No doubt you're already tired of answering these kinds of questions, but I'm chest deep in KOF and I'm treading water.
I'm practically a stranger to fighting games, having been introduced with SSF4 in 2010. But since then, I've tried to play a wide variety of fighting games, Like UMVC3, 3SO, HD Turbo Remix, Tekken 5 and so on. But none of them can match up to the amount of just... STUFF, there is in KOF XIII.
One reason that I wanted to get this game, is that I heard it's very offense oriented, and more focused on rushdown and aggression. That's always been a big problem of mine, is to apply pressure, ranged or close-up. Truth is... I'm never terribly confident in my fighting ability. I'm always too afraid to eat a reversal or miss my links so I rarely go on the attack. And more often than not I eat in towards the end when I'm being overwhelmed. No amount of practice really built up my confidence, cause I'd drop a combo, beat myself up over it and try too hard or too little to get back into the fight and lose. I tend to play a either space control or a poke/punish game style, but I want to force myself to come out of my shell a bit more and try to get some aggression into my game style.
I've had the game for a couple days and I have some grasp of the just the hops and some very basic combos, but nothing mastered yet. One big thing that's holding me back from trying to enjoy the game is the execution required for some of just the BnB's. My team right now is Terry/Diamon/Robert, and just getting some of their Super Cancels to happen is really wearing on my wrist. I can't seem to get the timing right, or much of the time I can't get the move out at all! This game does look fun, it really does! But I'm just having a really, REALLY hard time getting into it.
Sadly I'm out in Nevada, where there's no real local fighting scene, just EVO once a year. And I doubt my car could handle the summer trips from Vegas to LA and back again just to practice. And I keep odd hours as far as online goes, on top of being a complete n00b at the time of posting.
tl;dr version: Game is hard! Fighting Spirit is extinguished. How do specials and cancels?