KOF XII - Ralf thread

Ralf Jones
Fighting Style : Martial arts + Heidern-style assassination techniques
Birthdate : 25th August
Nationality : America
Blood Group : A+
Height : 188 cm
Weight : 110 kg
Likes : Collecting knives
Fav. Food : Bubble gum
Strong Sports : Baseball
Important Things : Badge of honor
Hated Things : Snakes

THROW
Dynamite Headbutt: close, b or f + A + C

COMMAND MOVES
Jet Upper: df + A

SPECIAL MOVES
Vulcan Punch: P rapidly
Burning Hammer: qcf + P
Bakudan Ralf Punch: qcb + P

DESPERATION MOVE
Galactic Phantom: qcfx2 + P

From seeing the vids, I’m digging on the way he plays. He would make a nice team up with Shen Woo plus a Shoto.

Me too. I never really liked Ralf’s style of play before. For me it felt too ackward. Now he seems to be more fun to play as. Shame he doesn’t have his “Unblockable” anymore.

I like Ralf in KOF 02, but 02 is not my preferred game in the series, so I haven’t really played around with him much. His 98 incarnation makes an interesting, but also confusing hybrid character.

EDIT: Alexander: '98 Ralf’s not really a hybrid character; more like a very ghetto (but ghetto-fabulous) grappler. His charge moves are all pretty gimmicky (except for Gatling Attack, which just sucks because it almost never combos cleanly), his masher punch is bad (although it’s a little better in UM since you can cancel it with ABCD), and his air dive punch is gimmicky, but he doesn’t really need those moves at all. His command throw is instant with good damage, and his normals are all pretty great, especially his C attacks. You hardly ever need supers with Ralf, either; his supers aren’t bad (except Galactica Phantom) and combo fairly easily, but you can get nasty amounts of damage just by breaking a stock and poking and/or comboing into backbreaker. He is a marvel of stupid efficiency, and he is easily my favorite version of Ralf – hell, my favorite FIGHTING GAME character – ever.

While I think he certainly LOOKS dumb in KOF XII (cosmetically…why the FUCK is he so huge now?), I don’t know if his latest reinvention will prove BAD per se. I kinda miss his backbreaker, but his new moveset hasn’t seen a whole lot of action yet (and I will not have firsthand experience with it until the home release), so I’m gonna give it the benefit of the doubt. If nothing else, I’m glad that his masher punch and Galactica Phantom appear to no longer be gimmicks, but actual, functional moves.

Ralf is a slow moving wall, seriously. You can basically push your opponent to the corner using a mix of f.C and cr.C, and the react accordingly when they struggle to get out. Short hops get beat cleanly by Vulcan Punch and early awareness of jumps and rolls can be beat by C ground pound.

The start up on the move is kind of slow, but its faster then C autoguard punch and the hitbox is ridiculously huge around Ralf.

His whole game revolves around some of the best midscreen zoning ive seen out of the characters thus far, and his overall set of pokes (when have they not been good) so far seem better then most of the other members of the cast.

Basic Combos:
cr.B, cr.A, Vulcan Punch (B tends to link better then cr. D after the Vulcan Punch, so thats a more plausible follow up)
(cr.)C, CD (super if you have it, and arent to far away when you land the cr. C)

Corner: (cr.)C, CD, qcb C, C Vulcan Punch (perhaps super instead of Vulcan, but need confirmation)

http://dic.nicovideo.jp/v/sm6807064

One of his punches (the one punching forward, not down) Has autoguard. You can see it as it blocks Leona’s Arc Slasher before decking her in the face

His Dp+C has huge amount of auto guard if held I think.

found a neat thing for Ralf today - you can easily link shit (especially st. D) off the 4-hit version of his (A?) Vulcan Punch. (i.e. stop mashing immediately once the Vulcan Punch starts)

So in the corner you can do:

cr. B, cr. A xx A Vulcan Punch (4 hits), link st. D, CD xx qcb+C, cr. C (or if you have super you can do that off the CD instead)

outside of the corner you still can’t juggle anything off the CD other than super. But hey it’s still free damage if you link the stand D -> CD after Vulcan Punch! Even if you screw up the timing, stand D has pretty damn good priority and might counter them if they’re mashing on sweep after blocking the Vulcan Punch.

Also I linked a sweep after Ralf’s qcf+C (the sloooooow autoguard turn punch), and I don’t think it was a stagger counter hit. I dunno!

Arcadia says:

-d.B, df+A, qcfx2+P DM

-(Corner) j.D, s.D, CD, qcb+C, s.D

I noticed that there’s an advantage to the Big explosion move, It hides his entire body in the explosion so the opponent has no idea what attack you’re doing next. Maybe not a huge advantage but one possibly useful for mindgames maybe

I will be using Ralf because I dig him from the older kof.

Why is he so beefed this time? seems to be Raiden-heavyweight

Does he still have his cool ultras, 1 punch and that takedown combo?

They are called DMs not Ultras.

