Yes, little known fact. gouken’s cr.LK is a godlike poke. 5 fr start-up, 4 active, 9 recovery. That sort of frame data is almost unheard of given the hitbox that it has.
It’s shitty that the only thing you can cancel to is ex tatsu and it’s a shit crouch tech. But it’s a great footsies tool.
actually since this is sort of a whining and complaining thread, I’m going to talk about how bitter I am about gouken’s footsies in general.
Gouken has phenomenal buttons. far HP, low LK, far MP, far HK, sweep. There are more too. His air buttons are absolutely godlike. Everywhere you look, there’s safety on block, good hitboxes disjointed from his body, forward movement, or something that would make them useful. Far fierce (HANDSHAKE) is probably one of the best moves in the game, up there with bison stand roundhouse and makoto MP. It’s crazy crazy good. I have won entire rounds stuffing moves, jumps, and approaches with that button. On any other character, it would be incredibly stupid. How many moves look like this:
and are active for 5 frames and recover in 13? That’s wild, man. 8 frame start-up is a little long, but it’s not a terribly big deal tbh. It’s just such a good move. And that’s just one. Look at crouch jab. Look at stand MP. See that Ryu cr.MK above? Gouken doesn’t have that problem, most of his ground normals clear his hurtbox by a significant margin.
The problem is gouken lacks the ability to maintain his position relative to better characters. The forward walkspeed is okay but because he’s fucking enormous and because his backdash and backwards walkspeed are so pitiful, his ground mobility is garbage unless he’s moving forward as quickly as he can. Here is a video depiction of Gouken’s backdash:
Not only is this fucking retarded because gouken is a ostensibly a zoning character (in the same class as Guile or Poison) that wants to maintain a certain space on screen, but it also means that even if you wanted to try to play an honest mid-range footsies game, you can’t really do that, especially online where you need to be able to instantly react to any movement from the opposing party. I mean straight-up: most online Gouken players look like lunatics. Jumping all over the place (especially backwards in lieu of walking or dashing backwards), going for the hardest reads imaginable, etc. But like… honestly, who can blame any of them? You can whiff punish rose cr.MP with st.MP, but first of all: fuck that shit, good luck getting into the right position to do that, and second: so what? You get 70 damage for your efforts because gouken can’t cancel any of his normals into damage on the ground to begin with.
Gouken’s zoning is also terrible, especially the opponent has meter or in most cases Ultra. The lack of a 2-hit fireball on demand is crippling in this game, we know that now. Without a 2-hit normal or a 2-hit fireball he can’t compete once the opponent has meter. Everything at that point becomes about the read for him. The design decision to give him fireballs that are potentially impossible to jump over (up fireballs+ex tatsu) was stupid because it means they had to make him approachable on the ground instead. This goes against everything fireball zoning is even about. It means that jumping is a bad idea against Gouken, but there’s no real incentive to jump at all because you can just walk at him and Focus. What’s he going to do, walk back to maintain space? Backdash? Sure, there are tools here, but eventually the guy gets in, and with a proper understanding of Gouken’s options it becomes very difficult for him to get away at that point.
Playing in an honest way is punished. So all that’s left for Gouken, all that’s reasonable or rewarding, is try to keep people out with his mid-tier zoning game and then get a throw and go for weird psuedo-vortex memes. No Gouken player alive has made honest gameplay work for Gouken yet at a high level. Not veloc1raptor, not lingo, not blacktoof, no one. Infiltration picks him in lulzy matchups, but he’s never going to play Gouken into anything else because there’s no real reason to.
Nothing about Gouken has ever added up. I’d rather they didn’t revisit the character unless they do some heavy rethinking of how he’s designed.
lol, man… There is always a great deal of frustration inside every Gouken player. And to think that we pay money for this??? Ah man, we should rather be living in caves and struggle with enough food rather than this shit.
Whiff-punishing isn’t intuitive to focus on if you’re only playing online, but it’s very strong offline. Our cr. HK is 6 frames, gets a knockdown and is relatively safe on block.
So maybe we don’t have something abusable like Decapre’s cr. MK to “stinger assault hands”, but maybe need to strike already at her cr. MK whiff.*
*or F+MP overhead in footsies to beat out her cr. MK even prior to that. But like the “let go of back before stand teching throws”, it’s easy to forget.
Whiff punishing with sweep is actually pretty easy, even online. But what’s your reward? Sweep blows now. Gouken gets good memes off forward throw, but nothing off sweep really except a few unsafe gimmicks.
