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When you first get into a deep game like this it’s a little paradoxical from a journaling perspective. Everything is so new and interesting to me, I have a lot I could talk about; on the other hand, all I can speak of is the most basic stuff. Let’s start with a quick recap of my fighting career to remind you where I’m coming from. Played SF2 a lot right when it came out. I was just a kid, I learned a lot of good basics, but also picked up a shitload of bad habits in the name of playing honorably. I also didn’t even look at combos for a second, although I was aware of their existence. After that, and I’m talking SF2:WW, I played most major fighters a bit here and there as they came out, but never put in much time with any of them. That was all until I got TvC:UAS a few months back and really, REALLY, got into it (thank you online play). My point here is just that I want to give you an understanding of where I’m coming from. Even though I’m always talking about fighters, I am, in the scheme of things, pretty new and a lot of things don’t come easily to me (i.e. combos).
I’ve been mostly (and I mean 85%+ of the time) playing Guile and Balrog (“Boxer” if you wanna sound cool). I’ll talk about them more some other time, but let’s start the combo discussion. I think I’ve mentioned before that I seem to always be talking about combos here, which would seem to elevate their importance (and interest as a topic) in the games. Well, the reason for this is a) it’s really my bottleneck right now and b) it’s very easy to discuss since it’s so mechanical.
For those of you who don’t know, combos consist of three different types of connectors: chains, links, and cancels. Chains are easy as hell, but extremely weak on their own. Cancels are almost always easy and are generally
normal->special moves. Links are tough as hell for me and are generally
normal->normals. When I say links are tough as hell, I mean it. I more-or-less don’t attempt them at all in matches. They require the strictest of timing. I’m sure this will be a source of conversation and depression for quite a while. But for now, let’s talk about the simple combos I AM attempting.
For Guile, I’m using a simple c.mp xx hk flashkick combo. (I know most of you don’t come from a fighting background, “xx” means cancel). Just a simple 2-hit combo, but it’s pretty decent for punishing vulnerabilities with nothing but a charge. The main downside to it is that you cannot hit-confirm before going into the FK, so it leaves you extremely vulnerable if blocked. The end result is that it’s a decent combo, but only suitable for nearly guaranteed openings. A more versatile combo would be c.lk > c.lp > c.mp xx hk flashkick. This actually does ever-so-slightly LESS damage than my combo, but has the added benefit of time to confirm the combo is working before going into the flashkick or aborting the combo if it’s not. The problem here is those “>” in the combo mean link, which means it’s a lot more difficult.
With Balrog, I’ve been doing c.mp xx hp headbutt. It has all the same benefits and drawbacks as the guile combo, so I won’t reiterate it. It’s basically the exact same thing. The last thing I’ve been trying is Balrog’s hp headbutt to ultra(1)(PPKKK). This is an extremely effective combo given that it results in an ultra landing. There is time to hitconfirm the headbutt before committing to the ultra, however the headbutt itself is unsafe on block. Therefore, it’s a pretty high-risk high-reward combo. At my present skill level, this type of thing is well worth doing once in a while for winning and worth doing quite often for practice. Again, once I can get a handle on links, I’d be able to extend this combo a bit to hit-confirm it before committing to the headbutt. Right now I can pull it off maybe 25% of the time or so. The most difficult thing, by far, is the timing of when to start the ultra. The timing is very strict to land it. So this one is my main focus for now. The other two I mentioned are pretty easy and I only have to get used to doing them reflexively on opportunity. This one is slightly difficult, but I’d say I’ve already done the hardest part (the first 25% accuracy), so I will be practicing this for a bit. Links are very important, but will have to wait for a bit as I address lower hanging fruits of victory.
Ahhh, I’ve had a lot of new stuff brewing lately, so this is gonna be another disjointed “catching up” post that jumps around from subject to subject.