No, he doesn’t have it. Why are people refusing to look at the FIRST POST which tells you what moves he has?

I found a nasty little setup with Ralf today.

First of all gotta give it up to Reynald, the winner of the Ignition KOF XII tournament, for showing this little trick in the finals:

[media=youtube]vxY4uMdUZHI#t=3m11s[/media]

Basically he does the jumping C, standing C -> CD xx qcb+C, standing C juggle reset into fully charged CD (which will guard break on block, but for some reason it wasn’t blocked at all in this video… could be because of the projector lag). This setup works really well because when you reset them out of the air with standing C (I prefer using standing D for the juggle but whatever), immediately canceling into CD and fully charging it will make it connect pretty much the second they hit the ground, so they’re kinda stuck (but obviously not entirely - more on that later). I haven’t been trying to implement fully charged CD’s into my game much at all, but this video opened up my eyes and gave me a wicked idea for something that could further be done to get more damage out of this situation.

The simplest use for a fully charged CD that guard breaks is to just cancel it into DM if you have meter (and you often will). Bam, Galactica Phantom in the face and massive damage. If you don’t have meter though… what do you do? You could just cancel it into qcb+C (the ground pound) and knock them down again, but that’s not too great. Let’s take it a step farther.

Cancel the fully charged CD into qcf+C (the slow autoguard turn punch). When the qcf+C connects, you can actually link a standing D afterward! The timing is a little tight, but it’s not too difficult to get down. See where I’m going with this?

Jumping C, standing D -> CD xx qcb+C, standing D -> fully charged CD (guard break) xx qcf+C, link standing D -> CD xx qcb+C, standing D -> fully charged CD (guard break) xx qcf+C, link standing D, etc!

If the opponent doesn’t know how to get out of this, you could potentially keep this loop going until they die!

(note: I’m not 100% sure on this, I forgot to test it since I’m a dumbass, but it might be possible to potentially cancel a guard break CD into 4-hit vulcan punch, and then link the standing D -> CD off that. I think the vulcan punch is going to scale down the damage of all those hits a lot more than the qcf+C does, so it might not be recommended).

Now this is KOF and it’s obviously not an airtight corner trap, as the opponent has a few viable ways to get out of it:

  1. Roll
  2. b+CD
  3. Do a move with invincibility (like a DP)

If your opponent tries 1 or 2, you can throw them for free. Option 3 will of course beat a throw, only things you can do about that is either block or b+CD (which I wouldn’t recommend doing randomly when they’re right in your face). So if your opponent manages to get out in this method and DP’s your standing CD, you’re probably better off not going for it and instead stalling and blocking low for a split second when they hit the ground. If they don’t do anything, you can try throwing (will get beaten if they decide to delay their attack), or do a low B, low A chain (remember - low B, low A xx Vulcan Punch is a combo, and the 4-hit version lets you link a standing D, which you can then chain into a standing CD and juggle them again…). So yeah it’s all mindgames from this point on, but Ralf definitely has the advantage in this situation.

Even if they learn to not sit there and take the guard break CD, you’re pretty much guaranteed to hit them once or twice and get some free damage in. Plus it completely rapes the CPU! (who cares…)

Ralf is good.

This is exactly why I’m finding Ralf more interesting in this game than ever before. I love the new crap he’s got, he’s much less awkward and more dynamic than he used to be.

i love the ikari warriors, ralph and clark for days. but i dunno why they’re on steriods in XII. one of the reasons why i think they’re so cool like clark is cause they’re so destructive but swift at the same time. like clark is one of those power house grapplers that swift ya know. now hes a twist of zangief and terminator.

They’re big, but it’s not like they’re any slower really aside from losing some of their more mobile moves, they still run, jump and attack similarly enough except Ralf now has some pretty awesome moves. Thanks for the write-up BBH, I really plan on getting to learn Ralf as soon as the console version releases so I’m happy to know I have some tricks I can start learning day 1.

Yeah Reynald first discovered this loop on me 1-2 days before the tourney which is funny in itself that he choose Ralf for the tourney, but anyways it’s definitely a WTF moment if you’ve never seen it happen. When he got it off me and as I walked away from the machine a couple of the competitors waiting in line asked if that was an infinite lol!

One point of interest, if you’re on the receiving end, and you have a CC waiting, anytime anybody does a charge CD just run up and CC them, they will definitely think twice about doing it on you.

I have a couple of recent of matches of Reynald and I was debating if they are good enough to upload but they definitely show me punishing him for charging CD too often (which I in turn learn this from Jon since he kept CCing me if I did charged CD).

I’m pretty much a KoF n00b. I see what you’re saying about how unsafe the Phantom is in '98 but what specifically makes it so much better in XII?

^^ GP was slow as shit for most of the KOF games. Usually it has a something like a 3-5 second startup time. For the most part it’s easily evaded or grabbed out of. Try doing that on Clark/Tizoc in XI and you’re getting a free DM or LDM to the face.