It’s about time I came back with a progress update. I think I was stalling a bit, hoping to have some more impressive news, but things have improved slowly but surely. I have taken my advice of spending some time in training and prioritizing combos as my main objective at this point in my game. This post will imply play with Ippatsuman, unless otherwise noted.

  1. Execution

    2. This has improved greatly, and considering that it was my #1 sub-priority, I’m pretty happy about that. Long, punishing combos are the centerpiece of my Ippatsuman strategy (I will further discuss overall strategy another time) and I have become highly aware of this fact. A combo is nearly always the best move when the opportunity presents itself, and my gameplay has come to reflect this.

  2. Effectiveness

    3. This is now my biggest priority, I will go into more details after this list.

  3. Aerial Raves

    4. This is basically a subset of the previous point. Again, I will go into more detail momentarily, but long story short: I have improved a lot here. I rarely miss launches anymore and semi-rarely miss the jump afterwards. However, I usually don’t fully complete the AR before finishing.

  4. Consistency

    5. I will spare you the details on this issue. Once again, we have serious improvement, although not perfection. This is now a very minor point for me.

  5. Equal Opportunity

    6. It wasn’t fair in my last post to say that this only affects Morrigan, it affects a few players, her more than most. This has improved slightly without really trying. It’s still really not a pressing issue for me. I believe that once Ippatsuman’s combos are nailed down, translating it into other characters should be fairly easy.

Ippatsuman’s combo (that I’m writing so much about) goes like this:

[Standard Combo]->Launch->Jump(AA,BB)->Jump(B)->DP->(wait)->Hyper Grab

Because the very last part of the chain is an unscaled Hyper Grab, the difference between pulling off the full combo and pulling off 90% of it is very significant. At this point, I generally have little trouble pulling this off until the second jump. After that, the DP after it is difficult as well, and the Hyper at the end is more difficult still. So I have a pretty strong beginning, but very rarely complete the sequence and that has a huge impact on the effectiveness. The most troubling part is that despite all my improvement, I have actually regressed a bit in the end part of the combo and I’m not sure why. Even in training mode, I have a lot of trouble with this. The fact of the matter is, I’m not really sure what is breaking down when I go for that second jump and I think this is something that really just needs to be perfected in training mode. At least my recent improvements are quite encouraging. Once I can get the full combo under wraps, it’s going to greatly improve my overall game and I’ll be able to move onto some more interesting topics to write about :)