The thing that people dont realize about 3S is that most of what makes people good at 3S is that they are good at the things that they can control. There’s always going to be that situation where someone makes a ridiculously good guess on an opponent’s anti air string and parries down a long chain or cancel attempt to blow up their air parry etc. Those things dont really encompass what makes somebody good at the game. It’s just their natural ability to read a situation and cover with an educated guess with a parry on specific timing that helps the things they know how to do consistently. You can’t consistently win matches in this game just by knowing how to parry. You’re not going to be able to parry everything and I remember playing against players like J.Wong enough times in tournament to the point where I realized that they were taking advantage of my parries. He actually became good enough at the game that he told me he could look at the way my character is moving and determine if I was trying to parry high or low. This is also considering that whenever you do a parry there’s a window of frames before you can parry again. Those frames can be taken advantage of at the highest level of play to counter hit people out of abuse of parries.
Firstly as “random” as people like to make the game seem the game can never really be that random. The fact that high tiers consistently made top 8 at Evo pretty much falls into a game of consistency. If the game truly was just randomness then anybody with any character on a good day could roll themselves into top 8. I would just try Necro one Evo instead of Ibuki and just roll the die and see what happens. It’s Vegas right? Maybe I’ll get a few parries into his electric snake super which does like half stun, hit them with one more combo to stun them and then I get top 8. That’s not really the case though. Unfortunately even through the parries you have to deal with matchup issues and your opponent’s ability to cover your play style and adapt to what you are doing in the fight.
**People who play consistently in 3S take advantage of things that dont rely on the random that everyone assumes the game is from watching videos and hearing what others talk about. **What makes you consistent in 3S is knowing the things that work without relying on a parry just out in the air. Things like baiting people to whiff normals and punishing said normal with your own, red parrying one of their block strings consistently, using SGGK to always get a favorable situation during a parry, consistently confirming landed hits into damage, etc. I remember reading an article about MOV one time and he said that you can literally become a better player just by knowing a type of option select that the opponent doesn’t. This allows you to control a situation that they can’t control which limits the randomness and pushes any situation towards your favor because you will always be getting something more favorable than they are. Same thing with whiff punishing normals or red parrrying. If you dont have good spacing you’re never going to be in a good position to punish people’s whiffs. Just like in any SF game you’ll have to throw normals out when you’re in a good spacing to start an offense. If you dont the opponent will invade your space and force OS’s and throws on you.
Learning how to do things like consistently red parry things like Yun’s 123 chain, the last few hits of Akuma’s fireball super or the last hits of a blocked electric snake super from Necro allows you punish opportunities that normally aren’t possible and can’t be devised through randomness. Those things must happen in the fight once the opponent commits to them and there’s nothing stopping you from making those things work other than your ability to time a parry within 2 frames of the attack making contact while blocking. Regular parries give you a 10 frame window where you can guess on an opponent’s movement but red parries give you only 2 frames to defend yourself against a definite block string from the opponent.
It’s those higher level intangible things that will make it hardest for people to get good at this game. The randomness you can create through parries will only help you at lower levels of play where people also just play the game through systematic randomness. At higher levels of play people know how to bait attempts to parry their moves and buffer in other moves in the middle to blow up your parries, vary their normal usage with awkward slower normals that can take advantage of the recovery windows of your parries, red parrying in tight block string situations, using SGGK and other option selects to blow up abuse of guess parries, using special meaty techniques on people’s wake up that force them into heavily disadvantageous situations if they try to parry on wake up instead of block…the list goes on of consistent techniques that you must learn to apply to be consistent in the game. People who are decent at the game are good at the random parry factor but the best players know all of the spacings and techniques to cover the randomness.
