Can anyone give me general advice against Vega? His flying special to throw is quite annoying, but a general strategy against his ground game would help also.
So in high level play, do Honda players do the point blank HHS to an enemy waking up? Or do they attempt a cross up butt smash or oichi set-up instead? If it’s a bad habit, I feel I should break it now in favor of something that’s a better choice.
The problem I have with Vega is not knowing which wall he’s going to jump off of. If he goes off his wall, you can jab headbutt early. If he goes off your wall, you jump back jab. If you two meet in the air, jump jab has good priority over his aerials. The problem is if he goes off your wall and you lose your charge for the headbutt. At that point, standing fierce may work, but I haven’t tried it. I’ve traded with standing jab before.
If he knocks you down and does the long roll, he may follow up with low forward or low roundhouse. Medium butt smash beats that. If he tries to two-in-one a low jab or strong into another roll, you can jab headbutt that.
Hands on wakeup is generally a bad idea, esp. if you’re being very obvious about it. Top players can all reversal more than 1/2 the time so the odds aren’t in your favor at all. The sole exception is when playing against dictator without meter and if his devil’s reverse still doesn’t let him out in SF:HD, then it’s in your favor to do some free chip damage.
As for claw, what ground game does he have against Honda? Everything claw does in the match involves jumping. If he’s rolling into you on wakeup, you can reversal headbutt for free if you want to take the risk. In the air, it’s just a guessing game; there are many facets of which attacks beat what but ultimately, anything by one character is countered by something else from the other character. You have to mix up your various attacks to stop wall dives. On wakeup, just sumo smash or block. If they’re diving from their own side and aren’t positioning the dive correctly, then by all means headbutt them.
Thelo’s right. There was actually a new weird Juggle state introduced in this game by accident. And it was a bit more prevalent in some of the earlier builds. In fact, the second Headbutt used to acuse this state, so if you used it as anti air, you could often Juggle after the second Headbutt when in the corner.
I thought Sirlin removed this state all together, but I guess it’s still in the game, just “hidden” away so that you can never see it… UNLESS the first hit trades! That’s pretty funny.
Oh and what’s up, Eggo! 
Glad to see you back in Street Fighter action!!
- James
I don’t play Honda (cuz i don’t like Honda) but there are a couple of technical issues here that maybe i can help with.
First off, Honda is a lag-friendly character because he’s a defensive tank and he doesn’t need any difficult combos. His ability to store Ochio is lag fighter heaven. Meaty HHS is awesome too if there’s even a slight bit of lag in effect.
Without lag as a factor, most decent ST players are great at doing reversals so you should probably save meaty HHS for characters without invincible reversals. This is even more true in HDR because of the exta leniency for special move commands.
As for getting uppercutted inbetween HHS hits, okay, this is the part nobody bothers analyzing. I’m sure you’ve noticed that it’s impossible to combo two hits of HHS or Chun’s Lightning Legs. Well, the reason is that those moves put the opponent in a special kind of hitstun that renders them completely invincible until they recover.
In other words, if your opponent blocks HHS, they’re stuck in blockstun until they get pushed out of range or whatever. On the other hand, if they take the hit, they can do a reversal after recovering from hitstun instead of blocking the rest. So it’s up to you to check whether they have enough life to take the hit, or to perform fierce HHS slightly before they get up so that Honda recovers before the opponent does.
By the way, if you do fierce HHS from kinda far away and they get hit, you can hold all three buttons and store Ochio, then release the buttons one at a time to attempt the command throw. That way, either you block their attack or you get Ochio for free since releasing buttons doesn’t commit Honda to any normal attacks. So goddamn cheap. Can’t believe Sirlin thought this bullshit was okay to leave in the game.
^^ anyone who says Honda is a “lag friendly” character has never known the joy of trying to get around well executed fireball traps in lag, LOL. Sometimes even jumping straight up over fireballs (a main honda tactic) is hard in lag.
I’ve been messing around with mostly Cammy and Boxer, and every time I face a Honda I want to throw the controller. I’m convinced Cammy has no tools to beat Honda, except maybe hooligan throw vs. HHS…I’d have to check the hit boxes on that one. Lk cannon spike is no longer safe…HHS should beat it easy on block. Most cannon drills are going to get you killed by HHS too. Seems like a turtle Honda dominates this match.
Someone really needs to help me with Boxer because honestly Honda is my worst matchup with him right now. I have a similar problem of getting in to start up mixups. HHS and jab headbutts shut me down.
I think that J.Chensor was fooling around with that matchup at evo and was saying the same thing! that it still is impossible to beat Honda out of 100 matches Cammy is 0-100.
If your opponent blocks the first hit of your super, you can still be hit in between the first and second hit. I did this and my opponents did this all over the place yesterday, which is retarded. I thought the whole point of making his super move more slowly in the first place was to make the second hit go fast enough so that you can’t knock him back in between hits?
Hmm, this sucks. At least they have to time a reversal or they can still hit it without reversal timing?
Yeah I only saw it happen with reversal timing, so presumably you need to do it as a reversal. Still sucks, though.
I’m Chris Li, and I approved this character.
lol nice one Chris! anyways no… blocking the first half of the super had nothing to do with the combo ability of when it DOES hit! it would have to zero frames between when the first hit of the super landed to when the 2nd part connected. even Balrog could be hit out of his super by Honda in mid super if blocked. if there are non hitting open frames then you can counter!
if that’s the case, then revert to stored ochio - do it backwards when he hops
Hopefully Kusumondo will be involved in an HD Remix tournament so we can watch his matches. I can only imagine what he’ll be capable of with jab headbutt breaking fireballs.
Nah, the point of making the second hit go faster is to make sure that when the first hit does connect, then the second will too. Beyond that it’s like the HHS, even if it hits mad fast between the blows, there’s always a chance for the opponent to reversal out of it as soon as there’s one frame out of hitstun / blockstun.
Edit: I’m dumb and basically just repeated what Ehonda already said.
yes its great to see Honda REGAIN his ability to wipe out fireballs with his headbutt. Most people forget that Honda used to be able to headbutt through fireballs in one of the original SF2s.
Thelo there are no dumb statements…well… almost! but not in this instance!!!
Honda will not lose his charge after the gief hop! He will still be charged it’ll just feel strange. Splash will still be charged and if you do the lk splash you will more than likely hit gief out of any up close ticks. Its when gief gets those far away low kick ticks is when the lk Splash does not work well. When gief is close it really is not as much of a threat since you have throw priority. Remember The splash has a ton of invincible frames as well!
Quick question, what do most people use for anti air with honda? Ive been experimenting with j.Strong but with little success. What do you use personally?
isnt jab headbutt gdlk?