Injustice 2 guide: How to move on

This is a beginner’s guide to Injustice 2. We don’t mean for it to take you to Evo. Once you understand the core concepts, it’s time to start studying and researching on your own.

Practice (and then practice some more)

We told you at the beginning of this guide to get into training mode, and we have some news for you now: You really never leave training mode. In life and fighting games alike, learning is something you do forever.

Train your combos not until you can do them once, but until you can do them 99 out of 100 times. Then you can start working on 100 out of 100.

Take advantage of Injustice 2’s versatile training dummy. If there’s a character or move you’re having trouble defending against, set up the dummy to use them on you and figure out a counter.

Researching yourself

Watch your own matches. It’s great to watch pro matches in tournaments to see what the optimal combos and strategies are, but the most valuable detail you need to pay attention to improve is actually what you personally screw up.

Unfortunately, Injustice 2 doesn’t have a match replay mode like other fighting games, but record your own footage if you can.

Evaluate yourself honestly. Rather than saying "I would have won if not for that guy’s crap!," look specifically for the parts where you mess up and try and figure out what led to your downfall.

Don’t beat yourself up, but you have to look at your own failures to understand how to keep them from happening again.

Researching others

Even so, it’s still important to pick up new ideas by watching high-level play. To see characters in action used by experts will show you what they’re really capable of, whether or not you actually use them yourself.

Even in the process of writing this guide, we researched by watching a few Wednesday Night Fights tournaments.

Don’t enshrine tournament players: They’re human beings and they make mistakes, too. Don’t just mimic them directly: You’ll just become an inferior copy. Just like when you’re analyzing your own footage, look at what they do and think about why.

Don’t give up

The strongest fighting game skill is tenacity. This guide won’t take you to Evo, but you might. Good luck. Now go put in some work.