I guess the biggest problem people have with the green beast is that he has decent life, good damage, good normals, a horizontal ball that you can spam from full-screen and a super + ultra that do a hell of a lot damage. And chip damage.
But let’s not forget, we’re talking about people who hate and complain about losing anyway. If a Blanka beats them, he’s easy mode because you can play him absolutely random and still get a good amount of damage. At leat in G2. I guess they feel they put a lot of work into the game where Blanka just throws shit out.
But AGAIN, everybody who complains in hatemail and forums about losing is a scrub anyway. Let’s be honest, most of them can’t even tell if you’re playing well or randomly.
SF4 is so damn well balanced, and there will always be matches where lag or anything like that doesn’t let you bring out your full potential. You WILL lose to a completely random scrub some time. These are the same people that complain about losing to Gief, Dhalsim, Seth, Fuerte, Guile, Honda or Gen. Every character that isn’t your standard shoto is easy mode and scrubby for them.
And they think they’ve mastered the game when they can cancel a fireball into a kara throw.
PLEASE note that I don’t hate Blanka, and I do NOT think he’s easy mode.
It is balanced for the most part but then you have matches like Blanka vs. Rog and Gief vs. Seth. I had one guy complain that because I use a charge character I’m always blocking. Charge characters naturally have the advantage I guess, lol.
Seriously dude that is totally not true; I want to see you complete his challenge mode and tell me how much skill it takes to play him then.
Other than that I love using Blanka and you can hate me all day for it, but it all comes down to abusing your opponents weaknesses and if you can not figure out mine then tough shit. The reason I main Blanka is because personally I can switch up my play style a lot whenever needed and can confuse the crap out of people by just hopping back and forth over them after their knockdowns. I bait so many people because of this. I guess its related to possibly taunting them which makes them play worse ROFL.
Great OP and lets keep pissing people off! BLANKA FTW!
You don’t know about the full screen blanka ball, mash lp elec, and wake up Ultra gameplan? Just kick it in cruise control from then on.
And knowing how normals have to relate to nearly every opposing character in a variety of instances and spacing? Fuck that.
For real though…of all the things my Blanka has gotten “hate” for? Throwing is at the top of the list? Not run-away, not guess Ultra, not shenanigans…but throwing?
Blanka’s challenge mode has nothing to do with how much skill is required to play him. You could point someone who thinks Balrog is easy to his challenge mode…he’s still easy mode. That’s part of the reason why I hate challenge mode. People always bring it up as a reason why SFIV takes skill when none of those combos are viable to use online or much often even offline. They’re all a bunch of just frame tests that get you shoryu’d if you mess up. Even with my main C.Viper…all of her hard trials are useless in a real match. She has much more viable combo into ultra setups than what’s in her trial mode that aren’t as position/character specific. Challenge mode for me is part of the reason why you get all of these scrub ass G1 Blankas online who don’t know how to do shit but random ball and slide and try for close range c.MK to Ultra or hop ultra when they can. They don’t use any of Blanka’s real shit that requires execution and strategy but isn’t as dead risky or gimmicky. I still pray for the day that SF actually teaches people how to play SF. Just frame combos are not what makes a good SF player. Especially when all it takes is some kid mashing on shoryu FADC to defeat them.
Granted Blanka does take a great deal of work to use at high level and his execution specifically just to pressure people is harder than most of the cast. Though since Super Turbo, Blanka has been designed to be that of a dirty mind fuck character and that’s mainly what people complain about. If the Blanka player gets in their head it’s easy to feel like there’s nothing they can do and Blanka is one of those characters that just forces the opponent to play SF on his terms.
I was thinking about using Blanka in SFIV though once I found out his offensive game was mostly mild and based around gimmicks that did no damage I stepped out. Mainly because that play style usually forces a character in a game like this to be played mostly defensively unlike his aggressive ST counter part. Any game where throws aren’t powerful Blanka basically turns into a wall that sits on low block and that’s not the Blanka I like unfortunately. He still has a lot of fun and new gimmicks but his offense is generally mild with weak throws and low damage BnBs. So he has to sit on health leads and use his access to invincible attacks like EX up ball when he has meter to keep the lead.
Especially when almost all of his combos are 1 framers right? Assuming you can even do a combo w/ Blanka, SCRUB. Lets not even talk about being able to combo into electricity without jumping. Pshhh.
Meh, jabxxelectriciy just takes a bit of practice, it’s really not that hard. The block stun on Fierce electrity is ridiculous though. Iirc it’s +10.
Cr.mk link to ultra isn’t that difficult either because there’s a buffer window when executing specials/supers/ultras during recovery, so you can do the move a frame or 2 early and it will still come out. Add double tapping and it makes it that much easier. That said, the only situation I can think of where you’d really want to try and combo into ultra is if you get a nice jump in. If the opponent leaves himself open otherwise, you either won’t have time to build a charge even from hitting the cr.mk first, or if you do have the charge, you’d just be better off going directly into ultra since it has better startup and won’t scale. I guess you could make the argument that you can fish for ultra with cr.mk, but it’s a pretty shitty normal and you’d need some pretty damn good reaction time to nail it.
His only semi-useful 1 frame is knees into st.jabxxball. And frankly it’s really not especially good considering the non-plinkable jab makes it dp bait.
I guess my beef with Blanka is that his moves are extremely hard to hit cleanly. In older games, you could easily smack him out of his balls which just isn’t the case in this game. Worse still is that they’re so slow, so you’d think it would be easy, but the hitbox on them is massive so you can’t even reliably hit them with a jump attack. So what you get is a really hamfisted move that does way too much chip. I’d be more than happy if they made them way faster while changing the hitbox to something reasonable. And yes, balls are quite punishable by some of the cast, but certainly not everyone. So the characters that have a hard time with it are frustrating to play because they get shut down by stupid shit.
I’m glad to hear they fixed his normals though because like most of the returning cast he’s extremely one dimensional compared to older iterations. I hope he gets more (useful) link combos.
You’re vastly understating how bad it is for Blanka to have ball blocked.
Characters who can Super or Ultra punish on block: Abel, Akuma, Balrog, Viper, Cammy, Chun, Honda, Gen, Bison, Rose, Ryu, Sagat, Seth, …and I think Vega too.
This doesn’t include the others like Sim, Fuerte, Rufus, and Gouken who may not have Ultra or super, but who have easy damage options off block ball.
Eh, I’m not trying to be a dick on this, but the chip on ball does not nearly compensate for all of that mess of problem there…
Ball sucks on block and is punishable by nearly everyone.
If your opponent is throwing out balls full screen(which they shouldn’t be doing in the first place) and you miss hitting them out of it it is generally because you messed up, not because of some great property of the ball. It is something you would need to learn especially if it was the case that your character doesn’t have a block punish for it like Ken or an overly practical one like Gief.
Yeah I like playing the Blanka matchup with Viper because it doesn’t matter if Viper is crouching or standing if she blocks horizontal ball she can punish with HP or EX seismo to HK SJC burn kick for free 20 percent damage from almost anywhere on the screen. Normally Viper doesn’t have enough meter in that matchup to punish ball with super but I guess it is an option if you’re somehow sitting on that much meter. Have to test that in training mode I guess. Blanka players don’t try to hit Viper with ball though cuz it’s just too much free damage if she blocks.
Christ, I’m not just talking about fullscreen blocked. Dunno what kind of retards you’re playing but that’s not what I had in mind. I mean stuff like non-ex upball or anti-air horizontal ball (lol @ the mere fact this works). That shit has no business beating air attacks so easily. It just turns the match into a staring competition. I mean shit, even Daigo says he hates fighting Blanka.
Even whiffed ball is impossible to hit clean. In older games you could wail on jab and Blanka would never get through. In SF4 that’s just not gonna happen.