Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez sat down with the hosts of “The Bridge”–a GINX Esports TV show, based out of the United Kingdom–to talk about his ELEAGUE experience. The 20-minute interview is dense with information, covering topics from his start in the FGC to his present-day appearances. (And I do mean appearances, in every sense of the word.)
Gootecks goes into his humble beginnings as a video maker for Family Fun Arcade, producing podcasts and tournament videos for his local Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike scene. It’s a stark difference from the heart of the interview: his sudden and surprising appearance on TBS’s ELEAGUE. Gootecks seems well aware of his place among the ELEAGUE cast, and even comments on how this was an opportunity to stand out from the pros. He also gives his hot take on who expects to see in top 8, and what he expects of the show’s production going forward.
One of the primary reasons for Braixen’s status as a top tier character in Pokkén Tournament: her ability to both charge her supports faster than other characters, and then cancel into those supports. These unique abilities coupled with some high level techniques such as Flame Charge Cancel, Sunny Dash, and others give her a terrifying list of powerful, flexible options for every situation. Pokkén player Double has decided to take the arduous task of compiling all of these options into video, one support set at a time.
Both sets show why Braixen’s support cancel ability is so strong–Emolga’s speed debuff is now a threat off any connected hit, and with a fast-charging Snivy, she has both anti-air and constant ground pressure available. The fact that Braixen can also convert into, and out of, the high-damage Lapras is downright silly, but perhaps is more trivia then tournament-worthy. Double has also provided an overlay showing the inputs of the combos. Those that have wanted to get the most efficient Enhanced Sunny Day setups, but are having trouble with the input will find this visual reference quite useful.
If you’re willing to put the work into it, The King of Fighters XIV’s Hakkyokuseiken master can pump out massive damage and stun. YouTuber playergodaines just made that work easier for all aspiring Kung Fu practitioners with his comprehensive Tung Combo Tutorial.
Practically, learning Air Senpuu Ken (QCB+P) and the loops off of it lead to a large part of the Max Mode damage Tung can dish out. Nowhere is this more clear then in the King of Dinosaurs matchup, where he can dump his meter for a 100% guaranteed stun off of a jump-in.
Tekken players are no strangers to high damage combos! In a game series where average combo damage can be 30~50% depending on the starter, it’s something you become accustomed to over time. It’s not even surprising when combo videos show off 90-100% combos–because most of them require specific stage positioning and unlikely scenarios that wouldn’t occur in a real match.
None of that can be said here: the Bryan player “begin” was on the verge of sealing a round, when he went for an option perhaps a little to fancy for his own good: a fake taunt cancel into d+4. By cancelling the knee too early, the anticipatory full jump from a Korean player (his tag is 아쿠마, which phonetically is just “Akuma”) connected, then all sixteen hells broke loose.
The combo came from a long set between the two top players, which you can watch below:
It’s worth noting that all of this came from the newly-nerfed Akuma in version 3.8. While this combo still requires incredible stage awareness, meter management, and one hell of a read, it cannot be underlined enough how scary a full meter–and Rage–is for Akuma players in Tekken 7.
Imagine you’re a fighting game designer. You’ve put blood, sweat, and tears for years into this massive project, and now it’s shipped to the world. It gets played by a lot of people, and is generally loved, but high-level play looks completely different from what you envisioned, because of a glitch you didn’t catch. How do you feel? What would you do with this glitch if you had the chance to make a sequel to this game?
Such a broad question has to be answered differently, of course, depending upon the game and the nature of the glitch. Sometimes companies roll with the punches and incorporate the “glitch” into future titles. Famously, that’s exactly what happened with combos in Street Fighter, and backdash-canceling in Tekken. Sometimes companies axe the glitch all together. (Wavedashing in Smash Brothers Melee, for example.) Such was the fate of SoulCalibur II’s Step-Guard glitch. Or, as the soulcalibur.com forums called it at the time, Step-G.
(Just so that we’re clear, we’ll be using the numpad notation scheme that’s commonly accepted in SoulCalibur to refer to moves. If you’re not familiar with it, check it out here. There’s even a video explanation for this!)
