He’s a retired wrestler/street thug. It makes perfect sense as to why Birdie could have let himself go. Is it really that preposterous to think otherwise? He still has his massive size to him. It’s just that he has a huge sotmach to go with it.
You’d think it’s kinda weird to turn a former bandit (just look at how violent he is in the Alpha Generations OVA) into this happy donut-eating dude. It’s a complete 180 on the character’s personality
Street Fighter Alpha: The Animation you mean. Alpha Generations is the anime about Akuma being Ryu’s father (and second best anime after SF2’s IMO in terms of art and execution). Anyway I get where you are coming from, I have always been a fan of the more serious SF and I’m not too keen on Birdie’s humor. However, he still a great character design and arguably more frightening than he’s ever been.
the gluttony thing is a part of Birdie’s background has been since Street Fighter Alpha. and it’s listed in his SFA3 Bio.
Birdie’s jab is definitely gonna get nerfed soon.
It’s funny that a grappler has the best conversion out of lights so far.
Birdie’s AA literally stuffs everything that I’ve seen in all of the matches. The hitbox on it looks pretty insane, and to top it off, his jabx3 or whatever into Super taking off 50-60%+ of an opponents health is unbelievable, and the frequency of it happening seems to occur almost every round. Watching a match like Daigo having an 80% health lead with Ryu on Tokido’s Birdie but then he gets caught with a jab into super for basically 60% punish is absurd. Personally, the jab setup is the only thing that I feel is ridiculous about Birdie right now, that’s really it.
I wouldn’t mind seeing Birdie stay like this going into the later versions simply because I would like to see what people will develop against him, however something tells me he’s going to get tweaked one way or another down the road.
The jab conversion is crazy especially when other characters don’t even have things like this lol.
We need more footage 
Looks like birdie is dominating the fuck out of this E3. Jab conversion to super does look a little OP but only time will tell. I find it funny that everyone was worried about ryu’s parry being OP yet we have yet to see anyone properly use it even once, while birdie is getting supers off of everything.
They made Birdie strong on purpose for the E3 build so people will take him seriously
I believe everyone was assuming that the Ryu Parry was exactly like SF3 Parry, and had it of been so, then yes 100% it would’ve been OP and made Ryu the most powerful character in the game. In SF5 however, even after a successful parry you have to wait for the animation to finish in order to do anything, so on jabs etc, it won’t be that effective but up against longer animations or such it can be. This is unlike the SF3 incarnation to where you could just parry then instantly punish in most cases.
literally every other character has the same kind of conversion birdie has.
Really? Ryu can start a jab fireball Super from cr. mk range? Nash’s target combo doesn’t drop if he’s not in your face and does 50% like Birdie?
Well, I’m not there, so eh, if that’s the case than it’s not so bad.
[quote=“gilley, post:94, topic:175439”]
Not really, at least not from what we’ve seen thus far. The only character to consistently land their critical art on numerous occasions is Birdie. I saw J-Wong drop the Dictator Critical Ult off of a combo numerous times being just slightly out of range. You don’t have this problem with Birdie, not to mention can’t he even land it off a dashing headbutt if I’m not mistaken? I know you can land Ryu’s CA off of a c.mk however I don’t see him getting a CA off a jab punish? No Way.
Again, I don’t want to blow this up into a “Birdie is OP” statement, because we’re still in the testing phases so their will be obvious changes to the game, not to mention I never want to be too premature about things. However, jab into CA is crazy, especially in rounds to where I really thought the opposing player had it Won, but got caught with a jab and bam…end of round.
Well to be specific, it was the multiple jabs being able to go into CA that bugged me. Idk, something about the whole package seemed fishy.
Low jab has mad range, and links into mp into headbutt into CA. But even if you miss your combo and the headbutt comes out it looks quite safe? Or is it just nobody punishing yet? But people tried. And the way the way this option along ith command grab is so threatening seems insane?
Tbh we don’t know yet. What I would give to test this out.
Ryu can do c.lp > c.lp > DP > super
Charlie can do c.lp > c.lp > slice kick > super
Chun can do the same thing
Cammy can do the same thing
etc, etc.
They all do big damage. It’s a gameplay feature specifically added to SF5. Birdie just has a lot of range on his attacks because he’s so big. In the older SF’s, you couldn’t special cancel chained light attacks, now you can.
Oh, I agree with you, and I apologize if I sounded like I didn’t, because I do. To me the only thing stupid about Birdie atm is what you’re implying and it’s the jab into CA, because many times we’ve seen him land jab at an insane range go into headbutt and launch CA right after for like 50-60% damage which is crazy.
It “kind of” reminds me of 3S Chun with the whole c.mk into SAII nonsense that took off a ridiculous amount of life which ultimately turned out to be arguably the best hit confirm into Super within 3S. If this option stays intact, their is no way I’ll see him falling off anytime soon.
Within the roster however, I still believe that Dictator (the pressure setups that J-Wong was doing was giving every Birdie player problems to the point they didn’t even want to press a button at times), Charlie (The Sonic Boom and AA punish Xian was doing was amazing and very effective against Birdie) and Ryu (I believe he’s the most difficult of the three to make it work, but his Hadouken, pokes, Shoryuken, and his V-Trigger Hadoukens are options that I can see being effective up against Birdie) can go against Birdie.
I just don’t want anyone to get too unpleasant just yet, because within the next SF:V update, he probably get’s modified and all of this conversation becomes mute.