- First off, I got my MadCatz Round 2 TE stick about a week ago. Being that I’m no joystick connoisseur, I was very interested to get this, the Cadillac of arcade controls, to compare against my TvC stick, which is regarded as high quality, but not quite as high. The main difference I notice is that the buttons on the TE stick are super sensitive. In fact, quite often I’m accidentally pressing 2 buttons at once, while I mean to just press one while resting my finger on the other. The other thing I notice is that the joystick seems to require slightly smaller movements to register. I’d have to agree that the TE feels better, but the differences are pretty small. The other great thing about the TE is that it’s USB, which means it doubles as pretty much the best commercially available mame controller as well. And what the hell is up with mame not supporting CPS 3? All that aside, the stick is taking some getting used to, even having gotten fairly used to the TvC stick. Quarter-circle motions are still kinda difficult for me (lol), and double-QC’s are still quite difficult.
- I was barely playing SSF4 before I got the stick. The game is awesome! The only problem I have with it is the ultra moves. They’re stupid. They’re the blue shells of street fighter.
- Three days in a row, I played against three separate friends who are into video games, but not really fighters. It was fun to share my passion with them, but of course it wasn’t much of a game. There’s pretty much no level of taking it easy that makes it a fair fight other than just plainly not trying to win. Don’t get me wrong, if they had even like 3 hours of practice it might’ve been a different story, but against a rank newbie, it’s just not a real game. It’s like: here, I’ll start out with 50% health. And not use ultras. Or supers. Or specials. Here, I’ll just walk around a bit and try to block, try some stuff.
- Last night I signed up for Xtortion Live (Gamertag: BlueC1oud). Even though I think monthly payments for online gaming is pretty much gouging, let’s face it, I want my online fighting. I’m also kinda pissed cause my 360 came with 3 months of free membership and I have no idea where I put that coupon. Anyway, at least it really is a nice experience. Similar to TvC, it’s only when I get online that I really become interested in the game. Playing AI is ok for a bit, but quickly becomes stale. After I signed up I played for about 6 hours straight until 3am :). Compared to TvC, there’s much less lag and much more opponents, so overall it’s a great experience. Although TvC does have a few online aspects that are nice. For instance, I can’t understand why SSF4 doesn’t offer you to rematch your ranked battles, nor do I understand why it sends you back several menu screens after your 1 battle is done. Finally, I get “Unable to join session.” on about 80% of my connection tries, which is apparently a firewall issue that I’ll have to work on. Still, overall it’s pure awesomeness and I’m sure I’ll be playing lots of SSF4 in the near future.
- I doubt any of you noticed, but last night someone left a couple of nasty comments on my blog. That’s cause last night I outed him as a chronic ragequitter on some TvC forums. I really don’t mind that RQ’ers hurt my ratio a bit while improving their own, it just bothers me to think of how lame and overall shitty some of the people that I’m playing with remotely are. But anyway, at least it brought him to the site and he probably learned a thing or two.
You might expect I would come back with a 15mb post about SSF4, but nope! Tatsunoko Vs Capcom! OK, the status of things is this: I think the last time I really talked about my plans was when I wanted to get Soki up to par. That’s mostly happened, I’m decent with him now. He’s still a 2nd choice for sure, but I’ve become pretty competent with him and can land his vanilla combo about 1/2 the time (the other half resulting in a smaller combo). I’m happy with that, I’ll continue to use him as an alternate, but my focus is now back to my real team. I’m in a state of wanting to branch out into new combos and techniques.
Ippatsuman – My main combo is pretty good now. I still drop it a lot, but a lot less. It’s pretty damaging when completed. I really want to add that last jump,medium into the end of it. The reason being I think, but I’m not positive, that it makes hitting the hyper grab afterwards a lot easier. Right now alert people can often avoid that last (and very important) step in the combo by double jumping or doing certain specials. I think adding the extra jump in my combo would eliminate that option. It’s hard, but occasionally I can land it. It’s strictly in training mode for the time being (and dummy-like opponents). Also, I’m working on a new sequence for him that could be brought into the main combo eventually, but can immediately be used to extend sliding kicks (which I’m a big fan of). It’s an extremely difficult sequence, but is quite extended if mastered (I believe it’s part of his ideal combos). As with most of these combos, if I can do the first 1/10th of it, then that’s 1/10th better than a sliding kick without combo, so it can be immediately put into use. Right now I’m quite poor at it. Details to follow (probably). And also, I’d like to get a better corner combo going. Right now I just use my regular one in the corner, which is not fully taking advantage of the situation. It’d be nice to find some long, hurtful combo including a Saki assist there. The sequence I was just talking about earlier would probably be an excellent fit there. It’s all a rich tapestry.
