YouTube content creator Amphorce has discovered that you can cancel the pre-jump frames in Pokkén Tournament into any move.
Since pre-jump frames in Pokkén avoid both low attacks and throws on frame one, this opens up a variety of option selects both in Field Phase and on wakeup. In particular, this allows for previously impossible punishes against some moves (such as, in the example of the video above, Garchomp’s low-hitting CA).
As long as it involves a button, as demonstrated, it is possible to use these pre-jump frames to your advantage. The technique is difficult, as it only grants you a few frames of invincibility, but with it you can do cheeky things like pre-jump over a low/throw, then block. It gives the appearance of attacks harmlessly passing through you. Do note that the footage above demonstrates this tactic as it applies to Sceptile; more testing may reveal slight variance in timings with character who have different frame data on their jump.
Swillo, who placed 7th in Pokkén Tournament at DreamHack Austin, has been in the lab with the geneticly-engineered Pokémon, Mewtwo. The results are pretty outstanding so far: this tech-heavy video shows off both Swillo’s just frame execution and a bevy of technology. Witness confirms off of supports, anti-air jab conversions, critical hit-only combos, wall combos, and much, much more in the video below.
There are enough just frames, instant air dashes, links, crossups, and situational conversions to make anyone’s head spin. Given Swillo’s open call out to all other tournament Mewtwo players, the bar is now set pretty high for all other Psychic types from here on out.
Working in conjunction with Chandelure pro DTN8 Cat Fight over on Twitter, YouTuber Stealthless has put together a showcase of the whole Pokkén Tournament cast making use of a new unblockable discovered with the support Pokémon Mismagius.
The way this works is relatively simple. Mismagius’ huge active frames coupled with Pokkén’s rock-paper-scissors approach to combat creates a situation where, while the cat ghost is roaming free, a properly timed throw beats all get up options from the opponent. Mismagius’s slow charge time reduces this technique’s availability, but that may be for the best, since some characters get devastating rewards off of its setups. Any command grab character, particularly those that have command grabs that cover the air, can use the specter to scare up massive damage in burst mode. Pay special attention to the Garchomp and Charizard examples at the end of the video.
Will this help push Mismagius/Ninetails into the main support meta of Pokkén? We’ll have to wait and see.
Underneath the glossy exterior of every fighting game lies a very basic skeleton. At the end of the day, no matter how pretty your chosen avatar model might be, Ryu is a square creating smaller squares that move towards another square.
Everything that seems complex, be it art, music, or fighting games, has a foundation to its construction. To help guide you through this idea, TheoryFighter has created a great video exploring and explaining Street Fighter V’s hitboxes. He knocks out hitboxes, hurtboxes, throw boxes, proximity guard, and more in under 5 minutes.
There are a number of ways to approach looking at hitboxes, though none come prepackaged with Street Fighter. PC users may enjoy their own methods, but if you don’t want to go through the trouble of meddling with your PC copy of the game, there are alternatives.
Dantarion has put together two very interesting hitbox viewers. The first one is fairly straight forward hitbox viewer that shows you all relevant data towards your characters and its moves. For the truly adventurous, however, he has a comparison viewer that lets you put different moves against each other to see how they interact in a controlled environment outside of the game.
So you’re a Charizard player. Your crouching X into seismic toss helped you mash your way up to C rank. Look at all the damage! So easy! If it gets blocked, people freeze and don’t punish! Wow!
Then someone you play against blocks the tail, low profiles the grab, and in general ruins your day. Or the grab just whiffs because of range. Or your opponent mashed out a critical hit-scoring normal attack. Either way, Charizard faints. What can you do to make your beloved lizard dragon rise up?
You evolve.
A brief demonstration of j.6Y possibilities provided by Thulius.
Buried in the depths of the fire lizard’s movelist are the curious jumping forward+YY string (henceforth written as j.6YY), and some footnotes about jump cancels. Though it’s a dexterous input, you can keep up the okokressure by jumping and doing j.6YY as low to the ground as possible. On hit, you have a multitude of combo options. On block, the claw of j.6YY pushes the opponent very far away, keeping you safe. You can also choose to only do the first hit of j.6Y and still get full combos and pressure off of it. This works on the full cast, though getting j.6YY to hit properly vs. tiny Pikachu is more difficult, of course.
Best of all, this technique allows you to confirm off all ranges of a hit 2X, which just special canceling into Seismic Toss does not.
