Hakan is way better in AE. Essentially all aspects of his game are improved: ability to oil up and stay oily, defensive options, antiairs, air-to-airs, mid-range options, and up-close options are all better.
Oiliness
Lk oil is extremely fast, there are literally normal moves in this game that take longer to whiff. I didn’t try t+mp xx lk oil on a blocking opponent to see how punishable it was (really wish I’d remembered that!), but just looking at how fast lk oil is, I would say it’s probably pretty safe against characters without good fast ranged attacks. Lk oil is also fast enough that you should be able to use it to buffer into u1 or u2 in punishment situations. And I’m sure you’ll be able to do focus crumple, lk oil, u2 on everyone now on even a lv2 crumple (right now it doesn’t work on everyone unless you do lv3 focus crumple).
Mk, hk, and ex oil are noticeably faster as well, although still not extremely fast. Ex oil canceled into coward crouch does seem to give you a shortened version of ex oil, just like how when you get hit out of it you don’t get the full oilup benefits.
As for the oiliness duration granted by each oilup, I didn’t notice them being any different. Like was said in the dev notes, slide oil followup seems to grant lk oil-like duration.
And obviously, the best thing is that oils stack. So like say I do lk oil to get 6 game seconds of oil, then wait for 3 seconds before doing another 6-second lk oil, then let the oil run out. In Super I would have been oily for only 9 seconds, since I would have had 3 seconds before resetting my oiliness anew with 6 more seconds. But in AE I’m oily for 12 total seconds, since the game just adds the new 6 seconds of lk oil onto the end of the first lk oil even though the first lk oil hasn’t run out yet.
You can only be continuously oily for 30 seconds at a time. The timer starts once you’re first oiled and then counts to 30 or until you run out of oil regardless of how long your individual oils last. So like if I do 15 second ex oil and then immediately another 15 second ex oil, I’m oily for 30 total seconds. If I do ex oil then wait 14 seconds before doing another ex oil, I’m still oily for 30 total seconds. If I had waited an extra second until my ex oil ran out then immediately did a new ex oil, my timer would have been reset.
You can’t go over the 30 second limit, so that’ll impact which oilups you want to use. Hk oil gives you 12 seconds, so using 3 would give you you 36 seconds of oiliness if not for the 30 second limit. You’re better off doing 2 hk oils to get 24 seconds, then another lk oil for 6 seconds instead of hk. That way you still get 30 seconds of oiliness but don’t give up any opportunities or risk being unsafe by using the much longer hk oilup.
The result of all this is that I found myself being oiled almost all the time. In fact, it was so easy to be oiled all the time that I kinda didn’t even realize I was still oiled at first. I could feel myself just assuming that after a little while I no longer had oil, and so I started to play a Drykan game even though I didn’t need to yet. I’ve gotten used to almost never being able to play a strong Oilkan wakeup game because that just almost never comes up in Super, but I had oil on my wakeup all the time in AE! I actually got wakeup backdnc cr lp xx lp slide, and the crowd went oooo heh. I could do it in Super and I played against many of the same people who were went oooo, they’d just never seen it because it came up so rarely.
It’s not that hard to keep track of how long you’re gonna be oiled. I just looked at the clock when I first oiled and made a mental note to keep track of it until almost 30 seconds later (like if it said 98, just keep in mind that at around 70 I’d probably want to try to back off and re-oil). And once you get a few lk oils in, you can quit worrying about oiling for a bit. I love that you can do lk oil 3 times, wait 15 seconds before oiling again during which time you can just play mid-range or meaty or wakeup games, then lk oil another few times and do it all over again. Once you oil up a few times, there’s basically no oil-related reason to do the slide oil followup imo.
It was already smart for Hakan’s opponents to pressure him right off the bat in order to prevent him from oiling, but now that’s gonna be a lot more important. Oiliness has a ton of useful applications in basically everything, turning a just-ok character in Drykan into top tier Oilkan.
Slide
Lp slide starts up much faster. It was rumored that Hakan could only combo cr lp and t+lk into lp slide when he was oily, but that’s not true, he can do it dry too. He can combo into slide at max range of those moves and even in footsies when he hits something the opponent sticks out. There’s probably a range limit to how far away the opponent can be when hit (ie it’s probably not gonna work on Dhalsim far st hp), but it didn’t come up in the games I played.
Speaking of footsies, the lp slide buff makes Hakan’s mid-range game much stronger. No longer do we have to rely on very slow moves like cr mk and t+mp for option select buffering into slide. Cr lp and t+lk are so much faster on startup and recovery that they basically become like Zangief lp/lk buffer ex hand, except lp slide doesn’t cost any meter.
The st lp to cr lp/t+lk doesn’t feel any easier unfortunately, but that’s a combo we’re going to have to get down really strongly because it’s really, really important for slide combos. Hakan no longer has to rely on unsafe normals like cr mk and t+mp for up-close mixups into slide. In Super you basically have to confirm a jump hk before doing cr mk xx slide because cr mk was so unsafe on block (-6) that you really couldn’t just throw it out there against lots of opponents. But now we can confirm st mp or st lp to cr lp, which is an easy hit confirm (although a 1-2 frame link), is safe on block, and starts up fast enough that it can keep people from jumping away.
The only problem with lp/lk xx lp slide is that it does significantly less damage than cr mk or t+mp into hp slide. So for punishments and guaranteed jump-in combos, those combos are still the way to go. There’s also still definitely a place for them in option select buffers in footsies, since they hit areas on screen that cr lp and t+lk might not be as good at.
