How to deal with Akuma

System_1 · December 22, 2008, 9:07pm

Lol, that sucks

MrQuotes · December 22, 2008, 9:37pm

Ken: mp shoryuken says FUCK YOU to air fireballs due to complete invulnerability startup

Lv.32_Z-Ism_Rose · December 22, 2008, 10:43pm

T Hawk:
Couldn’t T Hawk’s rising hawk go thru the air fireball if he does it at the very last possible moment? Not a hawk player but this kinda hit me earlier. Rising hawk goes thru fireballs on start up, and if possible, wait till the last possible frame to go thru it. Might be able to nail Akuma in the process as well if you did it late late enough…

Just an idea.

UltraDavid · December 22, 2008, 11:02pm

Presumably you can make him land on an attack, right? Do you just mean that you can’t do an attack after he lands? I mean everyone else who jumps or does something that puts them into the air can get hit by an attack they land on.

Heh this is getting kinda retarded, if you can’t even make him land on something.

gridman · December 22, 2008, 11:23pm

dont us hawk players wish.

AudioCG · December 22, 2008, 11:24pm

I think its only like that after the air fireball, I could be wrong though.

brian · December 22, 2008, 11:41pm

I mean you can’t make him land on an attack. He has tripguard after doing an airfireball, so to speak, unlike any other jump attack.

System_1 · December 22, 2008, 11:58pm

That’s so lame. If he does end up getting patched, I’d like to see him get some landing frames on that. Wouldn’t change things too much, but I’d still like it to happen.

Person-Man · December 23, 2008, 12:52am

I play Blanka, and if he tries to turtle air hadouken, if you’re at some distance (at least quarter screen away) you can just jump over the fireball and punch that nigga in the face for free

I use jump strong air to air simply because it looks cool, but j.HK is prolly better

As for offensive air fireball traps, can’t really say what to do other than block it and Reversal up ball whatever he trys to do next, ESPECIALLY if he’s trying to Raging Demon

reversal eletricity can work if he’s try to tick throw or just hit you, but you eat bad damage if he 1) SRKs, 2) RDs, 3) ground fireball

but go for it anyways cuz zapping Akuma is just fun

UltraDavid · December 23, 2008, 1:38am

Gotcha.

So it doesn’t work?

Unscrubscribe · December 23, 2008, 2:03am

I’m sure many have seen/read this, but for the record I think it’ll be nice to have here. Excerpt taken from Sirlin’s blog, emphasis mine.

Sirlin's Blog:

Then I made one small change that made a world of difference. I allowed his air fireball to be performed very low to the ground. In the original game, it has a minimum jump distance before it can come out, but I removed this. Now it became possible to do a ?tiger knee? air fireball, meaning you roll the joystick from down to forward to up/forward (for a jump), then wait a moment for Akuma to barely leave the ground, then press punch to get an immediate air fireball. This turned out to be way more fun and versatile than I realized it would be.

Akuma can attempt many, many traps and setups with this. An example is immediate air fireball (I?ll call it TK air fireball, referencing the tiger knee motion), then land right next to the opponent with the cover of the air fireball. Then do, say, low strong, TK air fireball and land right next to them again. Then do low strong, low strong (pushes you farther away), and TK air fireball to reset the trap. This time, after you do a normal move or two, jump straight up and do an air fireball.

I just listed three different air fireball situations there: one TK from close, one TK from farther, and one where you jump straight up and don’t do the tiger knee technique. Many characters have to do a different move or act at a different time in order to deal with each of those situations. **Against new players, I can create what looks like an inescapable lockdown, but really it?s a mixup that gives the opponent several chances to get out. It?s all an illusion.

I tested this trap against all 17 characters and every single one can get out.** Ken can do a medium dragon punch (invulnerable on the way up) to ignore the entire situation. Zangief can use his green hand. Bison can just jump strong. Everyone can do something. Also remember that if these air fireballs hit, they deal only a couple pixels of damage. If they hit as Akuma lands, he can attempt to go into a damaging combo, but due to the way the game intentionally slows down when fireballs hit, this combo will fail about 50% of the time no matter how good you are.

I see the Ken suggestion already posted.

desynk · December 23, 2008, 2:09am

Yeah but that was written a while ago, before this:

I played Damdai again and it gave me a better sense of what’s going on with Akuma. On the plus side, I think I surprised him that Fei Long could win at all and that Sagat can do ok. I did just fine with Bison. But yeah, even factoring out that Damdai is a very good player in general, there are problems. I recommend a patch at some point.

First, the Raging Demon. It seems not to be functioning as designed. One thing that DOES seem to be working correctly with it is the anti-air case. If you jump in at Akuma (say, jump roundhouse) and he makes you land right inside the Raging Demon, you can STILL jump out. I’m pretty sure you can get out 100% in that case. Even though I hit people with that all day, I have never been hit with it myself at times when I remembered to hold up.

But what about all the tricky setups with Raging Demon? Holding up is supposed to activate your pre-jump frames which are immune to Raging Demon. Based on playing Damdai (who lives far away from me so there is some lag…), it seems that Raging Demon is inescapable if I block his air fireball low. This includes times that I hold up before he even does the Raging Demon. This is contrary to what Buktooth just posted above, so I don’t know if it has to do with online / offline play, or what. But it seemed totally guaranteed if I blocked low, every time.

