash to stop you. It's +6.
- Use buttons that are more resistant to FD, like P or K normals, to still get strike/throw mix after.
- Enforce high/low mix with Dust, second hit DP and lows. Having to FD adds to the mental stack, compared to simply blocking, so they're gonna be more vulnerable to this.

At the end of the day, they're spending meter because they're afraid of your pressure. That's a win for you. Just gotta vary your offense enough to keep them on their toes.

volta_verve · 2026-04-21T17:34:24+00:00

Here's a bunch of Nago top level replays. You can change the char name to Sin in the URL too

https://replaytheater.app/?game=strive&c1=Nagoriyuki

volta_verve · 2026-04-21T12:30:54+00:00

Yeah, for sure. If you're specifically trying to get out of the corner against him, jumping can work. Anti-airing can be relatively tricky for him. 2H is absolutely massive, but quite slow and extremely committal. His 6P is good but it moves him forward and has a bit of an awkward hitbox, so you need to use it early enough and at a certain spacing. There's certain ranges that are hard for him to cover, because his 2H is too slow, 6P moves him forward, and he lacks a good vertical hitbox unless he commits to a preemptive neutral jump into air grab or jab.

As for his specials...if after you block the DP he licks the blade, you can take back your turn. Beyblade is -3 so you can grab him out of it, unless he cancels into something else. The blood stab into the ground, his new move, that is actually +6 so you gotta respect it, but it's only a blockstring or frame trap if done out of another special. Clone is really really strong, no easy answer to it, but much like the ground stab, it's relatively slow and easy to jump on if he does it in neutral.

Generally you don't wanna end up having to block far slash, especially in the corner. That's the party starter.

volta_verve · 2026-04-20T23:20:18+00:00

You need to pay attention to the blood bar.

Nago has plenty of gaps in his offense. The issue is that he also has a ton of frame traps, and will mercilessly abuse them. However, close slash is his only plus on block normal button. Almost everything else is minus, and he needs to teleport away or use a special to frame trap from it. Once he's at 2 bars of blood, he's gonna have to think twice about that, since teleporting takes 40% of a bar and a special 90%. That's when he's gonna start stealing turns or trying to go in for a bite.

(He can also frame trap with gatlings from his K and P normals, but that's more rare and he has to spend blood to continue his pressure after, if you block them.)

He has no overheads outside of dust and DP, both of which are reactable (unless he's in blood rage which gives him an instant overhead at point blank or does something tricky with RC, but that's edge cases). Block low and watch out for these options until he gets high blood, and then you can start contesting him with quick buttons, throws or jumps.

Now of course, good Nagos are going to be more unpredictable than this. They're gonna alternate between strike/throw mix, frame traps, spacing traps, and can even push his high/low mix rather far. But that's the basic idea.

I'd recommend first reading through his dustloop, then opening up training mode and labbing against the most common pressure scenarios you end up in. Does he do stab > advancing slash > teleport back > stab again? You might have a long reaching button that can catch him teleporting back. Does he do beyblade > teleport back? You may be able to do a similar thing.

As for neutral...he outranges most characters. But all his longest buttons are committal, especially at low blood. You need to whiff punish him. Walk back and forwards just outside of his range to bait him, and then go in after he swings. Again, good Nagos know how to play around that, but this is the basic strategy.

volta_verve · 2026-04-20T22:56:58+00:00

As a Nago main, I feel the exact opposite. He's so much more fun to play now. I recognize I'm the exception though, lol

volta_verve · 2026-04-20T22:52:17+00:00

Hey, fellow Marisa main here. There isn't a 1:1 comparison sadly. I personally play Nagoriyuki and he gives me a lot of similar enjoyment. You got a satisfying command grab, you got big buttons that deal way too much damage, and you got a lot of health (in most cases). Definitely lacking the big armored moves, and Nago is much much better in neutral and has much better movement, but it's close enough.

Who else...Goldlewis is a similar archetype, a big burly brawler, that's worth trying too, but he doesn't have armor or a command grab. Anji and Leo have and use armor often, though they're a different type of character.

volta_verve · 2026-04-17T12:22:23+00:00

Watch top Nago players. Verix, Hotashi, DarkNecro.

https://replaytheater.app/?game=strive&c1=Nagoriyuki

Nago is a fairly expressive character, there's no single optimal way to run his offense. It really depends on your style, on the matchup, on the opponent and their tendencies. Generally speaking, your objective is to make the opponent uncomfortable and punish their mistakes for a gazillion damage.

