I see a whole lot of really ambiguous or odd hitting cross-ups, and 4 series players will call them unblockables… What’s the deal with this? Haven’t we always had to guess on good cross-ups which way to block?
There are some setups that lead to true unblockables in IV. Where if you block toward it will hit normally, and if you block back it will cross up.
They’re extremely rare but some characters do have them.
The IV series is notable for using hitboxes that are not squares and rectangles. Many jump ins have hitboxes that are slanted diagonally, and iirc characters have hitboxes that expand and contract based on what they are doing.
This allows people with knowledge of those hitboxes (or just tons of experimenting) to find situations where a jump-in can be unblockable. Hold back and it’s a crossup, hold forward and it isn’t.
You could block the unblockable by blocking the crossup on the exact frame that it would hit you, but this is difficult.
There are many reasons why unblockables do not completely dominate competitive play,
- The setups for them are character specific, since characters get up at different speeds in IV, and most characters have unique hitboxes that make them immune to the unblockables.
- These setups afaik all require you to land a throw.
- The unblockables usually require you to jump within a specific one frame window. This is a lot more difficult to do than it sounds.
The only one that sees common
Yeah, sounds right to me. The only one that I can think of that sees common usage is the Akuma corner unblockable setup off of a forward throw.
Pretty much, but with certain cross ups you have to guess even more with no real prediction scale leaning to either side. Then again that happens a lot when you have command grabs and something such as a character running under a high jumping character in a limited 2D game as well.
^what the hell are you talking about?
I’ve seen the Ken unblockable used a lot.
Blanka’s gets a good amount of run in Japan, specifically against Viper cause she’s probably the easiest character to throw out of the characters it works on. It’s probably the simplest unblockable in the game because it has multiple frames of leeway on execution, and the actions to set it up can be buffered from the throw.
O_O. the hitboxes are tilted…
geez. that’s nuts. was this put in to make jumping more friendly or what?
It’s probably just an artifact from when the hitboxes were 3D.
Note that these aren’t “true” unblockables though. You can block them if you hold the correct way the moment before impact.
I don’t know much about Akuma, but it looks like Momochi is using an unblockable corner setup against this Ken:
That could be why he’s trying to Focus Dash away instead of just blocking it.
it’s cause the jump-in is set up so whichever way the opponent tries to block it’ll hit. if the opponent blocks by holding back, the attack will cross-up (causes them to get hit). if the opponent blocks by holding forward, the attack won’t cross up (causes them to get hit). it’s not a true unblockable, just real hard to block. SFIV hitboxes.