Shoryureppa! The Ken Thread

Classic Fighting Games SSF2T: HD Remix
981

I have a nice way of dealing with Guile. I noticed that his core anti-shoto gameplay basically amounts to leveraging his shorter projectile recovery time. He will try and get you into a fireball fight and once he knows you are going to throw one, he will recover quick enough to get a free jump in.

It’s not so bad with Ryu because the speed of the fierce will allow you to eventually push Guile back and chip him away. Also short tatsu is just short enough to get over booms without any additional vulnerability.

Vs Guile
I used to hate Ken Vs Guile for the reasons above. When I was first starting out vs decent Guile players I would put up a bit of a fireball fight, but I knew to do any significant damage that I needed to get in, so obviously short tatsu was the answer. But one day I was playing against a very formulaic DeeJay and this pattern of jumping in on your recovery was so blindingly obvious that it all just sort of clicked. I thought about how I could use his strategy against him and this is what I come up with.

Let Guile get you into a fireball fight, but don’t try to compete. In short you will end up losing, getting jumped on or backfisted (doesn’t sound pleasant at all). Just throw jab fireballs sparingly as soon as you see the sonic boom. The recovery is just short enough that at the right distance, you can recover and hit that leg with the strong DP. It boils down to a patience mind game and I find that this generally works well. If you get a really stubborn turtle Guile then maybe mixing in short tatsus to get in may help.

Either way, aim for a knock down. You should be able to hit Guile out of his flashkick with a crossup tatsu (can someone confirm? It seems pretty reliable when I’ve done it) and start 50/50 kneebash mixups.

Vs Zangief
Zangief is tricky, but you can use a few things to make life difficult for Gief. I would say my style for this match is hardcore turtle. Throw a mix of jab and fierce fireballs at fullscreen only. If Gief even walks forward a little bit (3/4), you are in the danger zone for a green hand + SPD. If he starts to advance, walk backward for a bit and throw a fierce fireball when he least expects it. You can of course mix this up by getting him to lariat through fireballs (force him to do the slow lariat by throwing slow fireballs) and then walk up and sweep.

If he gets close, do nothing. Have confidence in your reactions to shoryu or sweep/fireball on reaction. Aside from the running bear grab, he doesn’t really have any good ways to get near someone who is down back and waiting to punish (partly what makes the Guile and Honda matchup so hard, which is where I took this part of the strategy from). Of course you don’t want to sit there all day, but chances are he will try to green hand (shoryu), jump in (strong shoryu) walk up (sweep) or running bear grab (shoryu/sweep).

I tend just to throw a meaty fireball on wakeup because it’s generally not worth the risk trying to combo him or anything.

As for combos, there are the classic punch xx tatsu xx sweep xx fireball or punch xx tatsu and shoryu as you land. He will be in hit/blockstun while you land, and you go directly into an invincible (well partially) special. If he tries to reversal SPD it will whiff and he will eat a shoryu. Walk up throws are a bit gimicky but it’s surprising how you can get away with this. Few people expect a good player to try and throw Gief, so it does shake them up a bit.

My personal favourite which is also a kind of option select (depending if you have super or not) is crossup, 2x low short and super motion with fierce punch. If you don’t have super you get crossup, 2xshorts into fierce shoryu for 5 hits (6 if crouching) and a likely dizzy for around 40-50%. If you have super meter, you get 8 hits

Also of use is fierce punch xx roundhouse crazy kick. This will send an opponent flying as far across the screen as possible, and it’s one I should really use more. If you manage to sneak a crossup in on Gief, do fierce punch xx roundhouse crazy kick (not the hold version) and it will reset him to fullscreen for you to restart your fireball turtling game.

These may or may not help. They work Ok for me, and they turned matches that I used to hate into matches that I do alright in.

982

Golden Tips: Against Sagat, Guile, and 'Gief: rush that shit down (no sarcasm).

983

I dunno about rushing Gief down, but the other 2 guys you gotta bait them and get in on them for the mixups/knee bash. Guile is not too hard to get in on with short hurricane.

984

When 'Gief is cornered (if you do it right), he’s pretty free. It’s all a matter of baiting and punishing a whiffed SPD/low crouch/high crouch/jump.

