I picked up Continuum Shift a few weeks ago and was pretty overwhelmed by it.
I played as Hakumen for a while because he seemes reasonably straight forward, but I feel like I’m not quite ‘getting it’. I can land one BnB and generally hold my space with pokes, I need to learn how to work distortion drives, mix-ups and other techniques into my gameplan.
Anyone got any good resources for learning the game? Not specifically with Hakumen. I’m tempted to play Bang because his theme music kicks ass.
Do you have the extend version?
That’s a good start with Hakumen, really; His DDs aren’t really that important to his gameplay - you can use Yukikaze against people who like to do meaty attacks on your wakeup, but Shippu is really only very selectively useful.
At the most basic level, his mixup is 2B or 3C (Okay, if you don’t understand numeric notation, take a moment to go here P4A - How do I read combos…?)) which are both lows, vs 6B, which is an overhead. You can mix in throws, of course, as well. When you’re prepared for more advanced stuff, you start messing around with TK Tsubaki. But fundamentally, mixup in BB is no different from mixup in any game - High/Low/Throw/Frametrap.
You should also try to get an understanding how to apply Hakumen’s drive.
There are basically ~4 components to being good at BB:
#1: Understand the reach, speed and properties of all your attacks and use them appropriately.
#2: Understand how your character moves and the different ways you can approach an opponent, and then use them all to avoid being predictable.
#3: Understand what your mixup/pressure options are, and use them.
#4: Learn combos off bloody everything and be able to confirm into them - at a minimum, you should be able to convert to a combo off a standard ground starter, your overhead, a throw, and an anti-air, plus variants for each of those when your opponent is cornered (or will be pushed to the corner early in the combo). Ideally, you should also have combos for a standard starter on a crouching opponent, a “punish” combo for things like blocked DPs that uses a “big” starter, and a counterhit combo for your basic starter, as well as any character specific stuff (such as combos off counters for Hakumen.)
Also, it might (or might not, dunno) make more sense for this thread to be in the BB section.
I think this is fine for the Newbie Dojo. Like Airk said, learn to combo off of everything. The first 3 he listed are probably more important but essentially what you are doing in BlazBlue is maximizing damage off of fairly random hits (random in the sense that your opponent can defend any move you throw at them.) You’ll obviously be playing mix-up games, frame-traps, and oki setups but whenever you get those hits in you should be maximizing the damage you get off of it. Reasonably, for a beginner, you should be shooting for 2-3k damage per combo. This is character dependant but 2k combos are all pretty easy and it’s about 1/4th of the opponents health. You’ll drop some combos but that’s just how it goes in the beginning. This isn’t a hard and fast rule by any means, because resets and burst baits are totally legit too.
This might seem like a daunting task to combo off of everything, but if you scroll through the combos on dustloop.com for just about every character (I haven’t looked every single one so I can’t say for certain) there are going to be common combo enders. *Noel’s for example:
(starter…)>6A>6C>6D>236A>66C>j.D>d.6B>d.6C>5B>5C>236D
A super common ender for Hakumen is:
236B>623A (link) 2C>j.B>j.2A (link) Air-dash j.B>j.2A (link) Air-dash j.2A (link) j.C
This is the optimal way to end most of her combos. She has some common enders for corner combos too, but this is going to end like 75% of her midscreen combos. So you will have to memorize the enders to your character and all the chains that lead to those enders. So Noel, I have to memorize the ender I wrote up there and I know that 5A> will lead into this and so will 5B>2B>. So hop on over to dustloop and check out the character forums. It’s much better than here at SRK. SRK knows street fighter and Marvel, but dustloop knows BB.
*Those combo strings are from BBCSE. If you need the combos for CS1 they are in the dustloop archives.