Category: Fighting Games

In his ongoing video series to detail combos and tricks with characters both popular and underused, MySmashCorner has released a new guide, going through some of the advanced techniques which are unique to the amphibian shinobi, Greninja. In order to produce this guide, MySmashCorner collaborated with none other than Dennis “iStudying” Kwarteng, arguably the world’s best Greninja, to catalogue some of the special tricks that this ninja frog can pull off.

This short combo guide includes options like basic up tilt strings, falling up air extensions, uses of his Water Shuriken and Hydro Pump and even some very special Substitute conversions, if you are able to angle your counter correctly to continue your attack. The main showpiece of this guide is Greninja’s footstool combos, which are some of the most flashy in the whole of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. Along with the tried and true neutral air to footstool lock, MySmashCorner outlines some other possible footstool setups, like using back air to lock an opponent in place, if they manage to DI correctly following the initial footstool to avoid a down air.

Check out the guide below for all the details about this stealthy Pokémon and make sure to watch iStudying’s own YouTube channel for more high level Greninja gameplay.

Source: MySmashCorner

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.

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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.”

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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.

Sources: Smash Studios, Bros. Calamity feature image c/o Bros. Calamity

Ryu is already one of the most prominent members of the Super Smash Bros. for Wii U roster, due to his iconic status as the central character of the Street Fighter franchise. But TSM|ZeRo believes Ryu is still underplayed and underrated despite his Street Fighter pedigree. He also believes that the shoto has much greater play potential than has been attributed to him, going as far as saying he may be the “best character right now.” ZeRo speculates that community focus on Bayonetta’s abilities has allowed Ryu’s power to slip under the radar and escape being patched out.

ZeRo discusses Ryu’s balanced build, as well as his unique strengths: such as his ability to create “true” combos by cancelling his moves, and how powerful his Shoryuken is. You must defeat his Dragon Punch to stand a chance!

ZeRo has also recently talked about how to get sponsored to play fighting games professionally.

Source: ZeRo

 

For many King of Fighters fans, Stunfest was hype not because of any competition, but rather the fact that the latest build of The King of Fighters XIV was playable at the event. This allowed many European KOF players to give the game a spin and figure out how it plays.

The game itself was featured on stream and players seemed eager to try stuff out, allowing for what may be the most extensive streamed showcase of the game to date.

For those who missed it, Grave Lee has uploaded some footage from the first day of Stunfest divided into three videos. The footage below is mostly of casual sets with players trying to figure stuff out, at the same time however, this sort of footage is what helps us learn a lot more about the game.

Source: Grave Lee

One of the best parts about the exploding popularity of the Street Fighter scene is getting to know the players and personalities behind the sticks. The storylines that have grown and developed over the last few years–and have been propagated both in person and on all manner of social media–have made the matches all the more enthralling. With YouTube and Twitch paving the way for players to become their own brands, we know more about our Street Fighting idols than ever before.

Even so, it’s always exciting to be given the opportunity to get to know them a little better, and it seems that Capcom are more than happy to oblige. Matt Edwards, Capcom’s EU Community Manager, took to the floor at Stunfest this weekend to interview players from all over the globe, including Hiroyuki “HM|Eita” Nagata, Goichi “HM|Go1” Kishida and Chris “Rize|Cobelcog” McEntee. If you’ve ever wondered what’s going on between the ears of some of the best players Stunfest had to offer, this is exactly the interview series for you.

So why not find out what it’s like to be a world warrior, right from the players themselves? Check out the interviews below.

Or have a look at the full playlist–which looks like it will be updated as the year goes on–to watch the other interviews.

Source: Capcom Fighters