can you go into more detail?
So I'm going to say some things that probably just make me sound super bitter and will make people feel ways, but whatevers. When Juice says thing like "NA doesn't think abou tthings in these terms", he's right. We don't think of the psych a lot, a lot of people just say "I'll learn this combo and mix up, then I'll win". In SF4, you can't reasonably do that /now/. Back then, any shmuck in America could get top 8 with just having that over people, as long as an Asian wasn't there. In anime, that's still the case. You can get top 4 even at a tournament and you don't even need /good/ combos or set ups, you just need to control your character and guess enough.
A good example in all honewty is SonicFox. In NRS games, he does stupid well and I can't say otherwise. Some of his skillset, however, doesn't exactly make it to anime. When he plays Persona, it borders from shaky to outright disgusting. He rust runs at you and throws out hitboxes and whiffs things, and when he makes you block he does reactable unsafe high/low. It's not how you play that game, and when he runs into competent players he dies. For a bit he did okay thanks to nobody in this country playing Marie (another problem in anime, not having MUs), but now he kinda flounders. Not before he gets top 8 though. A player who can't even properly apply basic game concepts here makes top 8 because he just executes and has played a fighting game before. In UNiEL he does a bit better thanks to Carmine and the nature of that game, but when he runs into strong UNiEL players, he loses at neutral because he just wants to keep running at you.
Speaking of UNiEL, let's talk about 2GB. He's probably hands down the best NA UNiEL player right now. He's invented things with Carmine that Japan has taken and recognized him as the creator. He has an investment in this game and he understands it well. Now go watch Final Round Grand Finals and count the number of shield breaks and just bad decisions. If he plays like that vs one of the strong Japanese players, he will be eaten alive for those habits. Here's the problem though: He will continue doing those habits again and again until people will force him to stop, but nobodt in America is going to do that. He is actually handicapped by the fact he will not get consistent experience playign at a level where that's a problem, so it becomes incredibly difficult to actually address the problem.
This also shows in just whatever results we have. This is why Pops was actually a thing people fought over. Pops did stupid well for a kid and does play better than a lot of people, but he won UFGT because sG was right at the time, there was really nobody there equipped to stop him. That top 8 could've been any random BB player there that could do a combo, and that kid just blasted through it. A lot of the smarter players observed his problems and said "this isn't as good as people think it is", but nobody listened and just hyped him up and patted each other on the back. Fast forward to Evo, where a Japanese player recognized that Pops refuses to block, and just absolutely embarrassed him. Nobody else who was playing him had taught him this is what will happen if he keeps playing like that, and it was super duper brutal what happened. And the worst part is, the take away wasn't "man we all fucked up here and that exposed some problems", it was "he did good enough, but how was he supposed to fight Japan?" Fuck that, that was a failure we have to hold as a country but we won't because that means we have to actually recognize how ass we are and work to fix it. Instead, we can say fuck it and go play Guilty Gear and have it happen again, because at least that way I guess our feelings get less hurt.
All we do is game hop and pat each other on the back for having a stream or tournament, when in reality we're all just selling the games short and not doing much with them. People have fun and feel good, but as far as competition goes, we practically aren't outside of a very select few players. When people start to feel bad or realize their skills are poor, they can just reinvent themselves in the next game and move on. My time with Persona has been rough, simply because the number of players who played from vanilla release to now without dropping it is like maybe 30 serious players max, and only like 5 of us have managed the strength to consider fighting Japan. Working in that environment for the sake of competition isn't actually fun, it's really depressing and hard to get anything done, and then we know it's going nowhere so honestly, why bother? The good players now just kind of keep to themselves and don't care about tournaments, because the comp here is a waste of time and when international comp is here it's impossible to prepare. We try to raise up new players but they get sucked into the other nonsense and don't want to have to work as hard, or have circumstances which prevent it. Idk, I'm going off the rails here.
Anyways it just fucking sucks.
Juicebox is probably one of the the most underrated content creator in the FGC. a lot of his video's taguht me things that no other video's really does.
Every person who's ever asked me how spacing works I just show the footsie video. Thing is I keep showing it to people who've been in FGs for years when elsewhere that's like babies first FG lesson.