Aditionally, the hits of j.6YY can be added to combos pretty freely and still keep the phase from shifting. Your standard 5YY combo can reach a whopping 171 damage and still score a hard knockdown in field phase, allowing you to followup with a meaty mixup:
5YY (jump cancel) j.6YY (land) 6Y, Dashx2
The timing on the dash means you are right over your opponent with frame advantage. As long as you don’t buffer, your 2Y and Seismic Toss both hit the opponent perfectly as they get up and shut down the vast majority of their wakeup options. Heaven forbid your opponent does any sort of counter attack here–that’s another 200 damage. A simple jab combo and command grab has netted you over half life vs the whole cast, and you still haven’t switched phases, and you’re still pressing mixups post command grab.
And this is just combos and setups. Charizard has a blistering amount of options in the air- j.X, jYY, j6YY, Glide, J.A… and if your opponent is thinking about all that, he’s probably not thinking about Fire Punch Cancels into Flight Stance. All of this mental stress, all from a single blocked jab or tail, is just the tip of the volcano.
If you want to blaze past the competition, have your Charizard forget it’s old ways and teach it some new jump cancels.
Bandai Namco has responded swiftly to the previously reported exploit on Mewtwo’s Flame Pillar. The newly announced update, which is currently arcade-specific, mentions simply:
A pre-update was loaded on 5/30, with the actual update itself going live on 6/12.
Mewtwo’s Flame Pillar cancel window into Pokémon moves will be adjusted to occur later in the move’s recovery.
The biggest change will remove the ability for Mewtwo to grab before Pillar comes out (theoretically!) and still allow Mewtwo to retain his strong juggles, resets, and combos. This is unfortunate news for anyone hoping for an actual Mewtwo nerf, but the change is great for the game, regardless.
Given the deliberate hesitation of Namco to make any balance changes in 1.2 now that the Mewtwo infinites are removed, this is likely the meta that will find it’s way to consoles, and eventually, Evo. It is hard to believe this is anything other then a test run for the patch before going live on consoles, especially given how rocky 1.2’s implementation ended up being.
Outside of this infinite removal, the only other changes are the additions of titles and cosmetic options already available in the console version. The unlockable titles are tied to an update for the arcade Bana play card, which causes the new supports of Sylveon and Croagunk to increase a Lucky Item drop for a limited time.
Now all that’s left is to wait for the (likely inevitable) announcement of a console patch.
IG|Nightshade took the time to shed some light on one of Pokkén Tournament’s most powerful moves: Shadow Mewtwo’s Vortex. Performed by using X to cancel his Psywave, this move is considered a counter, pierces other counters, jumps, does good chip, hits the top of the screen vertically, and is safe on block. It’s hard to have a better grab bag of good properties.
As Nightshade demonstrated on his stream recently, however, the move can still be challenged on wakeup by the full cast, so long as you are prepared with the right assist. He spends a good 40 minutes testing various supports and theorizing the effects of each, but some of the most notable examples include:
Ninetails’ Will O’ Wisp – This arguably underused Disrupt posses invincibility, causes an attack decrease, and breaks the counter property of Vortex.
Magneton’s Tri Attack – Though the defender’s armor will get pierced by Vortex, Magneton will still shoot Shadow Mewtwo out of the sky, scoring greater damage and two status debuffs.
Rotom’s Thunder Shock – This fast charging, popular anti-jump disrupt cleanly knocks Shadow Mewtwo out of the air, but provides no defense for the user. There will almost always be a trade that results in both Pokémon crumpling to the floor.
Magikarp – Vortex cannot stop falling fish.
The versatility that assists provide, combined with the fragile lifebar of Shadow Mewtwo, can mean a lot more risk than many may realize for the edgier Mewtwo.
The world famous Mikado Arcade continues to bring old school 2D action to competitive life in Japan. A total of 53 players showed up in early April to throw down in another dual-game nostalgia blast in the neighborhood of Takadanobaba. This time, the games in question were Street Fighter 2 X: Grand Master Challenge–which we know better in the US as Super Street Fighter II Turbo–and Fatal Fury Special.
The footage, which only recently made its way on to YouTube, features fantastic play, difficult single-elimination brackets, wide character usage, stage interactions, and sweet 60 FPS quality. Click on the videos below to immerse yourself in classic footsies.
Looking for more old school action from Japan? Don’t miss out on the footage from this recent Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike event hosted by Game Daytona.
Editor’s note: Some responses have been slightly altered for clarity.The views expressed in this article are solely those of the interviewer and interviewee; they do not reflect Shoryuken as a whole.
“Once I eliminated Wong’s setups, I was in my element…”
If I beat fighting game community legend EG|Justin Wong in anything that he had devoted any time to, I would be profoundly proud. Part of that comes from respect of the man’s intelligence and experience, and part of that comes from the bounty that I have to believe all competitive souls feel around him.
