This will list tips for beating specifically the infamous HARD survival mode. These tactics should obviously also make it easier to get the easy and medium colors. Starting off with Chun, but will list others as I find stuff and people list things.
General tips. Always use either health boosts or more importantly defense up boosts (particularly defense 2 or 3). If you have a large amount of life and a big defense boost this allows you to make more mistakes without worrying as much. If possible, start any of the first few stages with double downs only. You should be able to beat the first few characters without getting hit much, if at all. If successful you’ll have a lot of points early on and won’t need to worry about being cheap towards buying more health. Using attack powerups isn’t bad either to help you clear the early stages faster.
GENERALLY it seems the CPU doesn’t anti air or block jump ins well and certain characters like Ryu can do a special move that they will just never block or whiff punish (MP Shoryu).
CHARACTER SPECIFIC INFO.
Spoiler
Chun Li. Seems pretty simple. Just walk backwards and do V Skill into j.HP or j.MK. The CPU generally never seems to block it and even when they do they usually don’t retaliate with much. df+HK, jump forward HK, poking with sweeps and shooting LP fireballs also seem effective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ8v7shHlaE
**Ryu. **Jump forward buttons and do MP shoryuken a lot. The CPU doesn’t seem to anti air well and won’t block MP shoryuken (or even punish whiffed ones).
I love this thread idea! Even though I don’t have any vids I do have a few Birdie tips.
The ai won’t do anything after f.hk most of the time and also tends to try to block the overhead crouching.
The cpu usually tries to hit you out of your armored specials.
Banana peel makes characters without a fireball act weird. If it’s between you and them they will try to walk forward and block it while not punishing anything you do. So stand behind a peel and spam anything with range.
Up until level 30 or so, teleport mixus ought to be pretty reliable. Beyond that, most of the cast has a hard time dealing with fullscreen HP fireballs; they just downback or lamely try to jump over them. You can mostly just chip everyone down. Vega/Laura/Mika gave me a bit more trouble than the other characters. Bison/Birdie ought to be pretty easy.
There are a couple of other threads floating around on this for you to check out/add information from:
That’ll work for me. I’ll keep any info for the other characters updated on the first page so people have a place to quickly look as the thread gets larger.
Just to update, level 49 Bison can be one of the harder characters to beat, but learned that if you just jump over him (even if you land too far over him for a cross up) he always tries to attempt a c.HP and usually ends up whiffing. Anyone with a good jump can take advantage of this until he dies.
This shows how to beat it with Vega on hell mode, but it applies to hard mode too. This WILL NOT work against higher level Birdie though. Against him, you have to do regular jump ins with hk. It’s also a bit iffy against higher level Laura.
Best advice for beating hard mode is to go into training mode, set the health bars to normal, difficulty to 8, dummy to CPU, then grind out rounds until you can regularly get perfects on them or beat them with 90% health left. I was having trouble against lvl47 vega even with this birdie strategy I found. I went into training mode and figured out you can immediately dash backwards into the corner, then start jumping up and down. Vega will eat a jump attack at this point and you can combo him, then start the pattern.
…I main Nash and so I tried beating Hard Survival with him. First, I lost to the last Zangief (43, I think?) and then on my second try, I was lucky and faced 50 Necalli with about 97% life left. So, I chose Attack Power 2… AND I FUCKING LOST BECAUSE I DIDN’T KNOW THE BASTARD’S PATTERNS! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!
It took probably 5 goes at it on Hard with Ryu for me to get it. I’m far from good at any SF not SF2 and it wasn’t that bad if you know how to chuck fireballs and run away. I think I time-over victoried like 5 different characters lol.
Sometimes you gotta switch up your strategies depending on character. For example, spamming MP DP with Ryu works really well against everyone but Karin, Cammy, Chun, Ryu, and Mika. Against those characters you’re better off throwing max range hados or just continuously jumping in.
I finished kens hard mode just by crossing up most of the time. Spacing it correctly makes CPU try to AA but whiffs. This is especially the case for chun, ryu, dhalsim, and bison. e.g. chun always does st.mk (I think? where her legs go straight up), bison always does cr.hp.
Against necalli however, he AA with DP, so crossing him up to make their DP whiff is slightly harder, but doable.
Cammy I’m just too scared to jump at since she always AA correctly, so I just stay on the ground.
So cross up:
hit? full combo (I always do st.lp b.mp b.hp tatsu)
