That’s really weird. I remember when I would play Virtua Fighter I would do Wolf’s K~G (kick cancel into guard) over and over again to make it look like I was doing an exotic dance after I won.
at evo, you said without hesitation that you believed that a good defense beats a strong offense. has that changed at all now that you’ve played in japan? a lot of the things you mention about their advanced play focuses on offense, e.g. - HHS setups, honda jump-in trades, akuma vortex, tigerknee cross-ups, etc., so it sounded like that might’ve influenced your opinion.
secondly, since you’re so big on D, is there anything they do defensively that has caught your eye? the only thing i can think of that you already mentioned is daigo’s new ryu strategy against sim.
thanks in advance for your time. great thread, btw.
some random mikado ryu had this j.fp crossup setup down, was so nasty.
Most of the offensive tactics you just listed are actually defensive at heart. You can’t win games based purely on defense. It’s not possible. If a sagat wants to throw tiger shots at you all day, you’ll have to do something (unless ur gouki). So in order to win, you have to have some kind of offense, and the best offense is a safe offense.
Gouki’s vortex is mainly done after he scores a knockdown. This happens a number of ways. You jump a fireball wrong, you get swept, srk’d, tatsu’d, red fireball’d, yata yata. Once you’re down, Akuma has to begin his offense, and in order to prevent you from retaliating, he forces you to guess. If you guess wrong, you lose 300 life, if you guess right, he loses some amount dependent on what character you’re playing. The thing is tho, he has the much safer route where he takes little risk and gets big reward. So it’s an offensive action with as much defense as possible (the guessing game’s the defense).
Honda has unsafe as hell offense with a slow headbutt, laggy specials on whiff and a horrible jump/move speed. He doesn’t get many chances to get in so when he does, he’s trying to make the most of his options. On a successful c.lp xx fp hhs, he just got free meter, some chip, and got in close to you. If he were to land a blocked jump-in but not do a hhs follow-up, he’d be forced to guess what happens next, tech, do an unsafe block string, do nothing, wait then oicho, attempt to throw a headbutt combo that leads to him being pushed out. In general, all of these options except the hhs option are dangerous and usually put you at a disadvantage that fp hhs doesn’t leave you with since it has decent push away and good frame advantage (+6 BEHBEH!).
Tiger knee cross-up is also a safe offensive tactic against elf whose one giant guessing game. He going to ex run away, ex guac, throw, ultra, back dash? You just don’t know. However, cross-up tiger knee on elf is a viable ultra setup that he can’t reliably fend off because it prevents most of his oki since knee’s an armor break. If he guac’d, he gets swept, if he ultras, sagat can jump, if he backdash’d, ran or threw, he eats an ultra.
These forms of safe offense are what set good players apart from bad players. The safest route taken most of the time, will yield the best results over the long run. less chance of a random srk ruining your life lead, or eating a random ultra, etc. etc.
That’s why Choi and Valle were so good at ST. They were content with safe ass o.sagat fireball offense that forced you to take the unsafe route. You’d never see valle attempt to meaty you with ryu if he had a life advantage cause that’d be giving up an advantage point (yes, i bit this scenario off of s.kill’s article).
When I got out there my buddies threw me like 4 chuhi tall/strongs w/o telling me that they will fuck you up.
Anyway thats like all I was drinking out there aside from beer. Like 200y at the conbinis. 10/10 would drink again.
The Lei-Fei dance was the best.
It was the only post-KO sequence that took practice/work since memorizing fatalities in the MK series.
lol
I almost always did that when I was in Japan. I had no idea it was rude. People did it to me all the time, though. 
Yeah, this is the first I’ve heard of it being rude too. I don’t do it intentionally every time but it happens sometimes. And I know I’ve had it done to me too.
Sabin,
Any plans on visiting China while you’re in East Asia? There are a couple decent arcades in Beijing if you feel like traveling.
yes theyve been taking place every week for a year. same time as always.
who will sabin get raped by this week? find out on the next episode of friday trf 
but yeah there are a few decent akumas ive played. something something MAX (lol remember i cant read) is a pretty decent master akuma around 50k bp. also there was a akuma with a star next to his name at bigbox that i played and was pretty decent. he was going back and forth a lot with shiro last night, until shiro aced him like 3 games in a row…then he tried to switch cabinets to escape from shiro thinkin some1 was on the other side and he got shiro again :lol: shoulda checked to make sure he wasnt on the other side of the cabinet.