And if I beat him in a tournament, deep within its brackets, with Mr. Wong having an insurmountable head start on exploring the meta of the day-one sport we were clashing in–well, I think I would feel, for just a moment, like I had done the impossible.
And yet, with all these facts looming above, there wasn’t even a needle scratch when AppleBoom bested Wong.
AppleBoom figures out JWong.
When no one considered it newsworthy that AppleBoom eliminated Wong from Pokkén Tournament at Final Round, it baffled me. Wong got to play the game nearly a year early, finished second at Nintendo’s Invitational Tournament, then won Nintendo’s followup Early Access tournament. AppleBoom, comparatively, attended none of these; he was armed with little more than NicoNico reposts on YouTube, and information on a little forum called PokkénArena.
My frustration came from being an invested spectator. Throughout the course of my chat with him, AppleBoom brought me back to earth; for him, it was just another opponent to prepare for.
I sent AppleBoom an interview request on PokkénArena, and to my surprise, he responded almost immediately. At the time, I was new to SRK’s writing team and expected to receive either no reply at all or a tremendous amount of scrutiny. Neither happened.
From PM to Ping, we were talking in about 10 minutes, and that length of time was my fault, not his. It’s little reminders like that that make me fall in love with the FGC all over again: We ultimately play these games together, and none of us are ever that far if you want to reach out to a player for info.
AppleBoom is a bit of an anomaly even among Pokkén players. Unlike many within this community, it wasn’t Smash he was moving over from, but other Namco fighters. His role as moderator on PokkénArena makes him a much more public face for his scene than some others, and his humbleness, a rare trait in people in general, led him to correct me–a lot. And every time it was in situations where he simply gave credit to others that he knew, or felt, didn’t belong to him.
“Gallivantz owns the site, I’m just a mod.”
AppleBoom revealed that his competitive roots are an interesting blend of FGC and Pokémon–as I talked with him, he name checked Harada and Smogon within seconds of each other.
“I was already interested in the game before it was announced,” he laughed. He revealed that his local group, prior to Pokkén, played both Pokémon and Soul Calibur 5 competitively–a Namco-made Pokémon game was always going to be a hit there. “One of my friends said ‘Tekken is like Soul Calibur for all these different reasons.’ And then I saw that Pokkén was being done by Harada, and I was like, ‘Oh, so that’s right up my alley.’”
“A big difference that a lot of fighting game players aren’t used to when they come to Namco fighters in general… Tekken, Soul Calibur…” he paused, I almost wondered if he was just reminding himself it actually was a Namco game, “…Pokkén. When you’re playing [2D games], especially air dashers, the moves are so fast that there’s absolutely no humanly possible way that you can know what’s going on all the time. Whereas with Namco fighters, in Pokkén at least, the fastest moves are i9. There’s a decent amount of endlag to them. Because of that you can actually pay attention to each individual move a lot more, and that makes for a very different experience and approach for the game.”
I asked, “So it was the particular way Namco makes its games that resonated with you, it sounds like?”
“Well, to be honest, I probably would’ve played this game regardless,” though he was just a voice on Discord, there was a palpable grin. “I would have gone with any style and been fine, but the scene around here happened to be Soul Calibur 5. And since we played that for 4 years, that’s the style we got used to. I don’t want to say that style is better or worse or particularly appeals to me–I played SFV, I played Under Night, I’ve played Smash–but I’m used to SC5. That’s kind of the same problem I have with ‘mains’ in games. I can have an interest in all these different types of characters, but I’m used to playing zoner types, so if I want to win, that’s the character I’m going to focus on.”
AppleBoom’s outlook of learning a character began to take form. We drifted into tech talk on Calibur’s frame data for a bit, and how it definitively shapes the characters in the game. As he bemoaned ZWEI, a character with some truly dreadful data in SC5, it occurred to me that he, AppleBoom, was a type that likely was guided by the tangible world of stats. Which makes sense for his Pokkén work: When there was no frame data available for the Pokkén scene, it was AppleBoom who rolled up his sleeves and captured it for the rest of the community.
“When I was first starting out in Pokkén, my first main was R. Pika. Pikachu Libre. And she ended up being very rushdown heavy. She became the most vortex-y character in the game. Something I noticed right away was Double Team–her stance–was invincible, and I wanted to know exactly how invincibile it was. We were actually waiting for someone else to do it, but no one did. So I just decided… I knew how to find frame data because of Soul Calibur, so I did. I don’t play her now, but it was helpful for me then.”