Let’s define Step-G. SoulCalibur teaches you right off the bat that there’s an attack triangle between Horizontal Attacks (the A button) Vertical Attacks (The B button) and Movement. You want to step around vertical attacks, but step loses to horizontal attacks. In SoulCalibur II, vertical attacks will “break” horizontal attacks when they collide, and vertical attacks usually have more vertical range (obviously), allowing you to play strong footsies with them. Vertical attacks are usually your combo starters, too (for example, the generic launcher, 3B.) If you went by just what the game teaches you intuitively, you’d have this…
Horizontal (A) > Step > Vertical (B) > A…
But what if Step also beat A? That’s where Step-G comes in. For whatever programming reason, there’s a bug that lets you guard while stepping. If an attack’s hitbox intercepts your step and you’re holding the guard button, you block it. Period. So now your horizontals can’t hit step. As a game designer, this is a worst-case scenario–a fundamental breakdown of the basics of your game.
Step-G was not always a common sight. During the initial arcade run, Step-G was secret tech held by top level players to keep themselves as safe as possible during tournament play. Since YouTube wasn’t a thing back then, it was a lot easier to keep secrets like this, and Step-G-using players ruled uncontested until console release. Countermeasures were developed: Step-G couldn’t guard low, for example, so a common way to defeat it was to find a low that had some sort of step coverage. You could also use grabs that tracked step, but the Step-G-er could still throw break during the step, and not every character had throws that could track step well.
Even with these weaknesses, it wasn’t enough to knock Step-G out of the meta. It protected you too well, and everyone could do it. Unlike, say, the dexterity of a Tekken backdash-cancel, all you had to do was press and hold a button. Anyone of any skill level could use Step-G easily. And it didn’t stop there: Step-G ended up being just one symptom, and not the illness itself, of SC2’s code. More glitches would appear: G2 during Guard Impact allowed players to block during the normally vulnerable frames of being guard-impacted. TER (Throw Escape Recovery) allowed people to act out of the recoil animation of broken throws. G2 during specific moves shaved off recovery frames. All of this and more piled onto SoulCalibur II as time went on, further “breaking” the game, and almost all of these were bugs similar in execution or input to Step-G in some way.
And yet, SoulCalibur II is by far the most beloved game in the franchise for tournament players. SoulCalibur II has seen a massive resurgence lately among players of 8wayrun and beyond. It’s going to be a main game at Combo Breaker. Popular FGC streamer (and SC2 World Champ) Aris dedicates a weekly stream solely to running the classic game. Even though Step-G was removed from the series afterwards, there is nowhere near the same clamor for SC3 and beyond.
The truth is, you can’t look at Step-G in a bubble. Step-G was a terrible glitch, for sure, but it existed for the right game. In SC2, moreso than any other Calibur game, frame data is wildly safe across the board and every character has shockingly strong tools, from the toppest of top tiers (Xianghua, Yoshimitsu, Cervantes) all the way down to the bottom (Yunsung). It isn’t even an opinion that SC2 has the greatest character diversity in its tournaments–it’s trivia.
Hayate wipes out Team Belgium with his Yunsung.
Without Step-G, though, it wouldn’t have mattered. This is because the characters with the absolutely safest and strongest vertical launchers would be on another plane of existence from the rest of the cast. Step-G didn’t just break the game, it exposed some of the bad design elements of it: some verticals tracked step. Some horizontals didn’t track step. Even without Step-G there were some characters that just absolutely couldn’t find a move with the A button to hit a stepping opponent. (Hi, Raphael.)
One of the best moves in SoulCalibur II is Xianghua’s 22B: a side-stepping, safe, reasonably fast vertical mid that launches and covers step completely. It beats step, beats A attacks, and likely will either clash with or beat other B attacks. Without Step-G, it could completely keep an opponent pinned in guard, too afraid to step. Step-G gave half the cast a fighting chance against Xianghua by allowing them to move when she was on the screen.
It was a combination of the overwhelming strength of the whole cast, coupled with the fundamentally poor implementation of the core attack triangle, that made Step-G not only reasonable, but necessary to the game. You could make the argument that Namco knew this, too–because when Step-G got the boot in SC3, so did the good frame data. No other SoulCalibur would have a cast as strong as SC2’s. SC4 Hilde, widely regarded as one of the most imbalanced characters in all of the franchise due to her hilariously safe combo starters, ring out potential, and high damage, would have probably been a reasonable character in SC2’s over-the-top landscape (and football stadium sized arenas). Likewise, the mostly mediocre SC2 Yunsung would almost inevitably appear top tier to SC5 players, thanks to his bevy of safe mids, high damage, and his semi-fast 11K knockdown low.
