This lesson is on analysing your own replays, analysing your replays is an enormously important skill to build when trying to improve.

It's especially useful when you are finding yourself unable to win and aren't sure why. It's still incredibly valuable when on a winning streak.

This lesson will aim to give you a checklist of different things to look for in your replays and some guidance on your mindset when looking them over.

Quick Tips

Let's look at some quick tips for looking at replays before we get more in depth:

Watch replays regularly - Even if you have a clear idea of how you need to improve, I'd recommend watching your replays at least once a week and keeping an eye out for anything more important than what you're currently focusing on.

Turn on input display - You can either use the input display or the virtual controller, I'd recommend the virtual controller as it's a bit more clear. Watching your inputs carefully can help identify bad habits or defensive errors.

Acknowledge that you have the benefit of hindsight - We've all pushed a little too hard and eaten a reversal level 3. It's easy to criticise ourselves with the benefit of hindsight but there are plenty of things that WILL catch you off guard. You want to focus on consistent errors you're making, not being caught by off the wall stuff.

Pick out one thing at a time - Especially when you're just starting out, you'll be seeing a lot of small mistakes and there'll be plenty you're not seeing. Pick one that strikes you as important and fix it before moving on to the next one. As you get more confident, you might be able to make multiple changes at once but there's no rush.

Watch your opponent closely as well - You're not the only one in your replay, sometimes watching your opponent can give you inspiration as well. How are they doing the things that you struggle with. This step makes playing against pink squares an absolute godsend.

Watch wins as well as losses - Watching losses is the fastest way to improve in my opinion but watching your own wins is important too. It helps you find strengths you should keep, opportunities you can seize and is a solid confidence booster to boot.

Save your replays to a video format - When you want to look at a replay in detail, saving it as a video gives you a lot more control than the lacking in-game options.

Now that we have some mindset stuff out the way, let's jump into what you should be looking for. I've put it in rough order of importance but everyone is different.

Defence

The easiest thing to diagnose is your defence, whenever you get hit, try and work out why. It's pretty much that simple at this stage. You aren't aiming to never get hit by anything, that's just not possible.

What you ARE aiming for is to eliminate consistent weaknesses in your defence. You should be aiming to not be hit by the same thing twice in a row. This covers everything from Dragon Rush mixups to the pesky overhead moves like Cell's rolling crush.

The most common defensive errors to look out for are: