Hello. I have been trying to get better with Ken. Today I had recorded some matches and was wandering if anyone has some input on things I can improve on or general tips that I’m not utilizing. Thank you.
I’m still somewhat new and definitely not a great player but I can try to offer you some advice to help improve your Ken. Forgive me if some of this seems obvious.
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Work on your anti-air game. You’re letting people jump in on you too much. Try to train yourself to be ready to react to jump in attacks. Your best anti-airs are MP Shoryuken and cr.HP. Taking the option to jump at you away from your opponent will limit them and make it easier for you to win.
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Stop relying so much on jump in attacks for damage. Try to earn your wins from the ground. Most good players won’t let you jump in on them much anyway. It’s okay to test their ability to anti-air, especially with cross-up EX Tatsu, but once you realize they are waiting for it you gotta stop.
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Don’t do wake up or raw Ultra. It’s easy to react to and even easier to punish. Practice doing a combo into your Ultra or save it for a whiff punish. I find that blocking on wake up is usually the best option.
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Optimize your punish damage. If someone whiffs a Shoryuken or some other unsafe move in front of you try using cl.HK xx HP Shoryuken (meterless punish), cl.HK xx EX Tatsu (does a little more damage but costs one bar of meter), or even Ultra 2 if you have it.
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You’ll want to practice some bnb combos and learn to confirm if the opponent is blocking or being hit by the beginning of it. If they are being hit you can safely combo into your otherwise unsafe moves like Shoryuken. If they are blocking you can go for a kara throw set up or something. There’s guides here that can help you with what combos to use.
There’s more I can think of but I gotta stop there cuz I’m at work and need to do some stuff. Hope that will help you. This Ken forum is pretty dead but maybe someone more experienced will give you better advice than I’m capable of.
Thanks man. That was real thought out. I will hit the training stage up and try it out. I have noticed it is pretty dead here tho. Thanks again!
You arent shutting down any of your opponents options. Think about what your opponent can do to advance on you, and use counters for them. The opponent can jump, walk and block, use a forward advancing move or focus dash in.
if your opponent wants to jump in, hit them with a MP shoryu, a crouching hard punch, or meet them in the air with a hard punch.
if your opponent wants to walk into your space, hit them with a crouching medium kick
if they want to use an unsafe forward advancing move, like juri’s spin kick (in the first match you played, that happened to you), block it and punish, or stay out of it’s range and whiff punish it, or even react to it. This option is often very unsafe and is easy to counter.
If they want to focus dash in, react to the focus attack with a low forward into DP or ex Tatsu.
These are just a few non character specific options that you MUST be able to defeat when playing street fighter.
All 4 of those options above are unsafe, and you will get absolutely crushed by fundamentally horrible players unless you can counter those 4 options.
You may ask, what if the opponent is being the defensive player, and they are waiting for me to do one of these 4 options? that is where the footsies game starts. I simply can’t explain footsies better than juicebox, a competitive fighting game guru who knows so much about the topic, i put a video a 48 minute video explaining footsies by him at the end of this post, its an insanely interesting video and will surely make you better at street fighter if you apply these principles . In footsies, you use those 4 options above, including a few more that have developed among the evergrowing fighting game meta that you will learn in Juiceboxes video.
I’m sorry if i didnt do a proficient job explaining footsies and controlling space, but frankly the topic takes almost a whole book to cover.
I am not a great player at all but from what I’ve seen here :
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Your defense overall seems weak, it is kinda like you are pressing random buttons a lot of the times (I felt this mostly against the blue Ken (first one) where you took a lot of counter hit shoryuken during the first round). You also look very easy to cross-up/jump-in.
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Don’t random your ultra like that. It’s not even random because in most cases it was obvious that it would not hit and you kinda excepted them to be dumb and walk into it.
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Don’t random your shoryuken unless you have two meters and you can cancel it (most useful if you play U1).
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Use more of the tricks ken has with is f+mk/f+hk. Step Kick / Fake kick into c.mk + whatever / hk overhead / Fake kick into throw / Fake it into shoryuken if you can cancel it (not the best) / Kara Throw
I like for example to do some fake kicks into throw sometimes and when they are well used to tech throw I try a c.mk + shoryuken (or just raw shoryu) and if I have U1 I cancel it into it. It worked plenty of times.
- Learn some of the grounded combos starting with light attacks (hit confirm combos)
Also there is a Momochi video on Youtube where he tells the strenghs of Ken and this is were I picked up most of my starting knowledge about the character.
You arent shutting down any of your opponents options. Think about what your opponent can do to advance on you, and use counters for them. The opponent can jump, walk and block, use a forward advancing move or focus dash in.
if your opponent wants to jump in, hit them with a MP shoryu, a crouching hard punch, or meet them in the air with a hard punch.
if your opponent wants to walk into your space, hit them with a crouching medium kick
if they want to use an unsafe forward advancing move, like juri’s spin kick (in the first match you played, that happened to you), block it and punish, or stay out of it’s range and whiff punish it, or even react to it. This option is often very unsafe and is easy to counter.
If they want to focus dash in, react to the focus attack with a low forward into DP or ex Tatsu.
These are just a few non character specific options that you MUST be able to defeat when playing street fighter.
You may ask, what if the opponent is being the defensive player, and they are waiting for me to do one of these 4 options? that is where the footsies game starts. I simply can’t explain footsies better than juicebox, a competitive fighting game guru who knows so much about the topic, heres a 48 video explaining footsies by him, its an insanely interesting video and will surely make you better at street fighter if you apply these principles >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQQCan5oo90. In footsies, you use those 4 options above, including a few more that have developed among the evergrowing fighting game meta that you will learn in Juiceboxes video.
I’m sorry if i didnt do a proficient job explaining footsies and controlling space, but frankly the topic takes almost a whole book to cover.
Sorry it took so long to respond. I broke my phone. But @DanggMang - that video was a lot of knowledge to take in at once. It definitely helped my neutral game. Thanks for that. And as for the rest, focus attacks are a hell of a lot less threatening even if they cancel with a backdash. Cr-hp isalmost singlehandedly boosting my defense vs jumpins (still having trouble with bisons head stomp though) and the cr-mk is a great keep away tool especially when followed by hadoken.
@ valoon - your are completely right the random ultras wrre out of frustration/desperation but the step kick/fake thunder kick setups work wonders! Thank you. I’m working on getting the light confirms down but I’m usually fucking up the dp motion but I’m sure execution will come with practice.
Thanks again guys.
I was watching 1:25 and I was like “Shoryuken!! Shoryuken!!” but then I realized I wasn’t the one playing.