I’ve been really into… is “semi-responsive” the right term? Whatever the Duncan Freehand and the Firecracker is. *And a Deeper State, I’m guessing, though I missed the first drop on those.) I guess I mean responsive yo-yos set up more for 1a string tricks that require really deliberate tugs to activate the response system.
When I started yo-yoing, about 1.5 years ago, I started on responsive and left it in a few weeks, mostly played unresponsive, and eventually added some stall tricks mostly on fixies. I got, but didn’t quite get the love, for the Duncan Freehand; I really enjoyed the No Jives and the Butterflies and stall tricks.
The last couple weeks, though I’ve started playing around with my Freehands and similar yo-yos more and really digging the hell out of doing really simple 1a tricks on them. I’ve been really surprised by what you can do on it - like if I had to guess, I would have never thought that a magic drop was possible on a responsive, but I knew that Kamikaze was invented on a responsive, and so I tried it… and it was pretty magical to pull it off on a Freehand.
One thing I’ve noticed is that there are a bunch of old-school tricks that I thought were boring - like Buddha’s Revenge and Cold Fusion - which I learned on unresponsive and immediately abandoned as boring. But they are super fun on responsive. Something about what you need to do to play them clean enough on a Freehand is delightful.
I guess a lot of the tricks I enjoy are ones with a fun responsive finish - the right bounce out is super fun.
So I’m interested: what do you do with semi-responsives? What kind of tricks do you do on them? What kind of tricks are especially fun for you? And… I guess I also just don’t quite understand the limits of responsive, and what kinds of tricks are and aren’t possible. (Is anything possible with enough skill? Or are, like, some kinds of slacks and hops just impossible?)