With only a few days left before the Tekken World Tour Finals, Bandai Namco has started releasing interviews conducted with top players and Namco officials in a new series called “Finals Player Interviews.”
Speedkicks, Joey Fury, Mr. Naps (aka Jimmy J Tran), Anakin, and Markman discuss their personal highlight moments of the TWT, and then self-reflect on their performance in this season’s events. Perhaps it’s no surprise that these pros are happy to have crossed one finish line, but are laser-focused on the next one.
Keita “Fuudo” Ai has a bittersweet history in Street Fighter V. When it has come to the biggest titles in the game — Evolution and Capcom Cup — he is always the bridesmaid and never the bride. He finished second to Infiltration at Evo 2016, then finished fifth at Capcom Cup 2016. He has come so close to taking it all — but hasn’t.
2017 has proven the same. The Evo 2011 champion of Street Fighter IV has all the chances in the world to take it all again. The question becomes: will he?
True Muscle Spirit
When you look at GRPT|Fuudo’s play in 2017, not much has changed. This is a good thing, though — as his R. Mika is just as deadly as last year.
While I commented last year that his Mika was one of the most in-depth characters in terms of setups, many of those became nullified at the end of the season when her wall bounce on Irish Whip midscreen was removed. Fuudo just simply took it upon himself to recreate the character with a whole new style, and the result is an equally deep character that removes all doubt that even her nerfs didn’t change her position in the tiers.
One of the biggest adjustments he made was within the footsies game. This is something that isn’t talked about much with R. Mika players, but is so vital to their play — especially in Season 2. Your setups only get you so far with this character, and one of the biggest problems on getting those setups going is that everyone expects the usual approaches of dropkicks, splashes, and crouching fierces. This is what sets Fuudo apart, is the fact that he has taken a page out of his old, stable Fei Long play book from Street Fighter IV and injected it into Street Fighter V.
Fuudo controls every bit of space on the screen well. However, once he gets you to the corner—and he will—it’s light’s out. He’s a player that makes so many strong players hit the panic button in that corner, and one of only a handful that does it so masterfully. While some of that should be attributed to the strength of the character, it’s Fuudo’s understanding of every pixel of space that makes him a constant threat.
Still Not the Bride
The problem I find myself always having with Fuudo is that he simply cannot close it out. If you look at his results at Capcom Pro Tour events this season, you’ll find that he’s the highest-ranked player that hasn’t won a single event. In 2017, the only event he has won was a non-CPT event at the RAGE series.
He has thrice had chances to close out premier events in 2017. He was poised to take Final Round XX, only to be put on blast by Xian’s newly-found Ibuki. He was later in a good spot to take Japan Cup, to be defeated by Haitani. He was also on a path to success at Dueling Dragons Dojo, only to be thwarted by yet another Ibuki in Yukadon.
If you look away from the CPT, he was also close to a championship at Brooklyn Beatdown, only to lose to a dominating performance by Tokido. Haitani notwithstanding, Fuudo has struggled against characters with solid mix-up games. Tokido has shown the capacity to work Akuma into that realm, and Yukadon and Xian have that kind of game by default with Ibuki. While Mika can mix up strongly as well, in match-ups such as against Ibuki and Akuma, she has a much harder time setting this up given the fact that the former characters have a strong zoning game to complement their mix-up potential.
The Road There
Let’s just look at the tape here. Fuudo has a hard road. He has to play a gamble-heavy character in MenaRD’s Birdie right out of the gate. While this match doesn’t necessarily favor Birdie — and Fuudo eliminated Mena 3-1 at Brooklyn Beatdown this year — on can only imagine how much focus the Dominican will be placing on Fuudo as he prepares for the opening round of Capcom Cup.
But let’s just say — in both theory and practice — Fuudo beats everyone he has to face in the lower half of the bracket. At some point, he will have to shift to play the upper half of the seeding. Just based off of the above problematic players, Fuudo is likely going to struggle in the latter phases of the event more than anyone else.
