Best Gouken style?

First, to establish a few impression:

Say we have many style of Viper. Like Latif, who is a bit more safe in terms of Viper play, replies heavily on faint and footise to create opening. Where Flash is more of a mix up based play style, getting much more close up. Relies more on Thunder Knuckle upper.

We also have many styles of Akuma. Tokido is more frame trap mix up based. Where infiration is zoning and footise based.

I might be wrong here on those. As I don’t really main either of those character, but when I look at Gouken replays from Bullcat or Shine or whoever else out there… I can’t find a style! Sure, they do different thing, but what are the different? Gouken seem to have a much more vague definition of styles compare to most other character, am I right or am I just not very observant in terms of style?

Flexibility is key.

My Gouken will always attack any opponent on wakeup repeatedly , I will sacrifice health to get opponent to jump in on my wakeup just so i can reverse the momentum with ex flip right when they think they got me where they want me then BLAM!!

sweep>gflip till there dead forward throw>gflip till theyre dead after U1 gflip till theyre dead
gflip>gflip>gflip>gflip = TAKIN FLIGHT resets into backthrow = me too

My style is situational. It depends on their super meter, Ultra, time and RISKS INBETWEEN. I love rushing people down but can be patient if i needed to. But its so lovely to be in their face and show then that you are not afraid of their shoru, supers and ultras. lol

My style changes depending on the matchup.
{Simplified of course}

Ryu, Guile, Ken, Chun-Li…:- I footsie with fireballs at jump distance, and AA them, then cross up on their knockdown.

Zangief, T.Hawk…:- Fireball, look for opportunities to DF Grab without predictability.

Fei Long, Yun, Yang…:- Bait moves like Chicken wing for EX Tatsu, DF parry.

Vega, Bison, Balrog, Blanka…:- I usually play defensive until i gain momentum with parries or knockdown then proceed with an unrelenting assualt.

Viper:- Stay moving, parry airbourne attacks, get in on her wakeup but be careful. OS alot during this fight as they tend to backdash, Ex Seismo etc.

Probably more in depth than you wanted, and not as distinctly different style as your example Akuma & Vipers.

I feel that your Akuma/Viper examples have stratagies that works for most of the cast, and have little reason to alter it.
Gouken needs to adapt a lot more and i think i’m a better player for it.

It could all be summed up with pattybenpatty’s line:

On a more concise note, I’ve watched and played against someone called Abu_Ryu.
We’re the same in skill i’d say.

I think he plays alot different to me.
I’ll try to upload video’s of both of us sometime soon, so you can compare.

Both of you are very good.

Gouken pretty much has 2 modes. Zone/bait for ex tatsu/high counter/c.HP. The second mode is rush which includes decent mixups, which can be devastating if you can reset and start another BnB. One successful reset can get you the kill on someone easily. In any case, I think to be a good Gouken player you need to be great at both. Not good, great. You don’t get a lot of opportunities to do your combos and you don’t want someone rushing your ass down because you whiffed your ex tatsu.

I’m obviously not as good as I’d like to be but I’m trying to master his 2 states of gameplay. In short, flexibility, just like pattybenpatty said.

I think the key to Gouken rushdown is being unpredictable, even to yourself. As soon as you show a constant pattern, smart players will capitalize because nearly everything Gouken does is punishable if predicted. I just went 22-2 in an endless room and every game I made a point to try playing differently and I think that is the only reason I won so much. Granted, some of the players were average but there was a good guile and two decent akumas in there. I usually crumble to his mix-ups. The reason I won was that I kept fluidly changing my style from zoning with fireballs to divekick pressure to footsies to sweep shenanigans, while the Akuma players seemed to be getting frustrated and started resorting to their standard patterns. I started seeing what was coming better because I wasn’t focused on myself anymore. I guess you could call it locked in. Funny thing is, I didn’t use ex tatsu successfully as an anti-air even once. Akuma just eats that thing up with his ambiguous jump ins, so I stopped relying on that.

Do u mind uploading some replays? I’m always looking to learn. If you are on PC, you can invite me to replay channel. I was following Mooshington on it and he doesn’t really do anything I don’t know how to do; he just knows when to do what and I think that’s a very important part of playing Gouken.

im most def rushdown and combo orientated hopefully soon i can get a capture card and put up all my games on my youtube channel for my fellow gouken players to see until then…tryin to get a better isp comcast sux ass where im at and if no one knows who this is its x260 pompuspuff

The one thing I notice is that I am absolutely terrible at mirror, but so is every other people. It seem like the better you are at a character, the worst you can be.

Just the other day I was playing with Akuma, in a mirror match with someone with about 3.5k PP and 10k BP, I beat him with surprising ease. Then it kinda click on me. When he fight another Akuma, he is scared to use just about any move that he knows how to beat. He begins to limit his option horribly and become extremely predictable.

I found myself kind of like that in Mirror match. I am actually scared to pressure another Gouken despite the fact that the odd is always in my favorite, because I know how to beat my approach. The problem is that I can’t easily understand what my opponent can predict.

I think this have a lot to do with style, the balance between how to become unpredictable and how to use the odd in your advantage is extremely delicate.

I used to suck at Gouken vs Gouken. You just have to play differently than any other matchup. Meaning a lot of empty jumps to bait counters and a lot of tick throws. Remember to ex tatsu every demon flip the other gouken does or j.MP or j.HK. You can also punish a Palm with c.HP to EX Palm on reaction quite easily.

I don’t have the tools to upload replays and don’t foresee buying them, but some of my games from the summer are uploaded in the “Journey of a Tiger Lord” thread on this board. It was against one of the best imho Sagats on PS3, EmblemLord. He destroyed me most of the time but I learned a lot of patience and technical stuff from fighting him. After those matches, I kind of got burned out. He broke me lol…but I think I’m starting to get in tune again.

My Gouken style: Sweep. If blocked wait a bit then sweep again.

That would be me,

I prefer the rushdown style if able to which pretty much means gflip to stuff srk/reversals on pretty much every wakeup.
Im still getting used to AE ( still struggling to shake off my super flowchart- which i guess isnt much differnt from the vanilla flowchart lol)

GGs to you both Black-toof/Climaxter - learnt a lot - esp how sick ex tatsu is in AE.
Im just about getting used to the new parry system, still a headache tho

One thing ive strted doing is fadc > backthrow thru opponents pokes once they get predictable with strings - totally seems to catch them off guard.