Karin General Thread: Elegant offense for a more civilized age

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZav20bIYsc

The only move she has that defines her outside of v-trigger is up kicks and her little overhead move. That is it. Until you activate v-trigger you don’t even have rekka’s. The 2 moves that defined her most are rekka and command grab. 1 doesn’t exist and the other is apparently so good it can only exist behind her v-trigger. She has counter missing also but personally don’t really consider that ‘character defining’. It is good that her v-trigger bar is short and her v-skill is useful in combo’s. You’ll get to play Karin for some of your match. The rest of it you’ll be playing some command dash thing that definitely isn’t Karin. You can’t do a rekka at all without being in v-trigger, how is that Karin?

I get this is probably a ‘design decision’ but that speaks leagues about the quality of the game so far and none of it positive.

I am aware of everything you stated here and still believe what I said to be factually true. That is how ‘not Karin’ this version is currently appearing to me. A new character in Karin clothing with less options is what it appears like to me.

How do you define a rekka exactly? If you have all the decisions and options available during a rekka, but you don’t do them with the same move, or the same series of inputs, is it not a rekka? Is Abel’s CoD a rekka, even though it has nothing in common with any other rekka move, just because it has rekka-like inputs?

I think Karin still has “substitute” rekka specials outside of V-trigger. Of course, that’s subject to change when we actually play the character. My opinion could swing if it turns out that you can’t 1-hit confirm via command dash for some reason, for example.

I don’t think command grab is that special to Karin, even compared to counters, which were somewhat covered by the backstep. If you expected her to keep it you were expecting something that would have been massively stronger in a new game than it was in the original. If you just wanted it for the visual effect, then it’s still there, although I guess it could use a few more knees to the abdomen.

Maybe I didn’t really have any expectations for the character because I realized how different all these things were from what they allow into modern games, so I couldn’t have the same reaction that some other people did. I really had no idea what they were going to do to the character in the transition. As a result I’m optimistic from what I’ve seen.

They generally had similar gameplans in the neutral game to poke and to put people into frame traps and guess against their rekkas. Even though Alpha 3 Fei Long was only in the console version, overall special move and normal wise he wasn’t too much different from Karin and wasn’t really in ST also. If you compare Karin and ST Fei they both tend to poke, have a rekka and an option that covers space through the air to get in.

With Fei Long now having a command grab that’s just another thing that makes him overly similar to her. As opposed to Karin now getting a new command dash option off her normals (including her cancelable low forward) which is pretty unique for her and in comparison to other SF characters.

In 3rd Strike none of Chun’s specials work like they do in her old games and she’s pretty much mostly normal reliant, but its a style people learned to adapt to while still having her feel like Chun. I feel like that’s what we’ll get out of this new Karin. Most of the same normals, just different and new applications of specials.

If you mean a move she can build up and use over time, multiple times at that.
Then yer totally the same thing.

Or the fact that it was the first time he was in the game , and has no moves that define him?

I wasn’t talking about its usefulness,in fact balance arguments are moot at this point .just the fact it’s a move and its a command grab and its present

Hilarious that in SF5 Fireballs are the most punishable they have ever been. Mediums punish Ryu’s and Sweeps punish Ken’s.

There is no way to say if her buttons are better and st. MK isn’t cancellable into rekka so … yeah … better? Relative to the cast maybe but there is no way of knowing that currently. Also decision making only available in v-trigger.

Depends you got a crossup opportunity of command grab and grabs aren’t super fast in A3. You could do either and if they soften your grab you actually have anti-tech options for more damage. Mixing both up was standard before even getting into v-ism craziness. Not to mention in a game where you can tech grabs having a command grab has a lot more utility because they have to dedicate to trying to evade the grab.

V-ism was not a safe option if your opponent had v-ism also as you could counter activate against them. Also DP’s are notoriously terrible in the alpha series. If your opponent didn’t have v-ism stocked there were a lot of pressure options.

Right … having a rekka outside v-trigger and a command grab that if they neutral jump can kill you is totally the same as a safe invincible move. Totally the same. No difference at all. None. Nadda. Zip. Exact same thing.

Coincidentally, I talked to the Karin player in the video the other day and he shares the same concerns that a few other people here including myself have regarding the usefulness of Karin’s rekka game. He doesn’t like that more than half of her moveset is locked in VT and that they don’t look like great pressure tools like they used to be.

