yeah, im just ognna go and say it now, akuma is fucking dirty. demon is too good. and no one has been talking about his retarded hitboxes. seriously, good luck jumping in on him ever. s.forward hitbox is best move in the game, no questions asked. no jump attack will beat it, NONE. it beats absolutely everything. s.rh also beats a lot of shit from max range. and to boot he gets his invincible dp. wow seriously? too many AA options.
also, his horse stance when he throws red and blue fireballs, his vulnerable hitbox is at the back of his body. so yeah, if someone crosses me up, i can try and do a reversed red fireball to make my hitbox move to the other end, making crossups wiff, and land right into the fb. if gief tries to do a tick spd, just reverse with red fireball, hitbox will be so far back, that most ticks will leave gief too far away to grab it, and eat red fireball.
also, all of his standing punches, and even c.strong, are really strong. whole arm is invincible on all attacks. whats nastier is s.jab hit box is large for a jab. it also extends way above his arm, making for really strong aa from far and mid range. s.fierce hitbox is freaking gigantic as well, and extends well past his fist as well.
then you get his ragind demon shenanigans.
yeah im calling it, akuma could be a monster, in the future. how do you get in on this character? and how do you deal with demon rage up close? unless you got a move that is invincible and leave the ground first frame or 2nd, you will get grabbed.
Jab dp is better after hurricane kick because you get to set up for what you want to do after better. There’s less recovery compared to after the fierce dp, so you get all the time in the world to set up and air fireball trap or whatever else you want.
You can’t jump out of demon if you’re crouching.
Also, standing roundhouse is cancelable. Antiair standing roundhouse xx fierce red fireball is strong, resets them right into the fireball. Edit: well, against some characters, at least.
So thinking that an opponent can’t jump out of demon if he’s crouching, I’m trying a setup that’ll guarantee demon (outside of reversal specials and supers that move you over Akuma), but it’s hard for me to do: crouching short (jab-jab), down-toward+crouching short, fierce. I think I might have to use two crouching shorts or kara cancel crouching short into firece, because that’s the only way I’ve gotten it so far, but it might also just be me sucking at the demon motion. What do you guys think?
I think I’ve tried this and during a game I usually screw it up and get a fireball. So I’m not sure if it works, I just thought of it randomly during a game.
is it just me, or can you do Akuma’s Raging Demon as:
jab *2, -> , short+fierce
i’ve done stuff like tried out all of his cancelable normals (like close standing Fierce and crouching Forward) into Raging Demon… wouldn’t it give someone the “oh shit!” look when that happens? Parlor tricks…
Akuma may be too good, this is from playing a ton and learning how ridiculous his st.mk and st.rh can be. Mixed with the air fireball, a good portion of the cast can barely do anything against him. His low health may be the one saving grace. Had a convo with alex valle about it earlier and he thinks akuma is the only character that may be out of place so far. What do you guys think?
If you haven’t tried it yet, try using st rh more for far antiair. Even on trades, its really awesome and it dizzies really fucking fast. A lot of the times if you throw a slow fireball, you’ll recover fast enough to st. rh or DP as well. TRY IT!
P.S. Sabre is gay (i love you bender the offender)
Akuma dizzies opponents really well generally. Two air fireball combos equals dizzy most of the time, in my experience, and it’s not terribly hard to land two because you can do such solid mixups with them. I mean it’s rare, but it’s not super rare.
It’s not really the dizzies that push me to the cautious side though, its the fact that he can keep people away so viciously. You really have to fuck up big time to leave a huge hole.
Based on this, I looked into what all is different for Akuma compared to Ryu and Ken, and here’s what I came up with:
A. Standing Normals
Standing Jab (S.Lp): The big difference here is that Akuma’s red hitbox not only covers his arm, but the hitbox is also twice the height of Ryu’s and Ken’s Standing Jab, and it also extends a bit farther forward (Ryu’s and Ken’s hitbox covers their arm only; no more, no less).
The blue hitboxes are the same for all three Shoto characters.
Standing Fierce (S.Hp): Just like Standing Jab, Akuma’s red hitbox is about twice as tall as Ryu and Ken’s version of the move. Also, Akuma’s red hitbox even goes a hair lower, so the height of the red hitbox is extended in both directions.