Final Thoughts
Never say never, but the likelihood of Fuudo taking down — based off his results this season and his performances against players who are netting better results than he is — looks grim. He could easily make top 8; his performance at Brooklyn Beatdown proves this emphatically. The worry then becomes if he has the chutzpah to make a run to the trophy. If he hasn’t yet this year, I find it hard to believe he will in Anaheim.
Leading up to the release of Marvel Vs. Capcom: Infinite, Capcom UK Community Manager Matt “The Street Writer” Edwards, along with FingerCramp and Unequalled Media, released a series of character tutorials for each member of the game’s 30-chracter launch roster. Now that they’ve been out in the wild for a few weeks, it’s time to move on to the first round of DLC characters: Sigma, Black Panther, and Monster Hunter.
As always, these tutorials include a brief character introduction by Edwards, followed by a rundown of each warrior’s special moves, Hyper Combos and unique skills — like Sigma’s Overhead Laser Command normal or Monster Hunter’s dodge, which can make certain attacks safe by canceling their recovery frames, while also being a strong mix-up tool when she’s in Demon Mode.
Finally, Matt provides prospective players with both a simple and advanced combo, as usual, displayed at both normal and half-speeds, before finishing the tutorial with an Infinity Stone recommendation. You can see all three videos — which also include a listen to each character’s theme — as well as finding links to all previous tutorials, below.
Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite is currently available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Character tutorials for future DLC characters Black Widow, Winter Soldier, and Venom will undoubtedly follow once they’re released.
One of the favorites going into this year’s Capcom Cup, Victor “Punk” Woodley is looking to redeem himself after his second-place finish at Evo 2017. Sitting down with BornFree at Canada Cup, Punk discussed how much his life has changed over the past year, his hopes for Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition, and his desire to take his demon — Tokido — down.
The main thing Punk wants from Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition is for Capcom to take some of the “nuttier” aspects of Season 2 out of the game. This means getting rid of throw loops, toning Balrog down, and most importantly, giving Karin some well-needed buffs. Based on what Capcom are doing with Zeku, Punk seems optimistic — but he just hopes that the new V-Triggers will unlock greater combo potential for everyone in Street Fighter V‘s roster.
If anything, Punk would like to see the return of Street Fighter IV‘s one-frame links, just to make combos an actual challenge to master.
NetherRealm Studios Creative Director Ed Boon has tweeted out a picture from the upcoming Fighter Pack 3 reveal trailer that will be unveiled during the ELEAGUE Injustice 2 World Championship Finals this Friday, at 10:00 PM ET, live on TBS. In the tweet, Boon asks, “Who beat up Black Manta?” showing the fallen enemy of Atlantis sprawled on the floor, with a busted, leaking oil barrel in plain sight. We can also see what appears to be the hand of an also-defeated Raiden and a lone, smoking, cigarette — the calling card of Hellboy, as seen when he appeared from the shadows in the Fighter Pack 2 trailer.
While it could be difficult to hazard a correct guess based off of these clues, since all three members of Fighter Pack 1 were shown being bested by their debuting DLC counterparts in the FP2 trailer, perhaps the cigarette and potentially burning oil can point towards John Constantine: the, arcane London-based Hellblazer, who specializes in matters of the occult as a working class detective? The character is extremely popular, with him playing a pivotal role in the Injustice: Gods Among Us comics, and being slated to appear in The CW’s Legends Of Tomorrow series alongside the already-revealed Atom. Already being seen in both Doctor Fate and Raiden’s Battle Simulator endings, he could easily scratch the itch of former Zatanna mains (like myself), who are yearning for a replacement character.
The flaming inferno could also be for a fourth guest character in the form of Image Comic’s Spawn, another popular guest NRS fans have been asking for in one of their fighting titles for quite some time now; he’s already seen fighting game action as a guest in Namco’s Soul Calibur II back in 2002. You can see the tweet below:
If there’s one feature that 2D fighting games haven’t really embraced, it’s the ability to customize characters. So far, only Injustice 2 has really run with the concept. Now, an indie fighter is looking to tackle characters customization in 2D fighter: Slashers: the Power Battle, now available on Steam as an Early Access title, will allow players to unlock gear that they can use to customize how their character looks. We’ve covered Slashers before, however, this is the first time we’ve gotten details on the game’s customization system. In the game, players can earn medals from playing the game’s “Journey Mode.” They can then use these medals to purchase and unlock customization gear.