Saki – I’ve got a few new things cooking with Saki as well. Most simply, this really cheap tactic I haven’t talked about yet (I will sometime) I am working on making even cheaper. Adding another jump, shot, grenade, shot to her aerial assault. That’s vague, but I don’t feel like describing it right now. Anyway, this is fairly easy and I just need more practice to pull it off more often. I’m attempting this immediately in real games as well. The main thing I’m changing with her is that I’m going back to using more unblockable hyper shots when I can. Specifically, when I have 2 hyper gauges, I’m starting to spend one up for the unblockable load and then SAVE it. Then, when I block their combo attempts, instead of going into my usual 2A,2B,positron storm I can instead go into 2A,2B,3C,jump,B,B,jump,B,B, unleash unblockable, catch with positron storm, for a devastating combo. It’s fairly simple, but I do need more practice with it. I don’t think I’m timing the unblockable shot with perfect timing, allowing for a small gap for escape. Also, I’ve heard I can sneak a grenade throw in there as well :). Even without the combo, unblockable into positron is fantastic. The one major drawback is that holding the unblockable takes away my favorite toy, regular C shot. Still, I think it’s a good thing to develop.
So that’s what I’m working on right now. It might be a little bit much to take on all at one time, but maybe the variety of tasks will prevent me from becoming complacent in practice… maybe. To recap: With Saki I’ve got cheapness drills and jab->unblockable->positron combos to work on. With Ippatsuman I have to add an extra jumpkick to my standard combo and I have new kickslide-based combos and corner combos to work on.
Edit: Nothing like writing all about the combos to make me wanna go try them. Had a quick Saki training session that was very productive. Added the grenade as mentioned before and it seems to plug the gap in the attack string. It’s actually very easy to do. This combo does about 70% damage and it only requires Saki with an unblockable loaded and a free hyper. This might completely change the way I go about playing Saki. I might start taking a more aggressive approach, trying to land this, cause it’s really a devastator. This has to be my #1 focus in the immediate future.
P.S. That combo might still be a little bit off. But it’s damn close and variants on it should be easy as well. Just needs a little bit more playing around to figure out how to eliminates holes.
Just received SSF4 yesterday. Haven’t had much time with it yet, but here are a few random thoughts.
Overall the game is awesome. The graphics, engine, and characters are awesome.
The graphics are great, but when will we have mouths that sync up with voices?
It’s funny, even though I only recently converted to a stick and, in some ways, I’m still better on the pad, I find pads to be borderline unusable. I will probably buy a TE stick in the very near future.
I’ve really been spending a lot of money lately.
This has gotta help Mad Catz’s stock… right?
MS are a bunch of assholes. I’d love to hop online right now, but since it’s a monthly fee, I think I’ll wait like a month for some training before I take the plunge. Annoying. Also, encrypted controller ports: VERY annoying!
I never really played SF3, but I can see why everyone loves Dudley (as a character)
I am like 2 years behind in this game. I basically never played SF4 so everything is new to me. It’s a bit intimidating in a way. No matter how much I play, I’ll always have 2 years less experience than most serious players. BUT. Let’s be honest, it’s not like I was gonna turn pro. I’m sure there’s a good handful of noobs that I could already easily beat and I will just keep moving forward.
Excessive TvC playing has left my hand a bit sore. It’s from resting my hand on the buttons at a little bit of an awkward angle. The good thing is that now I’ll be playing SSF4 on a pad for a bit, so it should heal, but this will probably come up again…
Just received my copy of Super Street Fighter IV today. My 360 is expected to arrive repaired on Tuesday…
edit: I might as well update this post with something a little less inane. Was just playing some TvC online and had a guy who rematched me probly 15 times in a row, which is always cool. I’d say I won about the first 11 in a row with fairly little problem. Even though he was more highly rated than me, it was clear were we in the same league, but I was considerably better. But then he won. 4 times in a row. (I’m estimating). All because of one move he kept exploiting: Zero‘s sentsuizan crossup. This thing was just destroying me over and over again. I don’t know why it took him so long to bust it out. The problem with it is it’s a crossup, which, by definition, makes blocking it extremely difficult. I have to think about how I can prevent this in the future… I’m not exactly sure how to work on it. Maybe I can find someone online who’s willing to cross me up all day long I guess.. I don’t want to leave this untended to though.