This was really where we started to get into the meat and potatoes of what drew me to him as a Pokkén figure. AppleBoom talked nearly without pause, and I could tell he was thinking about not just the data, but the way the frame data is organized to create the feel of the game itself.
“If you look at the impact frames and the block frames, they are very distinctly categorized. Throws are i9. Jabs are i13. Medium speed stuff is i17. Slow things are i21, and anything worse than that is really slow. When I was putting together the frame data that made it really easy for me to work with, to color code them into different tiers. It made it really easy to find what’s this, what’s that, what’s really negative, what’s safe, all that stuff. There’s slight variants of course, but it’s really tightly categorized.”
But he was quick to insist that his easy-to-read frame data was not a one man effort. “I had a friend, Michael Tillet. he took a course in Human and Computer Interaction–I think that was the name–while he was in university. He helped with that. It was a course about interfaces, making data look nice. I ran a lot of ideas with him. That was mainly him, to tell you the truth.”
Though it’s filtered out further now, there was a point in time where AppleBoom’s easy-to-read document could only be found on PokkénArena. AppleBoom is a mod there, and an incredibly active one. I asked him how he became involved:
“This guy from Australia, Gallivantz, he just decided to make the site for Pokkén. I stumbled on it through Google, and, you know, I just took a chance. I made an account, made a post, and just said, ‘Hey. I’ve been playing fighting games for years. Ask me questions.’ Eventually, I just became a mod.”
“I’ve got some things I want to do–I’m working on getting a wiki going on Pokkénboards. I remember in SC5, there was a lot of stuff to know but you pretty much just had to ask a high level player to find out. I didn’t like that, so that’s a focus of mine, to make information quick and easy to get. No one will have to ask. I want people, if they are interested, to be able to find answers quickly.”
Eventually, though it was great to get the scoop on how he came to find himself in Pokkén, I couldn’t dance around it any longer. I had to know. What did he do to get the W over Wong at Final Round? That doesn’t happen by accident.
AppleBoom even managed to steal wins off GO1, despite the game being out in japanese arcades for so long.
“Alright,” he reached back into his memories. “Okay, Xerick and I, we were following Pokkén since the [Nintendo sponsored] Invitational last August. I probably watched it 4 times all the way through,” he said with a sort of disbelief.
“There’s this one kind of pirate-y YouTube channel called HydeGaming,” he broke the name up a bit with a laugh, and I found out why, “Where he would just download NicoNico videos and reupload them. We would watch a lot of stuff on that channel and keep on going over things, trying to figure out what was happening. Why did this person do this, or that. We didn’t go to the Japanese sites, because, you know, we don’t speak Japanese. It didn’t hit either of us to just use Google translate.”
“Okay, so,” he sighs. He starts reliving the worst parts of a tournament: its setup. “The game comes out. Weekend of Final Round, which is crazy. It was super last minute. I kinda know Larry (Shin Blanka, Final Round’s head organizer) from doing the Soul Calibur tournaments on the East Coast. For a long time I said, ‘Hey, Larry, we should do Pokkén’ and he’s usually just ‘Ahhh I might do somethin’..!’ He doesn’t announce it until a week before Final Round that not only will there be Pokkén, but it’ll be sponsored by Nintendo. It was like, ‘Oh, that’s kinda out of nowhere.’ ”
“We get there Thursday night. It’s Friday morning when we started doing stuff, and we were scrambling. As you know, the LAN setup is weird for Pokkén. It takes rare equipment. I was probably driving around with Larry–and then with someone else from Final Round staff whose name I didn’t get–we drove around for a combined total of probably 4 hours just looking for all this equipment for Pokkén. We finally did find it all and got it for the event Friday night at 8PM. So Larry put up the tournament, he made it free, and capped it at 64 entrants. And the cap went by really fast.”
“I ended up playing Justin Wong in pools. He beat me in winners finals and I just worked my way out from there. My buddy Sandman and I, whenever we had a chance, we would grind out matches to be prepared. I knew Justin Wong was going to be there, he plays Weavile, so we probably did like… 50 Weavile matches just to figure that out. The first time I played [Justin] offstream it was close. I was not happy that I lost but if you’re gonna lose to anyone, losing to Justin Wong is not terrible.”
“I kicked myself for this, and I’m still kind of kicking myself for this,” he recalled hesitantly. “I was looking at top 8 and thought ‘Well, I’m probably going to lose to Justin Wong again.’ So I’m looking at all these other players, and there wasn’t really anyone else there playing at a level I felt threatened by, aside from Wong and Go1.” In addition to being a SFV powerhouse, GO1 is also a Japanese Suicune player, the other favorite to win.