From my observations, her rekka game looks unsafe and predictable. Literally the only useful ender she has is backdash. Everything else looks easy to see coming and punishable which is my main gripe as of now. She needs that rekka pushback on block for her enders to pose a better threat. That’s how rekkas should be in general. Rekkas are known to pushback on block to create optimal spacing for yourself and put pressure and confusion on your opponent. There’s literally no pressure with SFV Karin’s rekkas if it leaves her so upclose and unsafe other than “which way should I block?”. While that’s good to have, it’s not good enough because when your opponent starts to see the faults and holes in her enders, then what? Keep backdashing until your meter is gone? Uh no thanks…

Her out of VT specials dont look too promising either. They look easy to see coming and block.

Hopefully I’m wrong and things won’t turn out how I described. Maybe when we see high-level videos or get hands-on experience that my opinion will change. I love Karin. She’s the only reason I got into SF in the first place and made me fall in love with the rekka archtype. But I’m just very concerned for them right now.

s.MK not cancelable? How do you know? I’m not saying you’re wrong but the only way you can know is if you were told by someone who played it or you have played it yourself.

She also has cancelable c.MK so i dont see what you’re trying to prove with that point even if it is true.

Someone mentioned it a couple pages back so just took it as fact. I don’t know as I didn’t question where they got the info. Also the footsies in this game have a lot of low crushing standing moves, especially characters like R. mika where she has 2-3 strong low crushing normals. Having a strong standing move to counter these options is going to be very important in footsies. Not only that having a strong standing move would be nice against the sweeps in this game as they have such ridiculous range compared to all the mediums.

I’m assuming her medium normals now have reversed roles as well. Her s.MK was her main forward/medium cancel normal in Alpha 3. Now that c.MK is the main cancelable forward normal you can expect s.MK to simply be a poke now. I really doubt they would make both stand and crouch medium cancelable. We’ll see tho.

Yes, that’s what I’m saying. I’d rather have my primary gameplay intact and lose some icing, than have my primary gameplay be heavily nerfed like those characters.

You don’t think the non-VT specials give you the same choices as you get from a rekka? I’d like to know why you don’t think so. Both kick specials are potentially safe on block, and at range you should be able to 1-hit confirm the dash into the launcher for more followups like you would for a rekka. At close range, you can use the different variations of upkicks for mixup comparable to what you get from the usual rekka, the difference being that you have to commit to the safe LK version or the mixup versions ahead of time instead of as it happens.

Known cancelable normals right now are c.LP, s.MP, c.MP, c.MK, s.HP, and c.HP. We just found out that c.LP was cancelable yesterday, so that may not even be all of them. s.MP and c.MK appear to be no slouch for buffered pokes. We also have V-skill to fill the long-range whiff punish hole that was missing before.

I make the comparison because safety on block is so widespread in that game. Similarly, grabs are stronger for everyone in the alpha series than they are now, so it didn’t matter as much to have a command grab as it would now (outside of V-ism - no point getting into all that, as that’s not really SF5-related, so I left the previous two parts alone.) Not saying they’re exactly the same, but it’s a similar concept.

And besides, if someone had a safe invincible move in SF5 you could still make it whiff and kill the character. I bet that will happen to a V-reversal someday, actually. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t make the character stronger if they had it. Similarly, Karin with a 360 could land a rainbow palm, and instead of going into any of the followups, do an earliest possible command grab. Or any sort of reset like that, which she’s already good at. It would make her stronger, especially when you consider the effects of gray health, so I were trying to convince a developer to add it back, I’d have to offer something to remove in exchange for it.

No, not at all. A rekka leaving you at a range your opponent can’t punish you but close enough to threaten them or whiff punish is essential to having a funcitonal rekka game. The reason fei’s got nerf’d so much was some character’s couldn’t threaten him properly afterwards. So it made the characters that could fight back against him bad matchups unless he burnt all his meter on EX Rekka just to function (Ken). It is for a very specific reason that Ken is a hard match for Fei but Ryu is an easy match.

Just standing at that range is what SF is about. It gives sooo many options. Taking away that option and the ability to threaten a long range rekka is ridiculous. It is like saying Fei is the same character without his rekka. No of course he doesn’t have the same mind games without it. At all.

This sounds more like “I don’t like the new Karin so the game is bad”

Pretty much. Fans did the same with the redesigns for the characters in Killer Instinct. “Sabrewulf and Cinder don’t have all the specials from KI1/2 so don’t like”.

There could be some extra options that open up from these new options that people aren’t thinking about. Rekkas are more complicated than other standard special options so I think this is something that requires some actual beta play first. To even get started.

Have you seen how the shoulder followup (the safe one) from command dash pushes you back? Nobody really uses it in videos because no one is punishing the launcher yet. But if you watch for it you can find it.