There was something of a “Tekken”ing that occurred to the SoulCalibur series starting at SC3. Tekken’s lows, and frame data in general, were very different from Calibur’s at the time. Launchers were very unsafe, fast lows usually didn’t give advantage on hit, and if they did, they were also unsafe on block. This is the exact opposite of the way frame data works in SC2. Neither approach is “wrong” because for Tekken and SC2, these philosophies worked in the engines they were built for. But by shoehorning in another game’s frame data philosophy, it became a lot harder to do things in SoulCalibur.
Let’s look at the tale of Raphael 2K, a tragedy in four parts.
Game
Impact
Damage
Block Stun
Hit Stun
Counterhit Stun
Soul Calibur 2
i15
16
-11
+5
+5
Soul Calibur 3
i15
14
-14
-4
+2
Soul Calibur 4
i15
14
-14
-4
+2
Soul Calibur 5
i15
12
-14
-2
-2
Almost universally, the tale of Raph 2K is the tale of what happened to frame data as the series progressed. 2K is an ineffectual shin kick that does little damage but grants some frame advantage on hit, and its mostly low risk if it’s blocked. Since most of Raph’s other lows are slow, it’s his primary way of opening up opponents. By making it minus on hit, you effectively remove his ability to pressure, and his ability to even make a good opponent consider ducking versus him. Versus the wrong character (say, Sophitia), a blocked 2K means he loses 20%+ of his lifebar, too, hardly worth the effort of using a move that’s negative on hit. It’s not just Raph that suffered this fate: this happened across the board to lows, and even to the speed of many basic mids. Characters could just do less to you overall as the series progressed. The damage nerfs listed here are meaningless on this move since it never was about its damage in the first place, but it’s a funny number to watch all, all the same.
It might seem like we’re drifting away from the subject of Step-G a bit, but the point that I’m trying to make is that by removing both Step-G and strong offensive options, the pendulum swung too far in the other direction. Whereas there was a busted defensive glitch there to balance out insanely busted offensive options in SC2, movement became neutered and unreliable in later games with bad offensive options. There was finally balance found in Soul Calibur V’s heavily modified step system, but there were other problems outside of the game-play mechanics that sunk that game, too.
So, here we are. SoulCalibur 2, the Marvel vs. Capcom of 3D fighters, sits in a strange point in history as a completely broken fighter that was made better by the majority of glitches that were discovered. Tiers compressed. Competition strengthened. The meta advanced. It’s highest levels of play are intense, varied, surprisingly easy to pick up, and drawing players back to its world over a decade later. And it was completely unrecognizable from what the original designers wanted. Players of all skill levels point fondly to playing SoulCalibur II, glitches and all, and say “Yes. I’m having fun right now.”
Back to the original question. Do you keep Step-G? Do you build a game around it? Can you build a game around it? Capcom built a genre out of combos, and Tekken’s movement glitches are doing just fine. Namco is at something of a crossroads with the Calibur series-SoulCalibur V’s engine is solid and with the right characters and single player content, I am convinced it would do well financially. But that’s not the same game, or the same audience that’s applauding and playing the happy-accident filled SC2 right now. If Namco attempted to make an intentionally over-the-top game like SC2 and succeeded, that would be an unbelievable design achievement. As much as I love to play armchair game designer, I can’t say for certain if that’s the right decision. No one wants to admit a demonstrably-broken glitch helped save a game, and a delicate hand would be needed to mold something intentionally around Step-G successfully.
It took Namco several SoulCalibur games to get its step system right by design, and the series suffered heavily in other areas as a result. If recent streaming trends are any indication, there’s plenty of players for Namco to survey to find out why they keep coming back to SC2. If that (unlikely) scenario happens, hopefully the players interviewed will find it easier to admit that SC2’s flaws made it, somehow, fantastic. I think 15 years of hindsight should help with that.
As part of his massive working guide to Kolin, F3|AutoMattock has created a video demonstrating three different exercises to help sharpen the Ice Queen’s execution skills.
When used with the guide’s descriptions, the sequences here are beyond just rote memorization: AutoMattock breaks these exercises down to the specific execution skills they test, and the strategic power they provide in a match. Despite how dense the guide already is with information, AutoMattock promises that this is still just a small part of an ongoing project. For aspiring cold-blooded assassins, his guide should prove to be an invaluable resource going forward.
