OKIZEME
To answer your concerns about okizeme games…
If you fall down face down, generally don’t techroll to the side. If the opponent times a mid attack properly, it’s pretty much guaranteed and that’s what you got hit by.
The most common situation for this is when you get crumpled. Unless the opponent does a spinning attack on you when you are crumpled, you’ll fall down “face down, head towards the opponent.” This is the specific situation when you do not want to tech roll to the side.
What you can do, if there is enough time, is quick rise --> fuzzy guard. But in the end, you can get up any way you want, just don’t tech roll to the side when face down head towards.
The other side of Okizeme… attacks that have a lot of active hit frames are decent candidates for beating rising attacks. You don’t have the rising attack problem a lot of players have, so you don’t have to worry too much. Lion’s up+K is one of those attacks that if timed right, will beat a rising attack.
Eileen has a few attacks like this and I’m sure Yosuke could tell you which ones he remembers seeing.
THROWS
Can’t remember if I posted this, but I think I did. With Lion, his throw directions are neutral, df, back, and forward. You primarily want to escape back and forward because that’s where his damage is on throws.
But don’t forget what I wrote about Nitaku situations… If you can recognize that you are in a nitaku situation and your opponent likes to throw, you can hit them out of the throw with an unclashable attack.
For non-advanced players, blocking low and attacking for the sake of beating a throw (but not for the sake of just attacking) are easy ways to punish throwing.
Throw escape by itself isn’t super great, but it becomes an important skill to have (I will say that even at the top levels of VF play in the US, throw escapes aren’t common enough which is a bit sad).
But what better way to punish someone throwing you than to turn their 50/50 game back on them… If they’re pushing the 50/50 game on you, you can turn it on its head if you guess right by going for a high damage unclashable attack if your guess is that they will throw you.
An online player who completely lives or dies by 50/50 Nitaku is BboyDubC. This guy will low punch MC --> mid/throw you without fail all the time. Against his Akira, I will have to guess between blocking high or beating his throw when he does low punch. I have trouble doing ETEG online if there’s a bit of lag, especially if it’s just off of low punch, so I tend to go for the gamble and use Lion’s b,b+K if I know a throw is coming. THen I just block high if I know the Super Dashing Elbow or Uppercut is coming.
Anyways, point being… You should work on your throw escapes for sure, and I’ll give you plenty of practice on that–but you do have aggressive anti-throw options with Eileen and as long as you know you are doing the attack with a real purpose (you fully believe a throw is coming), you can really discourage your opponent from throwing on Nitaku. And actually, for some reason, I recommend using the aggressive options for awhile because they are easier and you know the flow of the game well enough that you can live or die by this habit, while understanding why you are doing it.
-Chanchai