The amazing thing here is that this is all done using 2D graphics. Other fighters that allow for character customization usually use 3D polygons (much easier to animate) even if they feature 2D gameplay. As for the game itself, Slashers borrows or pay homage to other fighting games with its mechanics. Slashers: the Power Battle features “Block ” and “Counter Block,” inspired by Street Fighter III‘s parry system; “Recovery” and “Power Recovery” inspired by Guilty Gear’s Roman Cancels, and the “Chaos Break” which serves as a combo breaking “Burst” mechanic.
The game is currently available on Steam as an Early Access title. In addition to this, it’s also subject to a 15% discount this weekend.
There’s so much obscure tech in the venerated Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R, it’s no surprise there are still videos coming out about it. Though this trick probably has been known and used by the most arcane masters of +R, it’s nonetheless well-presented in the video below.
Clayton chapman explains an “advanced proximity blocking” trick: whenever characters in Guilty Gear get ready to block, they switch their stance. Certain characters (not everyone!) have more than one blocking stance, which means that their hurtbox slightly alters. Clayton shows this below mostly with Ky and Potemkin. Ky uses Stun Raising to show that some attacks would trigger a taller box on Potemkin. In effect, you could force Potemkin to block attacks at certain spaces.
Read the full YouTube description for an explanation from the player, who talks about another setup.
“Super Street Fighter Carnival 2017” is the regularly-occurring tournament series of Japan’s famous Mikado Arcade. This series focuses on arcade titles of old, bringing out high-level play for a variety of games. We are halfway through this tournament season, so you can catch up here if you missed any of the action.
The most recent game is NEO GEO Battle Coliseum, SNK’s other dream-match crossover fighter.
NEO GEO Battle Coliseum is SNK’s 2v2 tag game, though without assists it still retains a patient footsie-mind feel. The timing of running this tournament is pretty nice: NGBC has become something of a topic ever since rumors began circulating that a sequel was in the works at SNK. There’s also that fact that SNK is expanding their esports division… if you missed out on NGBC when it came out, it may be worth your time to get a sneak peek at it just in case NGBC2 is around the corner.
Of course, a lot of what you will learn may be null and void if Hotaru and Mr. Big don’t make the cut in a theoretical NGBC2. As you’ll see from this event, they tend to hold important places on many of the teams represented. If you want to read up on why these characters seem to be so common place, you should check our SRK’s wiki guides for the game!
You can follow the action by subscribing to Mikado’s official YouTube channel. For the night owls in the US, you can even try to catch them when they livestream.
If you remember the Street Fighter IV series for anything, elaborate combos is definitely one of its hallmarks. Most people first heard of desk from his amazing displays of execution through the game, and now not to be outdone is Toronto player gentle_step.
In his most recent combo video for Ultra Street Fighter IV, he showcases some long and execution-laden combos for Blanka, Poison, Sakura, Makoto, Decapre, Cody, Oni, Dan, Ibuki, Seth, Deejay, Akuma, Rufus, and Evil Ryu. While some of these may have some more optimal variants for tournament play, gentle_step is merely showing off how rich this game is for its combo system.
Old Zeku has some new tricks up his sleeve thanks to youtuber World Warrior.
While there’s always a flurry of content during the first week of a character launch, few players actually stick with the flavor of the month. But when World Warrior showed us anti-back-rise setups, he clearly wasn’t done. Now, he’s discovered that the Bushinryu master has an excellent safe jump setup versus nearly the whole cast off his Crush Counter sweep, allowing him to set up meaty cross-ups and beat reversal Dragon Punches.
He also has his own take on the corner Gram pressure that we saw so prominently during week one. With the combination of wake-up pressure and safe jumps off hard knockdowns, this Zeku tech is perfect for Street Fighter V ‘s offensively-minded world.
When you look at GRPT|Fuudo’s play in 2017, not much has changed. This is a good thing, though — as his R. Mika is just as deadly as last year.