I understand your predicament NL .
For Koki Niwa , I think he sometimes become too passive too soon. I somehow feel that he loses confidence on his stock game too soon and starts trying out variations and depending on them solely ... some of the forehand to backhand exchanges he had with FZD was awesome and he should really be thinking in terms of close to the table rally rather than third ball all the time , point is if Harimoto can generate power at his age , so can Niwa ... and he has been actually looking more solid off late ...
His stock game is serve, receive and third ball, the problem is that he is not going to beat FZD at any of those things and he is not going to win the power battle either, FZD's power is highly rated, but his consistency is very underrated - he is probably the most consistent player with best touch on offensive shots in the game right now, which is what makes his misses in the last game amazing. I don't think you know fully well what it feels like to be completely outclassed by someone like that to the point you wonder WTF you are playing. I didn't post my matches from my last tournament but I played some matches where I felt like an idiot and wondered why I was still playing where kids had now gained 200 pts since I last played them 2 years ago and were using me for target practice. The power and spin is so much that you are too slow, your blocks are not good enough, your spins get countered back in your face, your pushes go into the net or fly off the table because you are trying to be too tight etc. That is how Niwa feels.
But Niwa is trying his best, he isn't giving up - the fact that he wins the 4th game shows you that he is always fighting, the problem is that it takes him that long to disrupt the opponent (FZD), only for the opponent to adapt to his tempo and then all the opponent's advantages come back again. Harimoto was complaining about Xu Xin's spin, he still hasn't played Fan yet, then he will know what spin and power are really like. I take you back again to ZJK playing FZD, you could see that once ZJK won one game, he knew he had done enough. Just the look on ZJK's face when blocking FZD's loops said it all, he didn't have to tell me that he knew he had no chance. The way that Koki beats XX shows you that Koki is not just complaining about the spin or the power, it is the overall consistency even the rallying.
That is what makes Ma Long and FZD so amazing, those guys just don't seem to miss. They have magnets on their rackets. I don't know if you saw JApanese TV strength charts, they only gave two players perfect scores, no need for me to mention who they are. They docked XX a point for speed and ZJK a point for power.