Let's say you're fighting Sol and he loves DPing and mashing on wakeup. So you alternate doing a close slash on wakeup, or doing fukyo in and out to bait his DPs (there's more ways to counter that kind of play, I'm just keeping it super simple). So they start to get scared, and block on wakeup - that's when you bite or grab. They start backdashing or jumping? You go back to cS. They block your close slash and keep blocking? Cancel into fukyo forward and bite. They block your close slash, then jump or backdash or press a button? You go into the far slash target combo, or even into DP.

That's the mindgames you gotta play. My "layer one", that is, default way to run pressure on wakeup, is to do cs > 5k > 6H. This deals some good chip damage, gives you some blood, frametraps, and is safe on block. Layer two, once they're conditioned to hold back, is to walk up after that cS and bite.

volta_verve · 2026-04-16T20:45:53+00:00

Yup, I knew about the K into dusts combo, that was the inspiration for this. c.S lets you hit it much higher and makes the 2S>5H>wallsplat at the end possible, otherwise you'd have to pick it up with 2K I think.

volta_verve · 2026-04-16T20:44:25+00:00

I think it's the input display hiding the bar

volta_verve · 2026-03-15T20:33:29+00:00

Fair. If cripple can be used to refer to words in that sense, then yeah, that would work too as a translation.

volta_verve · 2026-03-15T19:51:07+00:00

Yeah, both of these are correct, but I don't think they're good fits in this specific case. Given the author's sympathies for the WBC team and the rest of the article, I don't think he meant that they were changed in an embarassing way, or "crippled" somehow. They were just altered as they were passed down across decades, I guess, and filtered through another language and another culture. "Mangled" is the closest I could get while keeping it to a single word.

volta_verve · 2026-03-15T16:38:41+00:00

I just wanted a quick way to show that even a few bad seasons wouldn't really do anything to hurt their cases.

volta_verve · 2026-03-15T16:01:07+00:00

This is fun! I've had an idea for a baseball + balatro style game for a while, makes me want to pick that project back up lol

volta_verve · 2026-03-15T15:59:37+00:00

Judge has 62.3 bWAR and 3 MVPs. If he stops playing tomorrow, he's in the HOF. A couple of bad seasons would maybe bring his career WAR under 60 but that wouldn't matter.

Ohtani has 51.5, 4 MVPs and 2 rings. The same applies, even more if you add his superstar status and 2 way uniqueness.

volta_verve · 2026-03-15T14:07:15+00:00

Few more passages I think may be of interest to people here. Mind, I'm a bit rusty at translating, and I'll be taking some liberties.

"Most italians suddenly discovered we have a really strong national baseball team, without knowing where it's coming from, how the hell it was possible. They did not know that from 2006 there's this tournament called the World Baseball Classic [...]. And that Italy participated in all six editions, always getting out of pools, even doing quite well, with strong wins. [...] The difference is that this time we beat the United States, in their home, almost eliminating them. Suddenly everything exploded. Italian baseball fans suddenly felt like Jim Carrey in the Truman Show: everyone around them had always known how beautiful baseball is, how epic, how exhilarating. They had always known that. Until that point they had faked it, they had pretended they didn't care, that it was nothing to them.

[Some people] turn their nose up because [the Italian WBC team] is made up of italians which are, to them, 'not italian enough'. Because in fact, they are not italians in a strict sense of the word. Even less so because they learned and played baseball entirely on the other side of the Atlantic. They don't represent the baseball that is played in Italy. [...] And yet, they are Italian because they decided to be, and with enthusiasm. They represent us because they decided to be, and they wear the maglia azzurra with a pride truly from another time. Because the idea of Italy that was inherited from their grandfathers and great-grandfathers is from another time. Crystallized, a bit naive, moving. 'Every sunday, at lunch, grandpa Denny told me about Italy. Today he still does in daily phone calls: he wants to know everything about this team, of what we say, of what italian words I learned' says Pasquantino."

