How to win matches with your VTuber oshi in Idol Showdown and thus avoid bringing shame to her name

Let’s get straight to it: you want to play as your favorite Virtual YouTuber in the new fighting game Idol Showdown, but you’ve got no experience with fighting games, so you’re gonna get your favorite girl beat up by your own incompetence. My god! This is unacceptable!

You’re not going to instantly clear the gap between a beginner and a fighting game die-hard overnight, so don’t expect that. However, it’s actually pretty quick to clear the gap between a know-nothing and a total beginner! You just have to know what to learn first.

Find your fast pokes

First rule of anime fighter: it doesn’t matter how fancy a combo you can pull off if you can’t land a hit in the first place.1

Rather, start from finding the moves that are easy to land in the first place. Many characters in Idol Showdown, including for example Sora, have a good standing medium attack. This move comes out fairly quickly and reaches a long distance, making it an ideal poke move. Try to visualize this distance and use the move when you feel like your opponent is stepping into its range.

Your poke may not be a standing medium. Check standing and crouching versions of light, medium and heavy attacks, as well as the extra moves listed in the command list. It is no exaggeration to say that you can win on well-applied pokes alone.

Find your basic combos

Now that’s out of the way we can talk about combos. The bad news is you need to understand combos in order to deal good damage. The good news is that in Idol Showdown they’re pretty easy. I see way too many players online who don’t understand the basics, press random buttons, and don’t know why they’re losing.

Just press attacks in the order light, medium, heavy for a basic combo.2 It’s also okay and more damaging to start the combo chain with a medium attack, and you can even combo standing attacks into crouching attacks and vice versa. After the heavy attack, you want to finish up with a special move. Light, medium, heavy, special is really the core of it, even when you’re landing long juggle combos.

The important thing about landing a combo is making sure you’re actually hitting the opponent and not being blocked, a skill called hit confirming. For example, Ayame has a great combo sequence off her low heavy attack cancelled into her 22L uppercut slice. However, if we use 22L against an opponent who’s blocking, Ayame is wide open and the opponent gets to punish her (that’s why you see “punish” pop up on the screen) with a free combo attack. Instead, finish the block string with her 236L charging slice, which leaves her less vulnerable.

Learn to block

There was a little talk just now about safe and unsafe. I am not going to get into frame data study, but I do want to explain a bit about why you’re getting hit.

In short, stop pressing attack buttons while you’re getting up from being knocked down. You will always get hit! In fighting games, the first attack to hit wins, period. When you’re knocked down, opponents can time their hit to land just as you’re standing up. If you’re mashing buttons or jumping during this time, you get hit, no question about it! In this situation, you need to block.

Let’s carry this idea to other situations. When you’re blocking your opponent’s light-medium-heavy attack strings, you generally can’t press an attack button to interrupt them whenever you want: you’ll just get counter hit! Rather, you need to wait for the opponent to be finished with their string— usually after a special move— after which point you might have a chance to move or counter-attack them.

Attack and defense in fighting games is about turn-taking: you attack your opponent, and if they block successfully it’s their turn to attack after you’re done. Unless you really know what you’re doing, attacking out of turn will just get you killed.

Anti-air: don’t let ‘em jump

A lot of fighting game play is just about reacting to your opponent’s options with the correct counter. The easiest thing you can work on at this stage is your character’s anti-air defense.3

Your opponent’s jump forward is a highly predictable move: they can only land in one place and they are probably going to try and attack you. So as soon as you see an opponent start to jump into your range, start making mental preparations to counter. Find an attack that aims toward the sky, like Botan’s upward shot or Suisei’s crouching heavy attack.

If you don’t have any ground-to-air moves, you could try air-to-air defense: jumping straight up and using a normal attack with a wide area, like Aki’s jumping medium attack.

Properly reacting to your opponent’s common moves is more of an intermediate than a beginner subject, so don’t worry too much if you can’t do it at first. These things take time.

That’s about it

Idol Showdown is a pretty basic fighting game, and as such, basic skills will get you pretty far. Due to the fandom-based nature of this game I’m not going to tell you which character to pick— your wife is your own— but the characters’ difficulty star ratings are accurate: you are going to have a much tougher time as a beginner if you want to use Botan or Aki. But who am I to stand in the way of true love, right?