GGACR/I-No/No Prior FGC Experience

Help! I have no idea what I'm doing!

Ok, this is going to take some work, but it's going to be worth it in the end. Let's list some stuff that's gong to help you out so you can reference it here:

Training materials (this wiki).
Other players:
- Find a local scene or build one yourself.
- Get your butt into the +R Discord: https://discord.gg/2yFPuB5
Reference footage: http://horibuna.web.fc2.com/GGXX_ACPR/GGXX_ACPR_IN.html

Now, your first objective should be to just have some fun. If you don't have fun playing this game when you're first learning it, you're not going to enjoy it enough to stick with it long enough to get good at it. Don't force it. This is a game. Even if you're playing at high level, it should still be fun. If it isn't, find another character that's fun for you at high level, or possibly even another game.

Bear in mind that there are many individual skills you'll need to layer together to play any character in this game at a competent level. Some of the skills you'll apply aren't even directly involved in battling an opponent, such as your ability to research potential solutions to problems you encounter. There are numerous articles about how to get started with a fighting game when starting from nothing, and many of them are linked from the main page of this wiki. For your convenience, I'll link them here, but be aware that some of them use other games for their examples:

Ok, but what do I do as I-No?

Typically you want to land a hit, combo into a knockdown (even if it's a simple low-damage combo), force your opponent to block your music note projectile, and then run a mixup while they're blocking. If they don't block the mixup, you do the whole thing over again.

I-No doesn't exactly follow the typical gameplan in neutral because her far-slash isn't quite standard (it's a projectile, it's slow, and there's a gap between her body and where the attack actually physically exists), and her airthrow range is the shortest in the game. However, she can run a modified version of the general starter gameplan where you can use your crouching slash to check opponents in a way similar to how other characters would use far-slash. Then, you use far-slash from further away to force your opponent to try to go over-under (they can go under it), and punish "over" attempts with jump-punch, standing-Punch, or forward-Punch, or, punish "under" attempts with standing heavy-slash. Airthrow still works for "over" attempts, but with the reduced range you'll have to be rather precise with your timing, and wont be able to challenge some air normals after they've gone active because I-No lacks the range to grab opponents past their hitboxes (the part of the attack that can hit you).

In general, don't be afraid to be at any specific range. Some matchups will favor being in a few key positions, but I-No nearly always is happy to be at full-screen where she can safely shoot a music note projectile to get the opponent to block. There are some matchups where it's not quite that simple, but generally I-No is content to sit back and only approach while the opponent is already blocking the multi-hit note projectile. This gives you a margin of safety to use I-Nos strong high/low mixup game. If you're up close, you do have the ability to jump over stuff and dive to punish, or to call out attacks by using Stroke The Big Tree to go underneath them, and you have a 4-frame (fast) normal to work with.

Check out I-No's overview page for her overview and write-ups on what each move is good for, her combos page to get an idea of how to run her combos, her strategy page for detailed writeups (like this one), and the matchups page if any specific character gives you trouble. Also feel free to ask for help in the I-No section of the discord that's linked above.