That’s where the long-range poke-confirm for the character will come from outside of VT, and where you might get the spacing you’re looking for. You have 2 specials that appear 100% safe (LK upkicks, shoulder) so your spacing is up to you. When you are used to reacting with poke xx command dash, you can do launcher instead of shoulder and get multi-hit combos out of that poke.

Rekka first hit also appears 100% safe, and the d+P followup wouldn’t make sense if it didn’t auto-frametrap. VT appears to be what you activate when you are ready to go in and do heavy pressure, so I doubt you will have too many issues with safety either.

Guys how do u pronounce Karin?

do u say it similar to Karen? or emphasize the KA like

Ka-Rin

You can say you’re not talking about usefulness, but flat-out ignoring the distinction between her old command grab and this SF4-style hooligan grab and then wondering if you’re missing something about what some people wanted for the returning character is being obtuse. Having a grab that you can’t tech and can’t avoid by crouching and doesn’t telegraph its startup to the point where the opponent can probably always react with a normal to knock her out of it is what some people were looking forward to with the return of the character. *That *type of grab being removed is what they are expressing their concern about. It’s not just a high or low mixup anymore with that type of grab in play (she has those already), now they have to choose another option to avoid it which leaves them vulnerable to her other stuff. That’s part of the fun.

-Having said that, I did think of a way this new grab could catch people more often and that’s through conditioning with the regular grab after the Ressenha overhead (much faster and harder to react to than doing raw f+MK overhead). Since pressing throw forces the opponent to stand regardless, I see the possibilty of catching the opponents whiffed throw with the new flip grab. I’d be more open to having it if that’s the case, but it’s hard to remember that aspect of throwing in SF5 coming from 1001 crouch techs in SF3 and SF4.

A’s are pronounced lower in Japanese. So it’s like saying the word “car” and the word “in” together. KAH RIN. Technically the I probably sounds more like an E also.

She is Japanese and has a Japanese last name so it wouldn’t use English phonetics. I would assume that name is a common Japanese name also.

That is not what I am saying. I am saying if it was a ‘design decision’ to make her balanced is true then the game is aiming for the game to be very limited and basic. That is personally a very negative thing to me. I don’t mind basic mind games but there is inherently less depth in having less tools and locking all solid tools behind meter. She IS gutted, normal meterless stuff now requires meter and a good 2/3rds of her arsenal was just removed or replaced. Hopefully relative to the cast she still ends up decent but that is that is just a guess at this stage. Different is fine but I hope DevilJin is correct and not the ones saying ‘they did it because she’d be too good!’.

Her shoulder is safe without pushback. Momochi tested it. You can’t punish it unless they just were messing up some frame perfect punish. It definitely isn’t any worse than -3.

All 2nd hit rekka followups are interupptable, but he might have been speculating on the normal P ender that combos. No one is sure about how big the d. P gap is but I imagine it is fast enough to at least frame trap non jab normals, and hopefully jabs also. Hopefully her options are good, no one knows if they are. Personally I don’t think her rekka options are super strong given the meter requirement which is probably why they let it cancel into super as otherwise it would definitely be weak. Hopefully that can save it, and her EX Dash shoulder crumpling are honestly the only 2 things I’ve seen about her that look interesting.

Locking down of her Rekkas behind V-Trigger and removal of Command Grab seems like a decision to make sure shes balanced

As I stated before Capcom must have experimented a version of her with rekkas and command grabs and figured out she’d be too good compared to other characters so they ditch the command grab but know that Rekka’s are such a core part of her gameplay so they lock it down to V-Trigger

In your head she’s “gutted” but in practice she’ll be doing the same things she always was. More so than most characters in the game, if you ask me. She lost some icing, even if it was good icing.

It’s easy enough to say choices in design are arbitrary when you make the first character. But once you have a bunch of them, and you have a general idea of what you want the game to be, then you have to see how the characters fit into the game that you’ve made.

Chun no longer has safety on lightning legs. Bad fireballs in blockstrings are a common complaint. There are rumors that even Bison’s specials are unsafe now. So to have this much safe pressure with a character is really unique for this game. Same goes for walkspeed. Cammy kept hers but lost her old range on normals. Chun is the only other character who has both, but she doesn’t have the same type of offensive capabilities, especially outside of VT.

They’ve said they want to balance upwards, but that’s just relative to other characters in the same game. I don’t recall them saying it was a high-powered game compared to others. Damage and capabilities of the characters are different things. Being able to FADC is a lot more high-powered than not. Mobility and various other things are more tame in SF5 even compared to SF4, so it was surprising to me that Karin was able to keep as much as she has.