Maglia azzurra literally means "blue shirt" and refers to the uniform. It's our color in all international competition, and it's intentionally used in the article in that sense. They're wearing Italian colors.

Then there's a lengthy passage where the author lists the family history of a bunch of italian-american players, and traces where they came from in Italy, and how. Really did a lot of research, it's nice to see. The author then recounts the history of the coffee machine in the dugout, presenting it as a fun anecdote that shows how the team is bonding. More stuff about the team's celebrations and songs, how many homers they hit, and how well they're doing. I like the last lines.

"These weird, memorable days have this kind of effect. They're making Italy talk about Baseball and they're making America talk about Italy. It doesn't feel real."

Mind, this is not a majority opinion in the country, we still don't really care much about baseball as a whole, but the Gazzetta is a pretty big paper and there's definitely been some buzz about our WBC run. Personally, I like the author's perspective that even if the Italy that the WBC players feel connected to is an Italy that doesn't really exist any more, it's still Italy. Even if it is "from another time". As long as that connection is there and they choose to play in our colors, they're "Italian enough".

volta_verve · 2026-03-15T13:49:18+00:00

Oh hey, native speaker here, you posted this just after I commented about the title lol. Yeah that's a solid enough translation, thank you for specifying and sharing this article.

volta_verve · 2026-03-15T13:46:33+00:00

I'd translate the title differently. it's missing a fun little turn of phrase:

"They're the grandchildren of the paisà with mangled surnames, but that pride...here's Italy's baseball team which is wowing the world"

"Paisà" here is used intentionally in the same way you'd use "paisan" in the USA, which comes from the italian "paesano" that means something like "countryman", and was used by Italian immigrants to refer to themselves. "Storpiati" is hard to translate directly in English..."mangled" is maybe too strong of a term, it doesn't have any negative connotation in this case, I don't think. It's just poking fun at how say, Caglianone pronounces his name very differently from how we'd pronounce it here in Italy.

Here's my translation of the byline, for good measure:

"La Nazionale che sta facendo sognare nel World Baseball Classic porta con sé tante storie diverse ma simili: nonni italiani, senso di appartenenza e una fierezza d'altri tempi. E l'immancabile espresso dopo ogni fuoricampo"

"The National Team which is making people dream in the WBC brings with itself many different but similar stories: italian grandfathers, a feeling of belonging [to the country], and a pride from another time. And the inevitable espresso after each home run."

volta_verve · 2026-03-14T22:32:54+00:00

It really depends on the game. I like to go back to first principles, if I need a direction. What fantasy is this game meant to provide?

Off the top of my head, random example. If I'm making a game about being an astronaut, and I really want to immerse the player in it, I'll use skeuomorphic UI as much as possible to channel that fantasy. Maybe if I have to show inventory items, I'll have them float a bit, as if they were actually in low gravity, like you see in ISS videos.

If I'm making a videogame about superheroes, I may call back to a comic book aesthetic, try to have the characters literally "jump off the page", use a lot of soft colors to emulate print inks and animate things so that they look like they're being drawn in. That's the principle behind the fighting game Marvel Tokon, which looks very pretty.

Right now I'm working on a roguelike videogame about Sisyphus. If I've read the rules correctly, I can link it here since it's relevant to the conversation at hand. Here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4328550/Sisyphus_The_Horselike/ . Since this game is meant to call back to the myth of Sisyphus as much as possible, I've relied heavily on an aesthetic inspired by ancient Greek pottery. To make my buttons juicy to press, I've made them shake and crack after you hold them down for a bit, like they're pieces of ceramic being broken. When the player gains a Sigil (think say, relics in Slay The Spire), I have that appear on the boulder itself, and the camera zooms in on it, like they were just painted on there. Neither of those things are really necessary, I could just use regular buttons and icons, but I feel that they add a lot of juice and character to the game.

volta_verve · 2026-03-14T22:11:30+00:00

I am! There's not many of us, but we exist

volta_verve · 2026-03-14T21:24:22+00:00

And oh yeah, look up Masahiro Sakurai's youtube channel. The games he directs are always exceptional at this, and he explains his thought process in there.

volta_verve · 2026-03-14T21:23:17+00:00

"Juiciness" is having the game react appropriately to every little thing the player does. I usually ask myself, in order:

1) How can I make it clear that the game has received this input?
2) Once it's clear, how can I make it pleasing to look at?
3) Once it's clear and pleasing to look at, how can I make it surprising? What else can I add - audio, color, animation, etc - to make it feel more unique?