The oilup followup looks really strange, but whatever heh. I’m not sure how often it’ll be worth it though. You don’t have time to do a safe jump after or anything. It’s basically like the same amount of time you have after slide+splash into lk oil in Super, that is, not very much. In AE though, with lk oil recovering so much faster, I think it’s probably better to just do slide+splash then lk oil, because that way you get more damage, stay on the same side, get the same amount of oiliness, and also have more time to do stuff after. Seems like maybe the only reason to do slide+oil is to switch sides heh.
Command Grabs
Dry spd range is still awful. I literally stood right next to an Ibuki player on his wakeup, did ex spd, and whiffed. His spds are also still throwable, which sucks but isn’t unexpected. I didn’t notice any extra range on oiled spd, but then I never really tested it either, I just did it from ranges I already knew worked in Super.
All the ddt setups I tried still worked. Ex spd into t+hk into lk ddt, hp spd into step toward hk ddt, toward+mp xx mk ddt on a standing opponent, ddt into dash toward into jump over lk ddt, and late jump hk into lk ddt on a standing opponent were all still fine. Yay! Did you guys know that Ibuki’s semi-grab special thing beats ddt? I worked in Super too, just tested it, I just never knew.
I never tried ddt into coward. I didn’t even think about it, would have tried it if I had. But in theoryfighting with it, I don’t really see how it’ll be very useful for anything other than building meter from far away.
Dash Normal Canceling
I didn’t notice any differences in how dnc worked. At first I had a really hard time doing it and thought maybe something was different about the timing, but now I’m pretty sure that was just because the setup I was playing on at Super Arcade has laggy monitors.
As for the rumored extra slidiness or whatever, I didn’t notice that at all. I did focus toward dnc cr lk through a fireball and it worked like always, I stopped immediately upon pressing cr lk. I did the same with t+hk and it worked like always too, giving the hk more range than when dry but not more than when oiled in Super. It could be that other normals gain extra slidiness, like maybe more normals get the t+hk and cr hp effect of moving much farther forward when done in a dash, but I didn’t get a chance to test that out.
Backdnc seemed the same too, felt like the window to cancel it with a normal was still just as small.
Cr lp or t+lk xx lp slide also means we have better options in dnc. Used to be that when doing focus dnc or backdnc through an opponent’s move, some (most) moves would recover in time before cr mk or t+mp could hit them for a combo into slide, so I got used to just always doing dnc low short chains into mixups. But now, with 4-frame cr lp and t+lk comboing into slide, that’s no longer a problem. We’ll be able to combo into slide for knockdown into mixup or oil much more easily. The same is probably true for antiair focus dnc st lp cr lp xx slide. A hit confirm slide combo or mixup as an antiair is pretty nice.
I still don’t expect much use from crisco combos. Yeah, it looks awesome to do t+mp fadc dnc cr mk xx hp slide, I just don’t really think it’s worth losing 2 bars of meter for like 50 extra more damage very often.
Normals
I didn’t really get a chance to use antiair st hp or t+lp. I hope their rumored stronger hitboxes are noticeable! I did do antiair t+mp and t+hp, and they seemed the same. Air to air neutral jump mp causes a juggle situation now. Not a big deal I don’t think, but hey, it’s nice.
I also didn’t think about trying to link cr lk into anything else. I doubt that works, but it’s definitely worth a try.
Meaty ambiguous crossup jump hk and jump mk still worked. And now that you can do quick st lp to cr lp or t+lk to hit confirm and combo into slide after instead of super slow and unsafe cr mk, they’re even more dangerous.
Obviously the big normal buff on the ground is cancelable t+lk. This is good for lp slide combos, but also nice for uncombos with t+lk xx lk ddt against standing opponents in footsies etc, much like cr lp xx lk ddt can be used in Super.
Other than that, his normals pretty much seemed the same to me. I didn’t do any rigorous testing looking for safer recoveries or faster startups, but nothing jumped out as being noticeably different. I also didn’t use all his normals, so maybe like t+hp or dry cr hp are different in some way, I dunno.
Super and Ultras
I didn’t use his super. Yyyyep.
His ultras seemed the same. I didn’t really notice them doing more damage or really being different in any way.
Inputs
Unfortunately I still had an issue with getting spd instead of slide. But I have an unusually hard time with input control, so that might just be me.
Overall
Hakan is gonna be played very differently in AE, I think.
Your game as a Hakan player is gonna be much more focused on oiling. It wasn’t before just because you too often had to wait for a knockdown to oil up, you had to trade meaty pressure for oiling, and your oiliness didn’t even last that long anyway, so lots of Hakans just kinda dropped it. But now, you’re really gonna wanna oil up more often at the start so that you can enjoy all of Oilkan’s benefits much more easily. The normals you use in footsies are gonna be different, and you’re gonna be buffering into lp slide a lot more. Your antiair game will be more consistent, meaning you won’t have to let opponents get near you as easily as in Super. You’re gonna use different, much safer and more effective combos. Your meaty mixups will be stronger. Your dnc game will be stronger. Your wakeup will often be oily and as a result will be stronger, with real and consistent access to focus backdnc, backdnc, and oiled ex spd range.
I see him beating lots of characters. I see him being tournament-worthy high mid tier at worst and top tier at best. Considering the nerfs to Gief, Honda, and Abel, I think he might even be the best grappler in Arcade Edition.
He’s an extremely complex character, and that didn’t change. If anything, the increased importance of his 1 and 2-frame links and dash normal canceling make him even harder in terms of execution. But when we do finally get good with him, imo he’s gonna be one of the best, most fun, and most creative characters in SSF4AE.