anyway, as for my latest arcade report in the past 2 days -
woohoo, i finally got to A rank today and broke 25K bp 
shit was pretty tough, i hope i can make it to master rank at least, im not expecting to have enough time to make grandmaster. took me around 550 plays and im on my 2nd card now. slowly edging torwards 60% winratio. hey, at least my record might be better than mepu’s now reno! lol
one thing i noticed, is that a lot of top players are all in the same guild for sf4. something something KING. they obviously have hella hella BP for the guild. i wonder how the foreigners guild (the guild im in) is doing and if me, hfz are the only ones that are active in it. Kim1234 needs to stop being a bitch and join our guild too.
there was this 30k bp sim player i played at shinjuku sportsland that was pretty good. he was playing vs another rufus playr part of the same guild, and lost. so i hop on, lose the first game to this rufus and then beat him the next 2 straight. sim player goes to his side, and i guess he tells him what hes doing wrong, cause i see him talking to the rufus player, and suddenly he starts playing hella different, not divekicking stupidly or jumping in with zero respect, lol. it was kinda funny anyways cause i guess he didnt want his boy to lose. at any rate im sure my beatdowns have to be helping since im feeling a little better in my bad matchups day by day even if its a bad match.
so yeah the past few days ive been alternating between there and bigbox, shibuya freeplay on thursdays, trf on fridays cause thats where the big boys in tokyo seem to play at. unless theres someplace else i dont know about. hope im not missing out on any tourneys in the tokyo area too.
last night i also played cab, organizer of the shizowa cup and trf regular…fucked his shit up like 4-1. his boxer will just keep dash punching and tap a lot and try to keep the offense going plus hell lvl 3 focus on my wakeup lol, anyway im glad i got at that foo
then i met a few foreigners from this side, one dude from oklahoma in the military (forgot his nick) and RickyTTT from Europe. both dudes approached me and said they knew me so that was kinda nice. GGS to rickyttt btw.
the night ended with me losing a close match to shiro after i got 25k bp. wish i could have played him more i really wanna grind out my trouble matches. and i still need more viper experience.
anyway, getting raped has forced me to learn new shit and come up with unconventional counters i wouldnt think of normally…i guess being here forces u to adapt faster obviously. some new stuff im using, or thinking about using -
first, fp fireball is better in fireball wars because it travels faster even if it dissipates quicker. i dont know why i didnt do this before, esp vs sagat, and guile.
2nd, have to start using tripguard more. boxer players who try to jump at me with j. rh at that “sweet spot” that beats sim, or try to do it early to beat my stand rh - that shit loses to df+strong, and gets tripguarded by df+fierce…really really useful.
3rd, RH slide tripguards zangiefs j. fwd which is hella good that move gives me a shitload of problems if done early. also tripguards stand fierce and a lot of other random shit. i wanna see what he mixes it up with though so hopefully i get to play a gief again.
4 b. jab (overhead) into super might be good and reliable vs duckers esp people without a DP. might be good against bison…
there was this sim player i played in mirror who would go for it at every opportunity and i thit me a few times until i raw supered on wakeup one match. he gave me some encouragement whenever id win with sim though…
anyway thats all
i would hope not
magus had it right more akuma gief less boxer army dictator less blanka etc etc
oh shit RYDERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR whats good homie wish u were here watching the abel madness, stick with that fool hes so good
thanks ill try those. i guess you must have figured those out in the lab. i hate playing training mode though so boring. im not good at staggering inputs which is why i havent tried plinking yet (its a miracle i could roll cancel in cvs2 lol) but ill try both of those things, assuming i plug in my stick and spend a few mins in training mode on pc version hah. i thought i was gonna play console version out here but really, its pretty much irrevalent for the most part.
regarding divekick at higher angles that loses to b strong db jab and d. strong, also ex upflame (risky on whiff though.) i have to record/training mode the other option select shit u mentioned but thanks, he def needs it.
akimo beat me in a mirror sim on sim in casuals i think like twice at the last trf.
im sure they are laughin even tho i dont really care if i lose…haha i need to bust out my alternate character (ryu) its been a while so i can son them back.
also, i dont like aggressive sim…tho the closest ive seen to that is filipino champ from norcal whos pretty aggressive with him…im not a big fan of that style but i did implement his fadc fireball setups into my own game, stuff was nice!
btw sim does have a crossup, his crossup j. close fwd, i use it in teleport setups a lot
theres a nice hotel that u can take ur wife to which is right across the street from bigbox. idk what its called tho ill remember to check the next time i go. also ill be in osaka by then so we wont be able to meet, sorry! 