The blue hitboxes are the same for all three Shotos.
Standing Forward (S.Mk): As Sabre mentioned, this is a huuuuge difference. For one, the red hitbox extends noticably far past the end of Akuma’s foot (Ryu’s and Ken’s end at the tip of their feet), but it’s also a bit taller than Ryu’s and Ken’s version. The killing blow, of course, is the hitbox extends really far behind his foot as well. Combine this with the slightly taller hitbox, and you have a virtually unbeatable move.
The blue hitboxes are the same for all three Shotos.
Standing Roundhouse (S.Hk): This one is specifically based on Ryu’s version of Standing Roundhouse. There isn’t actually any difference in damage, stun, or cancel properties for this move, nor is there a difference in the red hitbox. So, what’s the difference?
The blue hitbox. On Ryu’s version of this move, he has an additional blue hitbox that overlaps part of his red hitbox; it extends all the way to the end of his foot. Akuma, however, does not have this hitbox, which makes it much safer to use as anti-air than Ryu’s version. To test this out, turn on the training mode and have Ryu and Akuma trade Standing Roundhouses; I guarantee that from max range, Akuma’s will win every time.
B. Jumping Normals
Every Neutral Jump attack, except maybe Fierce: Most Neutral Jump attacks have the same red hitbox; the only difference is Neutral Jumping Roundhouse, which is absurdly larger than Ryu’s and Ken’s versions. The red hitbox extends forward past Akuma’s feet (Ryu’s and Ken’s ended at their feet), and it’s twice as tall, extending way above his leg. This offers him almost complete protection from frontal attacks, whereas Ryu’s and Ken’s don’t aren’t even high enough that it covers their entire leg.
The biggest differences, however, are in the blue hitboxes. Ryu’s and Ken’s blue hitboxes encompass their entire bodies, and even extend a fair amount below their bodies. Akuma’s blue hitboxes for all of these normals don’t even extend half as far down as Ryu’s and Ken’s, making Akuma very hard to hit when he uses any of these.
Jumping Forward & Jumping Roundhouse: I’m grouping these two together because they have the exact same hitboxes. They are based on Ryu’s Jumping Roundhouse, so the red hitboxes for these moves are the same are Ryu’s Jumping Roundhouse. What this basically means is that he can cross up with Jumping Roundhouse (not unusual, Ryu could do this), but it also means that he can cross up with Jumping Forward (Ryu’s Jumping Forward could not do this).
Also, the blue hitboxes are wonky. Ryu has a blue hitbox that extends really far forward that Akuma doesn’t. So, if you try and have Ryu and Akuma trade Jumping Roundhouses, Akuma will win every time. It’s very safe as air-to-air. However, Akuma’s blue hitbox has one distadvantage: the blue hitbox that encompasses Akuma’s body extends below his red hitbox, whereas Ryu’s blue hitbox does not (neither does Ken’s, for that matter). This is a welcome difference, but it doesn’t offset the huge advantages these moves have by being totally safe from the front.
C. Special Moves:
Hadouken (blue and red version): I’ve tested out the things that Sabre mentioned very, very thoroughly, and the conclusion that I’ve come up with is that there is no actual difference between the size or position of Akuma’s hitbox at any point in the animation compared to Ryu or Ken. The biggest reason it looks like there’s a difference is because Akuma’s prefireball animation is a horse stance, whereas Ryu and Ken actually move backwards. However, I used a few things to test out whether or not there was an actual difference:
a. Ease in punishing the move: The test I used to see if Akuma’s hitbox really moves farther back is simple: See if Chun-Li can hit it. When playing Ryu and Ken, Chun can place herself just outside of their sweep range, and her Standing Forward can hit Ryu and Ken out of their prefireball animation, preventing them from even throwing a fireball. So, the test was pretty easy: See if I could do that to Akuma. The test showed that Chun-Li can still easily hit Akuma out of his prefireball animation.