I also never really understood the notion that fireballs are ineffective in 3S. You dont necessarily use fireballs to force people to jump in unfavorable situations anymore like in ST but that’s really been the last SF game of recent memory that allows you to use fireballs to such an effectiveness. Most any other SF game since Alpha 2 or 3 allows you to do things that negate the traditional methods of fireballs. SFIV gives most of the cast in the game special moves that go through projectiles during their ENTIRE active frames and a lot of those moves are moves that allow the person to traverse the entire screen length and instantly close the gap on the opponent. You also get the ability to simply dash through any fireball that isn’t an EX fireball via use of the focus dash system. A lot of the cast even has ultras that are specifically designed to put immense pressure on a character that has to rely on fireballs for offense. If they throw one bad fireball they lose all their life to some ultra that passes through projectiles like they aren’t even on the screen. ** SFIV basically gives you things to destroy fireball spacing. Ono makes a character and goes “this character has no projectiles but every single move they have passes through under or over them like some fairy tale shit have fun guuuuyyyy!!!”**
In 3S fireballs are only ineffective to the point that they dont build meter unless they physically make contact with the opponent and that the opponent can use the parry system to negate taking chip or real damage from them. This hardly makes fireballs any less effective than they are in SFIV or CVS2 (where they’re marginally effective also). In 3S nobody has a special move that has projectile invincible frames except for Dudley who absolutely needs it because his normal game and air movement doesn’t really support dealing with fireballs otherwise. You can’t just use an EX version of a horizontal movement special and blow through a projectile. There are definitely special moves that are designed to get around projectiles and some supers that can move through them but you dont just get special moves or dash techniques that literally pass through projectiles embedded into every other character in the game.
In 3S EXing your fireballs generally gives you an effective spacing tool where even if the opponent parries down your fireball you still get to keep your spacing and positioning during footsies. For Ryu or Ken if the EX fireball hits you get a clean knockdown and get to close the gap on the opponent and force them into the corner like any situation. Parrying down a shoto EX fireball doesn’t give you free damage or instantly give you great positioning over the opponent like the projectile immune specials, supers or the focus dash techniques do in SFIV. If Ryu or Ken has you in the corner they can pressure you with EX fireballs in the same way they did in ST. The best you can hope for is a double parry or red parry to negate chip damage since if spaced right they wont be able to be punished by much.
The last example would be Akuma in 3S. Akuma doesn’t have any EX moves so he has no way of improving the speed or frames on block/hit of his ground based fireballs. On the other hand he still has the best space control with fireballs in the game despite all of that. A good Akuma player in 3S must have strong control of fireballs in order to effectively space and not run into trouble because of his piss poor health. Using Akuma’s red fireball and air fireballs are key to effective spacing with him. People who are good at the game know not to parry down his red fireball unless they have a normal like Ibuki which has a hit box that passes under the fireball after a parry. Most any other character puts themselves into an unfavorable position if they try to standard parry all 3 hits of a HP red fireball. Parrying the fireball down locks you down in place longer than if you had just blocked it and you’ll end up getting rushed down by Akuma by the time you finish parrying. It even gives him enough time to dash up tatsu you into fireball super to give you basically a parry work out just for trying to not take chip damage. Good players will opt to simply block and then try to red parry the last hit of his red fireball but effectively red parrying the last hit of Akuma’s fireball is not something the average player can do to any real effectiveness. They already have trouble regular parrying the fireball. If you screw up the red parry you get knocked down and lose positioning.
Akuma’s air fireball is the single best projectile based movement control in the game. Akuma’s air fireball alone almost shuts down Hugo completely. Hugo has no EX green hand or lariat to deal with air fireball and Akuma recovers so quickly during the air fireball that even on a successful parry of an air fireball there’s usually not much he can do. His huge hit box and slow movement options also makes him more susceptible to zoning from Akuma’s grounded fireballs also. Nobody in SFIV has to respect fireballs as much as Hugo has to in 3S and that’s considering this is a game that has a wide misconception among random fighting gamers of projectiles being more ineffective than any SF game ever. Even against the standard rest of the cast there is not a whole lot you can do about Akuma’s air fireball to simply blow him up for using it. He recovers ridiculously fast from it and it generally lands at an angle that a lot of characters have trouble anti airing or dealing with effectively. If he lands it deep enough its safe even if the opponent parries it and he can always cancel it into air super to chip people down or force them to parry a ton of things at once if they try to go for the air parry route. Akuma’s air fireball is his main tool for dealing with Chun Li and it helps give him a great tool for dealing with Chun Li that most of the other cast doesn’t have.