hmm i dont see gouki players use footsies much unless they are whiff punishing me with sweeps. also sim kinda gets bullied in the corner so my perspective of it might be different. but yea they all play hella safe offense with air ab mixup until they land a knockdown then go balls out.
depends. most of the japanese guys that have been to usa say sup, even daigo hehe. and kims ppl that introduced me that i met at shibuya sportsland
is pretty nice, esp the max akuma etc they all acknowledge me. itabashi zangief spoke to me in english at the last trf and said ruudo told me your ryu was really hard to get in on, even though he beat me 60/40 so that was nice.
so yeah its not all bad here. i just talk about the bad parts more :lol: and im stepping up my taunting game, last night i was playing this ryu player DIOR and he did overhead x3 on my wakeup, im like wtf no respect so the next time i hit him with a combo, i start taunting him, and we got into a taunt war. one time he focused lvl 2 crumpled me did taunt, dp fadc ultra…so we got more creative with the taunt setups. i think the funniest was when i was over his body on knock down, did a taunt and cancelled it into backdash and then i super comboed his dp in recovery, shit was jokes
lol the fact that they think its rude is pretty retarded but whatever, i didnt know i was rude all the time
iyo is pretty successful on defense for the most part so my idea hasnt changed. you have to keep in mind that im a east coast turtle, too so i always have this mindset. just you cant always play like this in every fighting game (marvel comes to mind.) pretty much, iyo has more matchup experience than me so once i get used to fighting these styles i think ill be ok. like i said i lot of the shit i simply havent seen before, of course i will look free vs that - im getting better at defending the cheap shit though. for example vs gouki vortex sometimes im still free but i find myself escaping a lot more whereas before, anytime anyone would do it id die for free. japan forces u to step it up way faster than back at home, even nyc
lol thats that bum juice
shit fucks u up though i reccomend it too
Are you talking about Mashimashin, the 60,000+ BP Gouki, or Kikambo Max?
Mashimashin was always nice to me, and Kikambo seemed a lot less so. Maybe it’s because I never really tried to talk to the guy, but he always seemed like he didn’t much care for the foreigners.
Mashimashin is great, though, if that’s who you’re referring to. :tup:
Ryder had that shit right Art.
Next time we meet I ain’t gonna be losing on sum dumbshit.
Imma come hard wit it and you better had too.
EL ain’t fuckin free no more, I don’t give a damn who you be. :bgrin:
Keep leveling up though, cuz I know these jap sagats done opened your eyes to his madness and I wanna see how I compare to them next time we play.
Keep reppin the states nigga!!!
GO ART!!! :rock:
Thanks for the update bro, always a pleasure to read, and it seems you are having a hell of a time there, so nice you care to share some with us. keep it up buddy.
are you serious? mashimashin has always been hella cold to me. I think all the shbuya dudes respect him cause he’s prob the hardest to beat out of all of them. Kikambo MAX though, that’s my boy. The shibuya guys are dope, they actually have this thing called personality.
Sorry art, my bison card Is registered on someone elses cell phone who I don’t talk to anymore. So I can’t change anything on my card. That’s why my comment has always been “LETS FUN” for a year now. I’d totally make a let’s fun guild though if I knew how
any luck with the ladies or you still pursuing girl sagat?
This intrigues me the most out of anything you wrote in that post, heh. Everybody who plays Abel in NA says he sucks, nobody I know is scared to play against Abel (when they lose they just feel they got unlucky with guessing), and Japan’s holding it down and people go over there and say how good he can be. I play Abel and I think he’s good, but there’s no convincing anyone! I’m sick of reading “why abel sucks” threads in the Abel forum!
Are you saying he’s “so good” against Sim, or just in general?
This has been a really interesting read while at work so thanks for the posts, Sabin. Of all the American players I’ve seen in videos and whatnot, you and Ed Ma are probably my favorites probably because you don’t play Rufus, Viper, or Sagat. No real question here so keep up the good work.
Q: Arturo, why are you so cute?
…No homo.
Awesome thread! (i’m 11th page now XD)
Thx Sabin
Q: Is fighting game pro players play only fighting games? or maybe they play shmups too?
Tho i don’t think they can find time for it)
Sabin thanks for answering the previous question. One more please though. Did you get the name Sabin from the character Sabin in a game called Final Fantasy VI or elsewhere etc.?