“So, I was probably going to lose to Wong, and Go1 was there, and I’d have to beat Wong to get to him, so I decided I was just not gonna look up Suicune stuff and focus on Wong. When I did beat Wong and had to face Go1, I just thought, ‘Ugh, I… I don’t know this matchup. This is awful. I really should have looked something up.’”
“I can’t remember exactly what I was thinking during the Wong matchup, other than that it was neat and kind of intense.” He paused. “Oh, actually! There was this setup that he would use in winners, and it bothered me. So when I ran into him again in losers and saw it again I just thought, ‘No. I refuse,’ and I just started fighting against his setup and I found out he didn’t have anything else. It felt really transparent. It’s day one, of course, but I was surprised that I beat him like that.”
“I don’t think I was the only one that noticed his setups and patterns, but I was one of the few there that was a dedicated Namco player. So once I eliminated Wong’s setups, I was in my element, and Wong never really adapted.”
That’s something that stuck with me then, and now. Wong, a footsie powerhouse, found that his style of footsies did not transfer to the world of 3D when faced with someone who knows that terrain well. Just like that, the singular trick Wong used to power through two Nintendo sponsored events crumpled him in the face of one 3D aficionado.
Needless to say, AppleBoom is a lot more confident in his play these days then he was at Final Round.
It is worth noting the somewhat downward spiral Wong has taken in Pokkén since his loss vs. AppleBoom. Wong once chimed to ESPN that he was going to win Evo’s Pokkén Tournament–but after AppleBoom stood in his way, Wong suffered yet another early round loss to Florida player Nekoto at DreamHack in winners, then voluntarily DQ’d himself in losers right out of the tournament.
It’s big when a top player stops playing, possibly because of the resistance and reads another player gives him. I asked AppleBoom about how Pokkén could keep up its momentum–how tournaments can continue to draw people, even after Pokkén loses that new game smell. His reply was simple and direct:
“Make em’ consistent. Make the rules consistent. Have people show up. Everyone has their own individual reason to come to a tournament. All I can do, whenever people are around, is to encourage them. You get to hang out with people, you get to talk about stuff. Show up. Have a good time.”
Good, honest, no-nonsense advice.
Reflecting on our chat, AppleBoom strikes me as ambitious and detail oriented, both incredible features to have as a mod, and a player. If Pokkén can continue to attract analytical talent like him, its future is in good hands.
Namco has a long history of their console exclusive characters becoming wildly stronger then their rigorously arcade tested counterparts. Pokkén Tournament, it turns out, is no exception to that legacy.
Since their initial appearances in Pokkén’s release, the two console exclusives- Mewtwo and Shadow Mewtwo- have enjoyed a comfortable place at the top of the tiers. It was, however, for very different reasons- Shadow Mewtwo was propped up largely by his (now patched out) infinite pillar, whereas Mewtwo simply had crazy damage output for a character of his health, and options, and safety. While Shadow Mewtwo may still be very strong without his infinite, he still has paper thin health. The original Mewtwo, in comparison, was a much more execution-and-risk free top tier, and the lack of any balancing to his moveset upped his stock a lot more in version 1.2.
Well, it’s hard to argue who the best Mewtwo is now.
A quick rundown of the infinite- score a knockdown that guarantees a blocked back+Y flame pillar. Time the pillar to hit just after they get up, and do the Barrier Command Grab on their wakeup. If they jump, they get hit by the flame pillar, and you can juggle into the first two hits of Mewtwo’s homing string, get a hard knockdown, then repeat. If they attack, they get hit by the pillar on the ground, and you combo into the command grab, homing attack, repeat. If they don’t jump, they get grabbed, Homing Attack, repeat.
Swillo, who finished top 8 at Dreamhack Austin, confirming the lack of escape options.
Those of you that followed the Phase Shift article a while back likely know the meat of why this happens- only the last hit of character’s homing attacks will ever phase shift. Mewtwo’s pillar never phase shifts. Neither does his combo-starting command grab.
Much like the Shadow Mewtwo infinite, this will likely get patched out fairly quickly. How they tackle this will be curious, though. This is pure speculation, but there are a number of ways they can easily remove this.
Make Flame Pillar phase shift on hit. (Or at least cause phase points)
Remove command grab’s ability to be combo’d into. (Or out of!)
Remove the exceptional juggling ability of Mewtwo’s homing attack.
Cause homing attack to cause a air reset on juggled opponents.
I am not suggesting that they should or will do any (or all) of these, but considering the mechanical workings of what causes this to occur, these are the most likely properties to be changed on the move itself.
What do you think should be done to fix this pattern, if anything?