Also, so as not to sound like I’m being excessively negative because I’m always focusing on what I lack, I will say this: While it’s a long (infinite, actually) road ahead, I do think I’m getting fairly “good”. At this point, there’s almost no one who beats me for free. Even pretty much top players (online at least) have to work for it. That was actually my original goal. To be, at least, competitive against anyone in the world. Maybe not quite there yet, but getting quite close.
I was just thinking about how I really, truly, absolutely suck with everyone in this game except for Ippatsuman and Saki. It just goes to show the power of practice. The main issue is that these are the only two characters that I can do exactly what I want to do with when the situation arises. When I play another character, like Ryu, it’s like “an opening! now to just… wait… no, not that”, I end up getting like 3 kicks in or something instead of a proper combo. I’m not particularly concerned, just a passing thought.
Because I don’t want to look like a liar, it’s time for the Anti-Ippatsuman post. It is vitally important to understand how to defeat yourself in order to plug up those holes and improve. Please refer to my Ippatsuman Gameplay post, as this is a direct rebuttal to that post. I will be talking about some Anti-Anti-Ippatsuman strategies as well.
The first section of my Ippatsuman gameplay was the most generic as it focused on different ways of setting up combos, something that the vast majority of TvC characters are looking to do. 1 Ippatsuman (screw this, for the rest of this article he will be referred to as “IP”) has blocked an opponent’s attack string and is ready to counter. The best way to deal with this situation is to cancel into a special move that will either require another block, with enough time to recover from the attack string afterwards, or a special move that will place your character out of harm’s way. I’m not sure that every character in the game has such options, but I know that at the very least some do (IP, Soki, Zero). This is a great maneuver as it seriously limits the risk of having your combos blocked. Probably one of the best examples of this technique is IP himself. At the end of attack strings, he can cancel into a quick upper. I usually go into a light quick upper. More often than not, the opponent (in this case, also IP) will try to jab on reaction to my blockstring ending, whiff, then I will immediately come down into a new combo. Once the opponent starts to learn my combo finish, I can instead go into a medium quick upper to change the pace on him, or even a light baseball projectile, which is almost guaranteed to be blocked, but puts IP at a safe distance. I really wonder about how many characters have this kind of versatility. I’m not so sure because it’s a little bit of an advanced technique, so it’s not something I’m aware of for characters I don’t often play or play against. Anyway, for poor characters who don’t have this technique to escape trouble, their options are much more limited; they basically must either be much more careful about attempting combos, or sacrifice their recoverable life for a BBQ. 2 Rushdown attack. The answer to (2) is basically technique (1) from the first article. If IP is rushing you down, you must block then punish. But as I just mentioned, IP is particularly capable of rushing down with near impunity thanks to his canceled specials. Probably the best defense against this kind of sustained rushdown (of which I certainly utilize at times) is to advance guard your way out of it. Break IP’s rhythm, reset the distance and start over. Very few players seem to do this, even reasonably good players. I think this is because during typical blockstrings, we are so accustomed to just waiting it out and punishing it at the end. Against a character like IP, you’d be best off not staying on the defensive for too long. 3 This point was too vague to rebut. It’s about 50 entries worth of strategy summed up as “etc”.
Baseball projectiles are not a particularly big thing. Just block them and close the distance. Their main function is to be able to punish projectile spammers. Don’t projectile spam IP, it’s not worth it. Unless you’re Zero. The straight fly is good at catching opponents off guard, but it’s far from unpunishable. Just be aware that it can happen (it requires a chargeback, so you should have a decent idea of WHEN it’s possible). Block the straight fly and punish it. If playing as IP and having your straight fly blocked, your options are combo into a final reversal breaker anyway (cost 1 hyper. you can still be punished, but it’s far less likely), BBQ (cost red life portion. Unpunishable and pretty likely that you will catch the opponent off guard with this!), or simply taking your punishment (cost possible death). As it happens, I don’t overuse the straight fly as eventually opponents will learn to expect it. As far as the anti-air final reversal breaker goes, don’t jump in too much. It gets overused in TvC and I, for one, frequently expect it.