Still, this isn’t entirely substantial, so I used a second test:
b. The center dot: In training mode, you can turn on the hitbox display (obviously, lol). This also places a tiny red dot under the character, which indicates their center. If an opponent crosses this dot, the character will turn around. That wasn’t important to the test, though; all I needed to do was see how far the blue hitboxes extended or contracted from the red dot during the animations. After looking very thoroughly on game speed ‘0’, I’ve concluded that there was no difference in the blue hitboxes at all.
BUT!!!
There is just ONE difference that makes a HUGE deal, and I think this is what Sabre must have noticed:
Akuma’s Blue and Red fireballs have Invincible Startup.
It’s a pretty easy thing to miss, cos you wouldn’t even be looking for invincible frames on a fireball; but, they’re there. This is how it’s easy to dodge crossups like Sabre said. You don’t need a whole lot of invincibility to dodge a crossup, and the fireballs definitely have enough.
Win with Akuma does the announcer say “You Win” or does he say “Akuma Wins”, I’ve checked on xbox360 (“You Win”) but can someone also check this on the PS3.
How would you guys rank his matchups so far? Obviously this is just preliminary since we’ve had the game only a few days, but I think it’ll be interesting to gauge what everyone thinks and see how different we end up ranking everything in the future. Here’s what I think:
This seems accurate from what I’ve played. Ken and Sagat definitely are my toughest opponents. Very hard to get in against either of them to land any big damage combos.
Wow, I disagree strongly with alot of those. I think Akuma loses cleanly to 'rog, Claw, sagat, 'sim, and maybe Blanka, among other things. I also don’t think most of his good matches are nearly as one sided as you have them. It’s true that he can do some silly things with demon charged, but that’s only a factor once he has super, and he still has to set it up once he gets it, and even then it’s only a mixup. I don’t think that alone sways these matches that strongly.
I’m not even convinced he’s top tier yet, to be honest. Demon mixups alone certainly don’t put him there, and neither do his better-than-average normals. He takes enough damage that a lot of exchanges that are typically even or favorable are un-favorable for him; he loses just about every trade, and loses big time if he gets counter hit while trying air fireballs. His fireball game is no better than Ryus, and arguably a lot worse. (Yeah yeah, blue fireballs have slightly better recovery than standard Ryu fireball, but pro Ryu’s have been kara’ing short or jab into FBs to reduce the recovery to those levels for years now, and that didn’t break anything).
When does Akuma ever trade? His dragon punch is invincible and his standing forward and roundhouse have sick hitboxes, so he doesn’t need to trade on antiairs. Jumping roundhouse has a sick hitbox and jumping air fireball has no hitbox essentially, so he doesn’t need to trade in the air. I seriously almost never trade as Akuma. And in every fireball war I’ve gotten into with Ryu, I’ve gone even or won. Yesterday I won a fireball war with Alex Valle’s Ryu.
It’s not just the demon, it’s air fireball + demon + retarded hitboxes + best fireball game in the game. Taking more damage is not enough to offset that.
I’d say that the Chun match is, at WORST, 7-3 Akuma. I think it’s actually 6-4 Akuma. Chun can stop Akuma’s rush a lot easier than Ryu’s, especially because the J.Hk - the main jump-in that Ryu uses to get over Chun - is more susceptible to AA. It’s a teensy bit harder to rush down Akuma because of his invincible DPs, but it’s nothing that Chun hasn’t had to deal with before (O Ken). Combine that with the fact that Akuma has even less leeway to mess up, and I’d say that in most conventional ways, this match is easier than Chun v Ryu. The only reason I still say it’s 6-4 Akuma is because Akuma can do so much more if he gets in an advantageous situation than Ryu could, and it’s now harder for Chun to deal with fireball traps.
I had trouble with Claw, but Im really still trying to learn some of his tricks, but it still seemed like Claw was a harder match than most of Gouki’s matchups. You can’t really just try and psychic DP him because it’s not stable and he can reliably punish whiffs with a KND, and he’s the hardest char to AA that I have seen for Akuma, incinvible DP and all. I could be wrong but if done early enough I saw Claw’s j. fierce trade with s.forward, and reacting to his jumpin is really hard to counter with a DP when your holding db to block his ground game.
Ultra I’d like to test the Guile Akuma match with you tonight if you’ll be around. I’ve figured out some basic ways of getting trades and such with his airfireballs which make the match not seem too bad.