Depending upon who you talk to, TBS’s ELEAGUE may have been given to the FGC via a wish from a monkey’s paw. On one hand, the major television production is the realization of years of hard work and scene-growing. We have an FGC-centered TV show with a major network’s budget. No one five years ago would have guessed something like that could happen to us.
On the other hand, some decried the quiet, empty production stage, the wasted time between sets, and even the tournament format itself. A vocal movement has made it clear that they feel ELEAGUE is a watered-down representation of the FGC. All parties involved, staff and viewers alike, were treading into unfamiliar territory, unsure of how to make this strange new thing work. As ELEAGUE progressed though, changes were clearly made on the fly, and the show gained more energy with each new attempt. If, by day four, it seemed like the show had found its footing, there was likely good reason for that, as Stephen “Sajam” Lyon reveals in a blog on ELEAGUE’s site:
For starters, everyone has been constantly asking for feedback about how they can do something true to the community. The biggest concern from the start is that they wouldn’t create something that really captured the spirit of the FGC. They encouraged us at every second to offer our criticisms, even if it would make their jobs more difficult. I can’t say they’ve been able to accommodate every possible change, but the lengths they’ve gone to have definitely surprised.
Sajam’s behind-the-scenes blog is surprisingly earnest and optimistic, even while admitting the production’s struggles from the start. To read more of his current impressions on working with TBS, check out the full blog post here.
How are you feeling about ELEAGUE thus far? Has its progress brought the hype you were looking for?
Naser Esports’s mission statement is to gather the best esports talent in the Middle East and promote them on the world stage. Just last week they picked up SFV player Adel “Big Bird” Anouche, and now they’ve expanded their outreach to the NRS scene by signing Mortal Kombat X pro Sayed ‘Tekken Master’ Hashem.
[NASR] Tekken Master has been placing and dominating in the Mortal Kombat scene for years. He’s no stranger to the international stage, exemplified in his insanely close set with SonicFox after a bracket reset at the 2016 Evolution finals for MKX. On his way to that second place finish he toppled an army of MKX pros–Echo Fox|Scar, YOMI|Slayer, YOMI|Michaelangelo, and more all fell to the Kotal Khan pro.
With performances like these and with Injustice 2 coming out soon, one can only assume we’ll see more of Tekken Master at Evo in 2017. Hopefully, we’ll also see Tekken Master playing in the game that inspired his name, when Tekken 7 releases in June.
Daigo Umehara has gone on record multiple times claiming that Street Fighter Alpha 3 is his favorite Street Fighter. GAME a-cho in Japan holds regular tournaments for the classic Capcom fighter, so if you don’t have an opinion yet, here’s two hours of high level play for your analysis.
V-ism pressure, air blocking, and air teching are just a few ticks on the long list of system mechanics that make playing Street Fighter Alpha 3 a very different experience from playing the core series. There’s infinites, too, thanks to crouch-canceling. This is a technique that lets you remove recovery frames on jumping to extend juggles, and it’ll likely either increase your interest in the game, or sour your opinion of it all together. If your not sure what it looks like, trust me–watch the video and you’ll figure out what it is.
One thing is for sure- crouch-canceling hasn’t slowed the game’s popularity down among Japanese players at all.
If you like what you see here–or are already a fan of Street Fighter Alpha 3, check out Jazz’s coverage of Japan’s recent Ultimate Zero 12 SFA3 tournament event. There’s also this… but you probably won’t like it as much.
The Samurai Shodown series started with a very light-on-combos philosophy, which makes a lot of of sense for its weapon-based combat. Most of the games were focused purely on high damage pokes and footsies, and even today the majority of tournament matches for Samurai Showdown VI lean toward more pokes then combos.
There’s a lot of reasons for that–meter requirements, how rare combo-starting situations can come up, and so on–but that doesn’t mean that long, execution heavy combos don’t exist. In fact, SS6 has a number of meter systems called “spirits” that are specifically built to give you different ways to manage meter and play. There’s 6 in all (8 in the console version!), and a few of them are shown off here in MrBroken030’s newly-released combo video.
About half way through, the focus is predominately on combos involving the “Mu” spirit, a time-stopping rage mechanic that allows for even longer combos for the whole cast. If you’ve ever wanted to get an idea of just where you can take combos in Samurai Shodown VI and weren’t sure where to start, MrBroken030’s work here should give you some ideas!