I guess that’s about it for the anti-Ippatsuman gameplay. Of course, this is very generic and your particular characters’ abilities are going to weight heavily on this, but this is a generic roadmap to rebutting the strategies I laid out earlier. Overall, you want to keep a lot of pressure on IP. Blocking his attack strings provide minimal opportunities. Grapplers should also be OK against him as they like to get in close (which he’ll generally allow) and then attack with throws and holds. Pixie characters like Zero or Yatterman can also be effective as they can beat him to the punch. Long-range characters are usually in trouble as he can hold his own at a range and is very good at closing the gap and punishing up close. Giants also have trouble with him since he can straight fly right through them.
I feel perhaps it’s proper to give you some kind of idea where I’m at right now. I play free play (as opposed to ranked) almost exclusively, and my win rate is currently 55%. I’m slightly over 1,000 wins now, so I’ve played roughly 2,000 battles total. Ingest large grains of salt when looking at these numbers. Win rate is affected by many thing (do you ragequit? do you rematch better opponents or run? do you play your mains all the time or branch out a lot? is the community mostly hapless noobs or seasoned vets?). But still, if you’ve been following my progress, I figured you might want a general idea of my current status. Now let’s get wacky. If I am to estimate my “production” win rate, by which I mean mentally adjusting to only include the past month or so, ignore ragequitters, and only include my main team, I would estimate that win rate to be somewhere in the 65-75% range. Now chug a salt shaker.
Technical development in TvC can be looked at as three stages. There’s the R&D stage, the very initial stage. Here is where you (almost certainly in training mode) move around, try things out, read about what other people are doing, try that out, tweak it, etc. Then there’s the practice stage. While it’s all “practice”, what I mean here is that you’ve decided on what you want to do (i.e. the exact combo), and you’re trying to drive it into your muscle memory via repetition. I seem to be talking about this in a very combo-specific manner, but it applies to some other things also. Practice is also done in training mode. Then there’s the production stage. I consider a technique to be in the production stage once you’re consistently attempting it in real battles. Even if you don’t have it “under your belt” yet, at this point it becomes a true part of your gameplay. Repeatedly using a combo in the production stage obviously doubles as practice for muscle memory, but at this point it’s real. Tournament players would probably also have a fourth stage, a tournament stage, which would be techniques that you truly have under your belt and have very high success rates in.
As players, we must progress through the stages. If we don’t spend enough time in the first stage, our gameplay will become stagnant. If we don’t spend enough time in the second stage, our techniques will be sloppy. If we don’t spend enough time in the third stage, then you’re not really playing and will only have theoretical skills.
Now let’s talk specifics, specifically, Ippatsuman specifics. I recently talked about my Ippatsuman gameplay, but this is about my technical progress with him. For starters, I have become reasonably consistent with his combo. There’s still a lot of room for improvement, but I think I’m fully completing it over 50% of the time. My most common problems are missing the launch (holding d or f instead of df), or mistiming the jump directly after the launch. However, I’m pretty consistently pulling off the more difficult aspects, being the dragon punches near the end. It’s interesting, the fightstick has helped my combo with Ippatsuman, but made non-main characters that I used to be able to pull off combos “on the fly” much, much more difficult. This combo has been in the production stage for some time now and is serving me quite well. Some readers might recall a little while ago, I regressed this combo back to the R&D stage, removing a hit to reduce complexity. Now that I have a good production combo, I am going to go back and see if I can’t improve his combo a bit. There are three things I want to try and compare damages and complexity, they are:
- Adding the second jump before the DP back in. This was what I removed before and I would like to attempt it again now that I am doing the rest of the combo more easily and have even changed controls.
