Heya Rugi
since you asked for critique I thought I’d share my opinions with you. Now, first off, I’m no Gouki expert by any stretch of the imagination but I play him as my 2nd next to my main Viper. One of my hobbies of late is watching a LOT of e-sports videos (SF4, 3S, BB, GG and Starcraft) and I so happened to come across this thread. You’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on your vids and rightly so, but I feel a lot of people are missing a lot of mistakes you made or not pointing them out out of respect or w/e. I just thought I’d share some of the things I noticed because IMO you seem to be mixing expert play with some unnecessary mistakes.
First of all, you take WAY too much free damage. In the vs Sagat videos (mitmot or smt?) you take at least 30% of damage simply from walking into fireballs. As Gouki that is almost as vital a mistake as you can make. With his stamina you simply can’t afford these types of errors.
Second, you say you are a zoning type of player, often lurking for counter opportunities and whatnot, and that’s ofc a valid tactic. However that strategy hinges completely on your ability to do exactly that, counter. More importantly to make those counters “count”. First, I’ve noticed multiple times that you eat a jump-in due to your staying in a crouching position. I’m assuming you’re trying to get a SRK out but whether it was due to lag (willing to give you the benefit of the doubt here) or due to poor execution you’d basically end up eating the jump and the consequent combo. Now the players you played against didn’t really capitalize on it as much as they could have, but there’s a serious hole in your game right there. You’re baiting your opponent to go for big openings and punishing them for it, but when you miss the punishment you basically just give them a big opening.
Third, as stated above, you need to work on making your counters count. The idea of the counter strategy is that you are under pressure (or at least on the defensive) most of the time and, while taking the occasional damage from a misread or a bad guess, you are able to make up for it by making that one big opening count for all the damage that’s been done to you. Right now, you need too many openings to deal major damage imho. I advise you to go into training mode with attack data on and find out what Akuma’s most damaging punish combo’s are. Your favourite seems to be cr mp into BnB. You could add a ton more damage to this by making it into a cr. mp xx Hado > FADC > s. HP into BnB. Just one example. As Akuma you tend to have plenty of EX (I find) because of the fireball zoning and multi-hit combos.
Finally, I think you could improve in the area of ways of getting in. Again, against the sagat you got outzoned and basically your only way of getting in was EX flip, which you often missed (got blocked), then you resorted to blocking and got pushed back to the edge of the screen. All in all that cost you an EX stock and a shitton of chip damage and gained you nothing. I think you could work on slowly getting closer and closer into Sagat’s “unsafe zone” (if he even has one :S) where you could at least make him more wary of throwing out Tiger shots. Basically in that match I think you lacked an up close pressure game.
Overall your play is solid with decent zoning, but I think these are some areas where you could improve. Again, take this for what it’s worth because ofc I can’t judge what influence lag had on your play. Just my observations, and you did ask for them
p.s. Also tick throws make for easy, non scaling damage. I didn’t see too many of them, but they can be a valuable tool in your bag of tricks.