When I watch Infiltration or Daigo, one thing I noticed is their excellent footwork. They make great use of walk and dash to put themselves back into optimum range. I want to play Guy in this manner.
With Guy, you have to master the art of subtly inching forward. Far MK is great at stuffing/trading fireballs, it makes opponents block more, that’s when you begin to maintain a really far or even slightly outside far MP range, from there you have plenty of options.
reaction EX run slide to fireballs
far MP xx run stop -> throw
far MP xx run slide FADC backdash (if it hits you have a setup)
slightly walk forward and TC to catch focus
far MK harass
bait out pokes and whiff punish with far MP
List goes on
A bad habit I’ve seen Guys do is they set themselves full screen away from opponent, and then they throw HP Bushin Flip. It’s painfully obvious and so easy to AA
honestly i’ve changed my game so much i don’t ever use bushin flip anymore. literally… i refuse to use it because it’s so awful. i think the strongest way to play guy has been the way it has been in the alphas…a strong ground game. kiyo without question has the best ground game as far as guy players. watch him play… he almost never uses flip elbows. he sticks almost entirely to the ground and footsies you to death and it’s pretty amazing to watch.
a lot of guy players get overly aggressive. it’s tempting to use bushin flip because of how quickly it’ll get you in. i think in a lot of people’s heads, guy is supposed to be a rushdown character because of the pressure he can apply with run stop non sense. i don’t see him as a rushdown character at all. i see him as a footsie character. run stop is supposed to be used in tandem with his footsies for mixups. whiff punishing with things like st. strong xx run stop > throw. or canceling into run stop from TC, walking in and out of range to bait a crouch tech or a jab and whiff punishing with something like TC xx run slide. that’s why i think his TC needs to work properly. fortunately i saw with the beta loke test that they supposedly extended the hitbox on it. we’ll see how that goes.
I think TC whiffing at a certain range was to promote footsies.I can image a guy player doing TC lp shoulder or run/stop til they died or won the battle of chip damage.
Kiyo still uses Bushin flips, just… not quite the way most Guys do (full screen HP flip, LP flip on opponents wakeup) and definitely not as often. The occasional MP flip during blockstrings, or EX flip against wakeup can prove to be strong. Definitely shouldnt be a habit but throwing it in once in a while, and without desperation, just makes your mixups appear scary.
But you’re right about how Guy should be played. For beginners, it can be a bit scary to stay in poke range relative to opponent, lot of these Guys just throw out HP flips, jumps and cr LK, praying for a lucky opening.
I noticed you on Xbox the other day. Are the Sagat and Guile players you mentioned on Xbox? Apologies because I spend a LOT of time on ranked running long sets with a lot of the good European players on Xbox Live. Out of curiosity, is the Sagat player King Sagat 2010 and the Guile player Ninja Music G? They are 2 guys I play regularly and I would say have a very solid understanding of the Guy matchup. It took me a while against these guys to learn how to adapt to their solid play styles. Let me know if it’s them and I can show you some replays and talk you through some of my tactics.
this is how i always imagine guy should be played. just, solid… so solid. 1 bushin flip the whole match. only a couple jumps outside of safe jumps. and the icing on the cake? the whiff punish of evil ryu’s cr. forward with st. strong xx ex shoulder fadc ultra.
Yeah sure man, no problem! What’s your tag? I get the feeling we may already be friends but I easily forget when people have different names on forums to their tag.
So I don’t think delayed standing should be that big of a problem against Guy’s classic forward throw set-up mid-screen. If I understand correctly, when a person use delayed standing, the word ‘technical’ appears and the opponent is down for 11 additional frames. If that’s the case then Guy would be air borne on the first jump, giving him time to off-set the timing. An example would be against Rufus: Forward Throw, Forward Jump, (land) stLp, Forward Jump ambiguous cross-up. Or Forward Throw, Forward Jump into a late Izuna Drop float, Forward Jump ambiguous cross-up. Maybe this would work against certain characters only.
You’re right about the Guile player, it’s Ninja Music G. Very patient Guile and he doesn’t spam sonic booms. I’m not saying he’s the best Guile, but perhaps he plays the Guy match-up better than any Guile I’ve had to face. I think once you get the lead, you HAVE to lame out Guy - but it’s so hard to get a decent lead. This guy sits there and waits- rarely using backfist and opts for safer pokes which keep Guy out. St.MP and TC get blown up by flashkick as I mentioned.
