Duration: 1:04:19

40 views

1

Seems like I haven't had my fill of ping-pong lmao. So here's a clear with Erika, the schoolgirl character. At first I thought the characters didn't have major differences and were mostly for the various storylines, but in my first attempt with her ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21Zxi-Xpbio ) I quickly realized it was not going to be just like Kazuwo or Karen. My usual service cheese strats simply don't work! Uh oh. That's because she can't shoot the ball at such a sharp angle from the sides, except maybe if you get the MAX power. Oops! No free points anymore.

This makes this character harder to play since you have to fight more for points even when you are serving. And while most of the opponents weren't too bad, I realized who actually was the toughest CPU opponent in the game : the salaryman. He's on fire! He shoots so damn fast. Holy fuck.

Even before, I had some trouble with him especially if the rally count gets higher, but at least with Kazuwo or Karen I could relatively easily make him dive on the sides thanks to the angling of my shots, and then take advantage of that to score a point. But here with Erika it felt so much harder to pull that off so I kinda had to play the high speed high rally count game and hope to see an oppotunity somewhere if the AI lets me, which is a bit frightening. Moving back a lot more than usual is needed, and even then I often had issues with my return timings. Either I press it too late with high rally count, or I press it way too early at low rally counts because I expect an even faster shot. I wonder if Erika's range isn't also smaller or something, so many shots I tought I could return but failed to. But maybe it's just timing issues. In this run I even actually lost a set to him, which is one of the reasons why the run is like 10 minutes longer than my previous clears.

At least having him as the 3rd opponent makes the second half of the game less stressful, since the other opponents are easier. At least it's not like the Yukata girl (which I tried a bit too) who has salaryman as...the final boss. And she also can't sideways service cheese. Oof. Nice ALLMost potential right there.

Old man is still a bit demanding but he has some "obvious" weaknesses so to speak, while the salaryman doesn't. Or maybe "universal" is more fitting, as in the salaryman felt more matchup-dependant while old man is more about knowing where to shoot and bait him.

Played on PCSX2 1.2.1, recorded with OBS Studio