I’ve been in contact with the organizers of Godsgarden since they ran the first event, helping to spread the word about the tourney to the non-Japanese speaking community, and they have asked me again to help out with their upcoming events, which is the reason why this thread is now open!
Godsgarden II will be happening next year in March (probably just in time for Super Street Fighter 4? Who knows), but in the mean time there will be two events to keep the hype up, and the GG staff would love it if everyone was able to participate in some way!
November 26: Godsgarden 1.25 - Tentative name
9PM - 10PM Japan Time (approx 8am - 9am EST)
KSK, Mago, Kokujin, Daigo and Gama no Abura (voice only?) will be at the show. They will be showing everyone how to have fun with Street Fighter 4! So I’m guessing they’ll show you some tricks and neat stuff.
Date TBA: Godsgarden 1.5 - Tentative name
A three hour live program, featuring a 16 player tournament, with all characters allowed! Yes, all the console chars are allowed here!
There will be four invitees to the tournament and the other 12 will have to qualify. Will the ZAKO SABIN show up to run a train with his Seth!?
Now, where do you guys fit in? Well, they are planning to do interviews during Godsgarden 1.25 and 1.5, and I asked if they would be cool with answering questions from the SRK community, and being the awesome people that they are, they said they would definitely welcome any questions you guys had! So, all you have to do is post up in this thread, and I’ll translate the questions and pass them along to them! I don’t know how many of them will be answered – remember, the JPN players will want to ask questions too – but they will definitely do their best!
If console characters are allowed in this tournament does this mean that the Japanese player base is considering making an overall transition to console-based tourneys?
Do they complain about the same stuff we do in the states, Sagat/Ryu > FADC > Ultra, Boxer jab spamming, tiers, etc. ? Or are such things less of a focus (they just accept the game as is)?
Also, what characteristics make a fighting game “popular” in Japan? Like why do games like Tekken, Blazblue, GG, SF4 thrive in arcades, while others not so much (what the heck happened to KOF XII)? Is it pace? Character design? Balance?
What changes to SF4 are the players looking forward to/hoping for the most?
How do they view the US and European scenes, given how far apart and spread out most of it is? Do they take that into consideration whenever comparing them to Japan’s, given how console-based both of ours can be?
How much longer do they see arcade scenes lasting in Japan?
reno is gdlk!
ask them how they would feel about competitive street fighter becoming a job/their general feelings on professional gaming.
do they usually practice execution at home (assuming they own a console)? or do they just play in the arcade so much it doesn’t matter? how do they discover so much before a console release? (really hard combos or advanced things in general).
Pro athletes eat special diets, and while pro gaming may not be as physically demanding (except on the fingers), it IS mentally taxing to play at that level, so (at least in theory) a player with poor nutrition would be at a disadvantage against one that is really healthy.
I know the Japanese tend to eat better than us… but I wonder to what degree that is true- for all we know, Daigo could exist entirely on instant Ramen, putting the lie to decades of scientific research.
I’m pretty sure they just eat curry, noodles and cooked and/or raw fish. They also go to eat more Americanized stuff like McDonalds and other westernized foods but majority of the time they probably eat stuff that’s less fake ingredient ridden. Oh wait…you can smoke in Japanese arcades and Japanese people basically eat cigarettes for breakfast. Which is basically better than what we eat on average but then not because they just tarnish it all in chemicals. :lol:
Sabin was kicking people’s asses basically running on ethanol so I imagine drunk fighting is also powerful. I personally don’t think proper eating is super important to high level play. I think sleep is most important compared to anything else. Without sleep you can’t do anything period. Usually playing games turns off a lot of the other receptors of your brain and just focuses on what is required to react and think in a quick manner. Most top players have all of the nuances of high level play down so well that what makes us think before we act they can just act on cuz it’s muscle memory which cuts down on mental fatigue. Players like J.Wong and Daigo are so powerful because they were trained from the beginning to feel…not to think. That can only be done by playing for hours on end at the arcades like they did. They already got past what they need to think about and now just mostly react.
There’s a story about how J.Wong got tricked into competing into his first tournament. They told him just to play this person and then that person. Most people entering their first tournament are thinking and thinking and thinking some more while J.Wong was just thinking about playing and pressing buttons. Once you teach yourself to become a robot you are jumping over a big hurdle that most other players have a harder time overcoming. You’ll also notice that J.Wong and Daigo tend to pick characters that eliminate a lot of the situations where you are forced to make a lot of decisions quickly. They pick characters that tend to just have one or 2 best answers for every situation that work consistently and that is key to becoming consistent in fighting games. Taking out a lot of the guesswork and unnecessary fodder. Using more complicated characters like Fuerte or Viper can be fun but they run into a lot of situations where they have a bunch of different options that work ok instead of Ryu or Rufus who usually have one or 2 really good answers for everything offensively or defensively. Less thinking rewards you with more opportunities to find mistakes instead of making mistakes yourself just to push mistakes out of an opponent.
People who think too hard in fighting games usually get killed. Bruce Lee would be a good fighting gamer in that he would know not to think…but feel. You want to be able to use just enough thinking to quickly feel out your opponent. Thinking requires your brain to pause and you can’t pause much at all in a heated fighting game battle. That thought process that is used in other strategic games like Chess is not quite as present in games like SF. There is thinking involved but the majority of it has to be processed into quick reaction muscle memory. If you are using thinking that requires you to open up more parts of your brain you lose reaction and will basically lose for free in a game that moves as fast as SF. All of your longer term memory can only be used inbetween rounds or matches. Once the match starts it’s basically back to zoning in on your muscle memory.
no i’m not Japanese and i don’t live and play over there, but i have thought about some of these questions myself and these are the answers i came up with
ask them how they would feel about competitive street fighter becoming a job
while i’m not sure about some of the other players, I know daigo was putting in over 40 hours a week, more than alot of people work these days!
how do they discover so much before a console release? (really hard combos or advanced things in general).
the fact that they have 6 months before console comes out helps, that and they all communicate with each other - spreading the info fast… one person will tell another, then the other will find something to add, then another will find a counter, so then the original person will have to find something else… and so on… the more fierce a competitive scene is, the faster knowledge will be gained all around… and fighting scenes don’t get more intense than in japan
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good post by DevilJin - a big factor about what makes japan so great is part of the fact that they just do things by reflex… alot of the time without thinking… because they have so much experience that they just know what to do at a certain time… like he says, when you have to THINK about how to get out of a situation, you won’t react to something you should have punished for maximum damage and lose momentum
Yeah it’s easy to discover stuff quickly when you are in Japan. Especially when they are in a country where discussing high level strats in fighting games is basically a culture. Discovering those crazy option selects or crazy just frame combos after studying mook guides it’s just something that’s regularly done and when you have that many people actively doing these things it just happens that much quicker.
They pretty much are just applying the same things they’ve used in other fighting games and applying them to newer games. Most of the stuff people are finding out in SFIV is the same shit they were trying out in older fighting games (super jump cancelling, kara cancelling, focus cancelling, option selecting etc.). They’ve been doing those same tactics for years in other fighting games and all they’re doing are just retesting the same glitches on a new game and seeing what happens. To a lot of people newer to the scene it may look like they are just crazy information crunching aliens but essentially they are just reapplying the same stuff they were doing before into a game that with such lenient commands makes it all that much easier to come up with and implement. Like practically everything in the game can be cancelled or kara’d in some way because of the way the inputs work.
It’ll be interesting to hear the answers directly from themselves but the answers are pretty common sense. All you need is even the slightest know how of the Japanese scene and the rest you can put together yourself. They may have specific stories or what not but the idea of how it all came to be is far from rocket science. It’s more or less fate really.
If there is no SSF4 arcade release, what will the arcade community do?
Do “pros” have jobs?
How important is frame data to the SF4 community?
How can players afford playing the game since i hear “they play many hours?”
I would be glad to wake up early to answer their questions.