As for Sagat, it was another player, I think he was Dutch. V something. Knew the match-up really well and didn’t mess about. Low fireballs really make the shoulders useless and ex run is not easy to react with without buffering the motion early - which hurts your footsie game cos you can’t exactly do both at the same time.
Exactly right! The same would presumably apply to the neutral jump OS after TC > run slide as well. I assume even with delayed wakeup, Cammy, Sagat, Blanka, etc. will still have their own timing, because the delay tech wakeup only adds extra frames to each character’s already existant wakeup time? In which case, if players of those characters are foolish enough to start delaying their wakeup against Guy, we could come up with normals to whiff in order to successfully safe jump them. Of course the smart players who know the matchup won’t do that because it’s just giving away free setups to Guy, but it’s something to consider at least!
I’ve just been watching a couple of replays of Guy. Quite frustrating and disheartening I must say. And don’t get me wrong, I honestly see many of these mistakes in my own play too.
One common problem I’ve found with Guys is that they easily forfeit space. Some players understand that Guy isn’t a rushdown character, and that he has pokes to push out or pressure opponents. This causes them to walk back a lot, waiting for opponents to come in. This is a terrible habit, Guy is unnecessarily giving up territory, and end up getting corner pressured all day. His pokes should not be limited to being used as some kind of tripwire (except in the case of whiff punish), they need to be timed right and unpredictable so that opponents don’t punish them so easily (so many times Guy far MK gets lvl 2 FA’d). Some Guys are so used to throwing far MP xx LP hozanto, and get lvl 2 FA’d, when they could’ve gone for Target Combo. And then there are Guys that simply spam buffers, example: cr MP xx EX hozanto. Don’t get me wrong, cr MP is a powerful normal, but it’s stubby range allows opponents to easily whiff punish.
Then I see these Guys play against Guile/Sagat. In these matchups, they tend to stay 3/4 screen away from opponent, and this is where they keep striking from (jump, Bushin flip, hozanto, EX Run-slide/overhead). Again, bad habit. Both Guile and Sagat can safely AA whether Guy fully jumps over fireball, or interrupts with elbow drop. They’re too used to attacking from this range, that when the opponent closes in, they get very uncomfortable, defense breaks down: excessive cr LK (get frame trapped or whiff punished), focus (get multi jabbed, or grabbed), cr HK or tatsu (full punish). Guy gets opened up and becomes free.
There is surely unexplored territory in Guy’s ground game, I just know it.
One reason to not stay in the opponents face is so the cr.mp actually works. For some characters you have to stay a certain distance to get the cr.mp to work, cos they have good priority normals.
With characters like Sagat and Guile, they have full screen footsies in a sense, with their really good projectile game. THere’s lots of pushback from projectiles too. I don’t feel the corner is so bad against some characters anyway, like Guile. IF you’re careful and pick the right timing, you can flip outta there and now they’re in the corner.
I know what you mean, but many Guys keep backpeddling into the corner, they dont quite know when to step forward and strike, waiting for the opponent to come in. Space is so important yet they voluntarily forfeit it.
As for flipping out of corners, this can become predictable, I have seen Guy-experienced players react with jump back air-to-airs and air throws. Ryu for example can jump back MP a Bushin flip, for a free Ultra.
I know I always mention this guy, but watching Kiyo play, then 80% of Guy players play is so radically different. Kiyo holds his ground a lot of the time, knows how and when to weave in and out, reacting to whiffed attacks. The rest are either riding their offensive momentum well, or getting corner pressured hard, a do it or die playstyle.
THe ground game experience most likely comes from other street fighter series, SFII, 3s, or possibly other fighting games. You gotta remember that a lot of us are 09ers (including myself) and patience and personality has a lot to do with it. Some people play with personality and that can go against what the character is capable of, or even against the game engine.
Ok I have 2 or 3 good replays against Ninja Music G (love playing this dude! In terms of the Guy matchup he is literally as solid as Dieminion - this guy is NO JOKE!). And I ran a FT7 with King Sagat last night and beat him 7-0. He’s very solid in occasional games, but he gets flustered in long sets and starts mashing DP or EX tiger knee when he doesn’t know what to do. But credit to him, his fireball spacing, combo execution, focus attack timing and spacing etc. are all bang on point. I used to play Ryan Hart a lot but the way this guy plays Sagat in the Guy matchup can be a work of art if he’s on his A game.
Hit me up next time you’re on Xbox Live and I’ll share the replays with you.