- Adding a BBQ before launch to restart the combo from the beginning. I tried this a little last night and it’s fairly simple, but seems to increase the damage by a surprisingly trivial amount. I want to get the exact damage outputs and try to figure out when this makes sense.
- Replacing the double-jump from the first variant with a DP(A), A, B, DP(A). This seems a good deal more complex, but I would imagine it probably increases the damage decently as well. I have not seen this in action yet, but someone said they were using it.
Hopefully I can update this post later today with reports on how much damage each variant deals.
Somewhat in line with my last post, yesterday I decided to upgrade Soki from one of my secondary characters to my only secondary character. The old secondary characters are now tertiary characters that I don’t plan on playing for a little while. I would like to eventually get him to the point where he’s a true third option against my most difficult of opponents and the only way to accomplish that is by focusing on him and letting the other secondary characters take a back seat. It’s a bit interesting that I gravitated towards him because he’s the type of character I typically stay far away from (big, slow, strong). However, it’s good to “spread your wings” a little bit and, when used masterfully, he can pull off some truly insane combos. I won’t get into all the nitty gritty details, but from the start I was doing a super simple combo with him, A, A, B, C, Level 1 Oni Tactics(hyper). It was very basic, but it started with a jab and ended with a hyper, which is always good. Right now I’ve regressed a bit. He has a lot of combo options, which makes his R&D phase a little more complicated than most. I’m not 100% settled yet, but I’m pretty sure the first combo I attempt to move into practice with him is gonna be this basic combo. There’s no hyper involved, but it deals a good bit of punishment and saves meter. I tried this a bit last night and there’s really only one part of it that I find tricky. The combo goes like this:
Jump(C, B), 2B, C, 6C, DP(A) (staggers), A, B, C, 3C, aerial rave
I highlighted the tricky part in bold. Going from C, to 6C, then canceling into a dragon punch requires very fast timing and I was missing it a lot. The good news is that the rest of the combo is pretty simple. I need to hammer out those 3 moves in training mode. Soki has much more basic combos into hypers (as mentioned before) that I could rely on instead, but I believe this would be a much better goal for bringing him into the status of a viable character choice against all opponents.
Edit after quick R&D session:
Ippatsuman
The first variant mentioned is still overly difficult and not worth pursuing. Same with the third. Concerning the BBQ, here are the stats:
Regular combo I’ve been doing: 23,469,000,000 damage
BBQ 10% Red Life: 24,079,000,000 damage
BBQ 20% Red Life: 31,240,000,000 damage
These numbers vary a bit depending on something (I think depending on how squarely you hit the last DP before hyper), but these are solid averages. At 10% red life, the damage is so minimal, it barely seems worth it in most cases. At 20% life, the damage increase is significant, but so is the amount of recoverable life you’re sacrificing. I’m still not sure how the trade-off works out as far as when it’s advantageous. I think the best thing to do may be to practice BBQing more and just try to feel out if it’s helping or not.
Soki
The very first combo I was doing (AABC,Oni): 8,035,000,000
A, A, B, C, DP(C), (wall bounce) 623AB(hyper): 15,006,000,000
Basic combo I’m trying to do: 21,765,000,000
These numbers are slightly difficult to compare because they can be mixed and matched. For instance, I could replace the first A in the first two combos with a jump(C, B), which would probably help a lot. But in any case, it would seem the simple combo is the most effective and without using a hyper. It’s also still quite difficult for me to pull off, but I have faith that a little practice phase should bring it into an Ippatsific level of consistency.
While I’ve been talking about Tatsunoko VS Capcom, the rest of the world has been talking about Street Fighter IV. And lately, Super Street Fighter IV. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m “super” excited about it. I just kinda wish it was coming out in 6 months. Or 12. I’m still in the middle of a huge TvC tear. I’m still not even that good at TvC. I’m still in a period of fairly rapid progress. I’ve barely scratched the surface of it…
I’ve really been thinking about this all day long.. I think I have to jump on SSF4. I mean, how could I not? Still, it’s gonna completely cut into TvC time to say the least. The problem is, while I’d love to be playing TvC, SF4, KOF, SF2, GG, etc, etc, if I did play all those games I would completely suck at all of them. Different games are like different characters, but on a macro level. If you play all characters equally, you will be ok with all of them. If you focus on 1 or 2 characters, you will become great with them. Speaking of which, there are still characters in TvC that I’ve never even tried…
Well, I am very excited about SSF4. I’m gonna send back my 360 tomorrow and hope they fix it. But it’s gonna be rough. Especially since I basically haven’t played SF4 at all yet and I’m gonna suuuuuuuck.