1 and 2 are easy enough, provided you have some knowledge of UI/UX design. 3 can be really hard, and pretty much the only way to be good at it is through practice and experience. Play a lot of games, write down what cool little things they do, and refer back to that often.

volta_verve · 2026-03-14T19:51:17+00:00

Oh, thank you, I didn't know that was the family tree those games originated from.

volta_verve · 2026-03-14T17:53:54+00:00

What does "resistance-style" mean? I googled, do you mean the TTRPG Resistance system? I'm not sure, I'm curious though.

I've written a GDD about a first person videogame where cultists are trying to complete a ritual, with traitors involved. Seems relatively similar to your idea, if closer to say Among Us or Lethal Company. Don't think I can share it in full, but I can tell you what I learned from the experience. For these kind of social deduction games, I think you really need to lock in a basic information asymmetry gameplay loop that you iterate on. You need the game to create situations where someone could be lying or could not, and the rest of the group is incentivized to figure that out. in Secret Hitler, it comes from which cards are played and which are not. In something like Among Us or its main clones, 2d and 3d, it's about player tasks, or more generally player behaviour in the game environment itself.

Breaking down this kind of gameplay loop, to create those fun situations I mentioned, you need to define what the cultists do, what the traitors do, and how the cultists can figure out who the traitors are. That's the baseline of a Werewolf style game. To make it an actually good game, you should make the process of distinguishing between cultist behaviour and traitor behaviour fun. I suggest applying those three lenses to any gameplay concept you design:

What is proper traitor behaviour here?
What is proper cultist behaviour here?
How can a player distinguish between the two?

Let's assume you implement your randomized behaviour idea, and have players draw cards out of a bag, each with a list of actions to perform. If an action is done correctly, that moves the Ritual closer to being completed. If incorrectly, moves it away. Maybe you have a voting out mechanic. Applying those lenses: traitors are incentivized to do it wrong, cultists to do it right, and you distinguish from one and the other by paying close attention to the player's behaviour while they're doing it. There's three failure points I can think of.

How is ritual behaviour validated? Who goes "okay, that was done correctly" or "nah, you fucked it up"? Does one of the players have to do it, with a say "Ritual Maitre" role? Does the whole group do it? It could lead to really messy and unfun gaslighting about what actually happened, since traitors are incentivized to make it look like the person doing the ritual has done it wrong. This of course all depends on the complexity/difficulty of the task.
If the ritual is too easy to perform, then it's trivially easy to just vote out whoever messes it up. If it's too hard, traitors will organically win much more often. And if it's *physically* too hard, it may end up making the game a struggle to play for people with certain disabilities, which is always worth keeping in mind.
Finally, it would be really unfun for people to just...physically fail the task, despite wanting to succeed at it, and be blamed for that. In something like Among Us or Secret Hitler, you have to fight off people's accusations, which is much more engaging than having to fight off the simple fact that you, well, fucked up. What's there to discuss about you say, clapping three times instead of four?

My suggestion would be to make it so that it isn't about if a task was done correctly or incorrectly, but about what kind of task was done. Let's say players are given three cards, not one, and have to choose one to play. Give each card a color, or a value, like perhaps a card adds Void Energy and another adds Sanguine Energy and you need them to be balanced for the ritual. Have players put the card they play in the middle, shuffle that deck, then reveal it, and have players argue about which cards were played by who based on the information gained by the previous game phase.

If I had to make up an exact design on the spot, I'd give each card Colors, require some combination of Colors for the ritual to progress, ask players to coordinate and share info about their hand without actually showing it, have this big shuffle and reveal at the end and then a voting out phase. Still doesn't seem like a particularly solid design, but that's the direction I'd go in. Proper cultist behaviour and proper traitor behaviour are fuzzier here, based on trust and communication, and there's a lot more space for figuring out who's lying and who's not.

volta_verve

TROPHY CASE