Golden Tip: People may not necessarily know this, but if you punish a jump in with a :hp: DP and they hit the wall, you can follow up with another :hp: DP as this move has juggling properties. This makes it that much more treacherous to jump in at Ken. Furthermore, this isn’t exclusive to big/fat characters; this works on everyone so USE IT!

985

Double post ('cause I’m awesome like that)

What’s this “mix-up of God” that Aniken has? Super Nohoho Fighter mentions it, but I’ve never heard of it before.

986

nohoho is prolly talking about a corner meaty Jab Hadoken followed up by Knee Bash/Shoryuken mixup:

Aniken used to be known as the player with the “mix-up of god.” While it ought to work 50% of the time, Aniken somehow employed the knee bash/Dragon Punch mix-up with 80% efficiency. Recently Aniken has cut back on his use of the mix-up of god, yet he still wins with incredible consistency.

987

What’s the secret/theory/science behind getting rapid crouching shorts? I still don’t understand this in full. Against a character like Ryu/Ken, if you mash the short button a fast as you can in a meaty position, at most you’ll get is 3 crouching shorts linked for 3 hits. if you time it slightly slower and your rythym is consistent, you should be able to get 4 no problem. 5 is possible, but I can’t do… or at least consistently. My friend has a different tapping rythym and he can get 5 shorts in more consistently than me.

I want to understand this because I’m trying to see if I can link 4 crouching shorts into a juick kick for a total of 5 hits. The juick kick can hit a standing oponent in the head on start up from about crouching roundhouse distance , so distance is not the problem. I want to understand the data behind the linking of the shorts so I can time my juick kick better. I can link 2 crouching shorts into a juice kick for 3 hits no problem. 3 shorts into juice kick for 4 hits is possible, but very difficult. 4 shorts into juice kick for 5 hits … i have not yet seen and I need to understand the way the shorts link to see if this is possible or not.

988

BEHOLD! Here’s how the science works:

  • Rapid fire attacks can chain
  • That means you can interrupt them at any time
  • If you do it too fast you’ll interrupt it before it hits
  • If you do it too slow you’ll waste time and get more frames of push back
  • So, you want to find the precise rhythm where you time each button press as close to, but not before, the first frame where the move hits.

Make sense?

989

Thanks.

So your second short should be pressed during the first hitting frame of the first short ? anything later is simply push back frame.

990

Yup, you got it! And if you did it a frame too early you’d have wasted all of those startup frames and the move would begin again without ever hitting.

991

Ah. no wonder. This is gonna take some practice. :slight_smile: thanks!

992

SweetJohnnyV…

I almost forgot to mention. I met you at Evo in the hotel room for the first time. You might not remember because i was knocked out most of the time. I was rolling with DGNRS Papercut. You guys filled up that smoke like no tomorrow :).

993

LOL! I might remember you if I saw you, but we were all partying pretty hard so…ya. Good times! :party:

994

Actually, you can only cancel once the hitting frames have come out, but if you hit the button too early, then you’ve got to wait for the button to come back up before you can try to cancel again. (If cancel-before-hit were possible, turbo jab/whatever wouldn’t work.)

995

Oh, good point. Can you still kara-cancel a chained move if you do it SUPER fast or do chains just not cancel at all until the hitting frames?

996

You can kara-cancel chained moves. That’s, for example, how the short-short-super hit confirm works.

997

Sure, I know you can kara-cancel a chained move into a special/super. What I’m wondering is if you effectively kara-cancel the chained move into itself. In other words, can you only cancel cr.LK into itself when it hits, or can you also cancel cr.LK into cr.LK during the first few frames of startup?

998

You can’t renda/chain cancel before hitting frames come out even if you push the button at the game’s maximum accepted input rate. (IIRC Guile can cancel jab->short or short->jab, which is pretty easy to do fast by hand.)

999

i think specials can though, sometimes i special cancel cr.kick xx hado fast enough, that the hado cancels the startup before the hit.

So if i did my math right, on T3 ken’s cr.lk x2 super is like a ~5 frame link. Somewhere in that neighborhood, when i did it earlier. So a cancel should be unnecessary.

1000

if you’re saying you can short short super without a renda cancel then you’re wrong. if you had 5 frames to link the super after the short recovered that would make it retarded easy.