It goes without saying that Mad Catz’ Daigo Umehara is one of the greatest fighting game players this community has ever seen, so when he talks about genre theory, you’d best sit down, listen, and probably take some notes for good measure. Fortunately for us, the Beast’s weekly Street Fighter V streams have allowed competitors the world over to watch his training sessions live and learn a thing or two about Capcom’s latest title.
In order to further the spread of his ideas, Daigo (with the help of Jiyuna) recently presented a quick breakdown of the six main skills fighting game players should foster. According to the Japanese competitor, success in the genre can be boiled down to execution, your ability to discover strong techniques, reactions, willpower, memory, and the power to construct strategies.
That last one in particular, Daigo says, is incredibly important, explaining that “if you can beat your opponent in this aspect, there is no way you should lose.” As such, he spends the rest of his notes discussing just that.
The thing with strategies is that each technique you possess as a fighting game player is improved by subsequent discoveries. “After you select a strategy, you need to think about how to make that strategy succeed,” Daigo explains. “How can I successfully bring my opponent to the corner? How can I successfully prevent myself from being cornered? The important thing here is that once you decide on a strategy, you need to stop focusing on doing immediate damage and instead focusing on succeeding in the strategy.”
The examples he offers up focus on three simple scenarios: saving meter in order to kill with a Super, carrying an opponent to the corner, and using fireballs to control the neutral game. As with any strategy, these all come with their fair share of positives and negatives. Heavy fireball usage, for instance, increases the length of time your opponent lasts in a match, giving them better opportunities to corner you. On the other hand, maintaining distance gives you a greater eye of the playing field as a whole, allowing you to switch up strategies should things go south.
Of course, there’s much more information to soak in here than what we’ve provided. Be sure to visit Jiyuna’s full translation of these notes for further details and tune into Daigo’s stream on Twitch every Friday at 6 PM PDT, 9 PM EDT.
Source: Daigo (via Jiyuna)