This gives Akuma a mixup that’s a lot more deadly that I intended. If you block the air fireball high and hold up to avoid the Raging Demon, you are open to getting combo’d by low forward -> something scary. As James Chen said, it isn’t SO bad for Akuma to have a throw/low attack mixup, but it really is so bad when guaranteed Raging Demon practically forces you to stand. It is not supposed to be guaranteed there.

Another concern with the Raging Demon, though this one only happened rarely. There were a few times, definitely the minority, where I blocked Damdai’s air fireball standing, I knew he would Raging Demon, so I held up before he even did it, and I still got hit. Most of the time, I jumped out, but I don’t see how it’s possible I got hit ever in that situation. It could be lag, but I don’t know about that. Perhaps more players can post about that issue.

Incidentally, the Raging Demon has around 9 frames of startup, and it probably wouldn’t hurt to increase that slightly.

Sabre has pointed out the strange hitboxes on the red fireball startup that allow Akuma to avoid tick throws. That’s not intended either. Sabre and others have also brought up the very high priority of some normal attacks like stand forward/roundhouse and jump forward/roundhouse. I did know that those were better attacks than Ken/Ryu’s, but I didn’t realize during development how much better. Possibly none of Damdai’s wins against me had to do with these hitboxes, but I would put it in the category of bug fix requests, along with the Raging Demon-while-ducking issue.

If priority on normal moves wasn’t really where his wins came from, then where DID they come from? A good chunk of them were from me standing up into combos while trying to avoid guaranteed Raging Demons, as I mentioned above. But another chunk was because of Akuma’s jab dragon punch. I think it turned out to be a really good idea that only Ken’s medium dragon punch is totally invulnerable on the way up. If Ken wants to do his safe jab dragon punch, he can at least be hit by well-timed attacks somehow. But I forgot to give Akuma that same treatment. After I work very hard to get in against Damdai, he has no real decision to make. Jab dragon punch no matter what, and against many characters he’s safe. If he happens to hit, big damage. Really, he should be forced to open himself up with a medium dragon punch like Ken has to, in this situation.

Another chunk of Damdai’s wins came from really old school, solid tactics with ground fireball and sweep or whatever. Nothing new there, and Damdai can pull off those same things with Ryu. But Akuma having access to that good of an old-school ground fireball game was a bad idea on my part. I think it’s fair to say (Damdai, correct me if you disagree) that when Damdai just did air fireball tricks all day, I had many answers. There’s a lot of nuance, a lot of room for me to get in somehow. But once he changed his plan away from mostly air fireball stuff to a mix of that + Ryu ground tactics, that is what put it over the top. And again, when I get past all that…jab dragon punch no matter what.

There’s some things that take a really long time to sort out. Like years. There’s other things that are just oversights and bugs. Maybe this is controversial, but I think the air fireball is the first kind of thing. I don’t feel defeated by it (yet?), and I do think it makes Akuma unique and that he really can fit into the rest of the game. With bug fixes, oversights corrected, and a few extra recovery frames on ground fireball, Akuma makes more sense to me.

I don’t think it’s worth it to look back, but I know you guys can’t resist so I’ll just say one quick thing about that. I was afraid all along that something would threaten balance that wasn’t even on our list of possibilities. Everyone was afraid of things like Guile’s super or Ken’s fierce dragon punch, or T.Hawk in general, or 5 or 6 other things, while Akuma was generally rated one of the worst. I even reduced his damage penalty at one point try to get him rated higher, and maybe shouldn’t have.

Anyway, I’d like to try to beat down some more Akumas for a while and see how it goes. It’s tough when only Damdai has scared me so far.

System_1 · December 23, 2008, 3:44am

Wasn’t unscrubscribe talking about the air fireball?

Shishioh · December 23, 2008, 4:03am

Sort of like Ken after Reppa: I you didn’t hit him just as he hit the ground, try throwing him.

margalis · December 23, 2008, 5:16am

The Rising Hawk seems to at least trade with the air fireball most of the the time.

UltraDavid · December 23, 2008, 5:18am

^ Which strength?

Today I got jump kicked at the end of my raging demon even though I was holding back to try to block. Guess it doesn’t have instant recovery.

margalis · December 23, 2008, 6:22am

I switch up between fierce and jab, at this point I can’t say which one is best for what.

gridman · December 23, 2008, 6:49am

He cant do jack shit against jump back air fireball. The only thing that MIGHT work and itd be incredibly situational, is a preemptive jump rh. If akuma jumps in (without crossing up) with an air fireball, hawk could do it late i THINK…again, itd have to be a really REALLY badly timed one since the air fireballs hitbox is ginormous (lol is that a word? its not red underlined) and hawks invincibility frames dont last that long. this match SUCKS for hawk. especially since you cant even safe jump akuma.

orochizoolander · December 23, 2008, 6:58am

Dictator’s jmp against far air fb is pretty good.

brian · December 23, 2008, 7:01am

If he does jump back airfireball, why dont you just progress slowly towards his corner?

If he does jump straight airfireball, you can hit that with jump straight dive right?

And if he jumps towards airfireball, I guess theres various possibilities like the srk perhaps…