I’m pretty sick of chronicling my improvement in mechanical matters (arcade controls, combo proficiency), so this post I’m going to describe my general strategy with Ippatsuman.
My Ippatsuman game revolves around his combo that I never shut up about. I have three methods of getting them in (there is mixture, it’s not 3 completely distinct tactics). In order of commonality they are as follow. 1 Blocking my opponents’ attack strings, then punishing once they become vulnerable. This method is so nice because in this combo-centric game, people are constantly trying to start off their combos (like myself, for instance). Often you can see them coming a mile away. Then a little bit of blocking nearly ensures you’ll be able to start your own combo as soon as their attempt is finished. 2 Rushdown attack. This needs little explanation, a rushdown attack overloads some players to the point that they’re unable to defend themselves, much less launch a counter-offensive. Like all things, some characters and opponent strategies lend themselves more to this type of game than others. A specific I’ve learned is that with many players (particularly less skilled ones), when I accidentally lose my combo during the aerial rave portion (fairly common), I land behind them and often can immediately start them into a new combo before they can react. For some players, I can go back and forth doing perhaps 3 or 4 combos in a row this way. Better players will only fall for this once, if ever, as there’s no reason the new combo cannot be stopped (or preempted!). Another thing I’ve learned is that jumping in with light attacks seems to be a great way to start chains off. This applies to most characters, not just Ippatsuman. 3 Miscellaneous openings. This is a lot looser than the other methods; it includes things like punishing whiffed attacks, catching the opponent off guard, and footsies.
Beyond setting up combos, Ippatsuman does, of course, have some other tricks up his sleeve. At a long distance, Ippatsuman’s baseball projectiles can really drive someone crazy. Between the 3 different trajectories, which each have somewhat alternate trajectories when thrown from the air, he’s able to hit a target in just about any position. They’re not terribly powerful, but can take a bit of life off someone while annoying them and teaching them that they can’t just keep away from Ippatsuman and think they’ll be safe. His straight fly has some good uses as well. It can be used to quickly close distance, punish blocked or whiffed long-range attacks, or simply to catch an opponent off guard. Better yet, this can be comboed (2 hit combo) into a final reversal breaker hyper move, so the damage done is greatly improved. Speaking of the final reversal breaker hyper, it’s an unblockable anti-air attack, so it of course has value on its own for opponents trying to jump in on me (very common, as mentioned in point 2 above). Ippatsuman’s grand slam attack is fairly limited in its usefulness. The power is ok at close or medium range, but nothing to write home about and the screen freeze before it makes it easy to see coming. I mostly use this either when the opponent has very little life and chip damage is useful or fatal, when an opponent just seems off guard, or when I’m desperate. His come forth, gyakkuten-oh hyper is total garbage. I call it the “hyper waster” as 80% of the time I use it, it’s by accident (not happening much anymore with the arcade controls). It requires at least 3 meters, drains your entire meter, does very little damage, and is fairly easy to avoid. I only use this for fanciful finishes or in rare incidents where it’s advantageous (usually when we’re both super low on life and the invincibility it provides is a huge boon). Ippatsuman’s assist is pretty lame and nearly the only time I use it is when I whiff Saki’s positron storm (in which case it’s very helpful). Come to think of it, with Saki’s limited close-range skills, I bet there are a few more cases where his assist can help relieve the pressure. I should look into that.
Originally I was planning on writing up my strategy for Saki as well as well as anti-Ippatsuman and anti-Saki strategies, but this ended up being a pretty long post so I’ll leave that for the future.
Dan Haigh
Ghegs
[DRZ] OTL-TIW
sikraiken
Alice
victoly
plasm0
Aquas
Raydere
szycag
BDA
bloocloud
Kollision