He has other good whiff punishes too, but the reward for doing that is only in the damage you get from the normal. What’s hilarious is that the developers clearly knew this would be a problem going into Ultra because they tried to fix it pre-emptively with the far LK change. They even made EX Tatsu fucking BROKEN to try to make far LK x EX Tatsu a thing. It didn’t work because the range still isn’t good enough to cancel far LK into EX Tatsu on an extended normal. TBH it wouldn’t have really made Gouken a good character even if it did work.
Last time I watched Infiltration play Gouken (vs Alucard’s Hugo at CEO) he whiff punished with raw EX Tatsu. Maybe we should just invest in that.
A good whiff punish is cr. LK/ cr. MP to Super, but we need a full Super bar for that to work. A more realistic whiff-punish is as advertised in the Ultra update, the cr./ st. LK to EX Tatsu. Cr. LK is 1 frame faster than sweep.
Infiltration was probably so mellow in that set against a Hugo that he couldn’t even be bothered to tag a normal before the EX Tatsumaki.
Counter-hit cr. MP to MP Palm has really excellent range, by the way. It pretty much never drops. Zoning in cr. MP range, and verifying a counter-hit and then cancelling to MP Palm, could also be an area we should put more effort into.*
Also, to not immediately follow through with a safe block-string, for example after a random jump-in HP into a safe block-string like cr. HP to LP fireball, but rather leaving a small gap, will in many cases land you a counter-hit combo, instead of just a push on the opponent.
*standing ground with just a cr. MP that won’t necessarily lead to a combo (if you don’t observe that the cr. MP is about to interrupt something), isn’t necessarily all that bad, as you are 1) standing your ground, 2) able to whiff-punish with sweep, 3) anti-air if they jump.
I know another good Gouken player who prefers the fireball & anti-air range, where he can sweep if you FADC past the fireball and anti-air if you jump. Maybe that’s just the best range… I’m not sure how much I like it, personally, though…
He gets nothing off sweep?
What?
Gouken only needs 2
LMAO…
What are you guys doing on sweep knockdowns that is safe for both wake-up timings? AFAIK delay and manual timing doesn’t have any timing tolerance whatsoever and is really really easy to fuck up. Personally I don’t risk eating DP->Ultra. The fthrow setups allow for a slight alteration of timing without any risk to yourself.
But if it ain’t the village clown?
I didn’t even bother to comment on your foolish statement.
Why not address Climaxter’s question/statement instead???
AND…
I ought to attempt to get you banned, because you’re a real annoyance in these forums…
Freaking village clown :neutral:
Just change your ways a little bit, alright? That’s all it’ll take to get me off your back. How old are you? I used to be arrogant, some ten years ago, too.
Moving on… :neutral:
LMAO… Aren’t you too old for piggy back rides???
Stop deflecting and answer the question at hand…
If you use the timing sort of like you’d stuff the shoto dp for most characters, you can either Stuff the reversal / Make it whiff on standard wake… and if they press DWU you stuff or safe jump them. For shoto’s you alter the timing a bit to land early on the dwu.
There’s a small gap where if they wake up early they can dash out “SOMETIMES”… but you can alter your timing 1 or 2 frames and they dash right into a dive kick and if they DWU you faux the wake and land early.
I can get it almost anytime I want, it’s not hard once you know the timing. The reason why it’s manual it’s b/c you can’t whiff a normal to get all the effective options.
Yes I am, so…
carry one…
@NG1313 . yawn… no substance or talk about the actual game at all… (your usual, but you dream of me being banned LMAO).
So you plan on trolling or are you going to somehow defend the dumb shit that you said?
Climaxter is still waiting for a response, and I can’t wait to read it, I know it will be LOL material. 
I’m going to relax while you work the field.
Exactly… Checkmate.
You’re not supposed to talk to me. You’re supposed to talk to anyone wondering what the reward with a knockdown is.
If your moron eyes didn’t fucking notice, I didn’t ask about that.
if I recall I was never addressing you in the first place… That’s you being my fanboy again…
Oh the wackness hurts… It hurts I tell you.
So you mean to tell me you’ve been responding to me saying LMAO over something that you didn’t post AND I didn’t address or say anything to prior to you??? Definition of wackness bro…
That’s where the #3 with a side order of disenchantment comes in ol buddy for many, chasing an assumed" ethereal "strategy and while trying to assimilate, only to hear on top of the manual spacing, manual timing jump in, and canceling to dive kick, there is also a possibility of making reads thru every wakeup/dive kick scenario and the one tiny tiny grey area has to be manually timed yet again.
I see people follow it up to a certain point and I think right about here is where the disconnect comes in at…
but oh fuck yea, the memes get me almost everytime