fundamentals. which was the discussion we were having. my point was if you want to see how good a characters fundamentals are just remove the tricks. the characters we were discussing are much more reliant on mixups than akuma because they dont have strong tools to fall back on. my terrible comment was in relation to everything thats left outside of getting knockdowns
also you guys are severely underselling akumas options outside of his strong oki
can you name 5 characters with a stronger ground game? what about 5 with stronger zoning?
I used to main Seth and my style was footsies, zoning and running. Only went for mix up when I got the hard knock down.
Capcom has nerfed his runaway and zoning but overall his fundamentals are still some of the best in the game.
I would be interested in how you define SF fundamentals.
So what do you think taking away Akuma’s fwd throw (which is a tool allowing for his mix up game to begin) does to HIM?
Maybe the top Akuma players in the world will be able to adjust since their fundamentals, footsies and zoning are top notch. But that’s what; 5% of all Akuma players in the world? The rest of us, the 95% left will all be fucked as we won’t have the tools to be as efficient anymore. We’ll have to go back and re-learn everything, which, I suppose is what your natural answer will be: learn your footsies and zoning.
Generally speaking however, “footsies” and “zoning” is not something you can just pick up on nor is it something that’s known by the common SF4 player. Certainly someone picking up the game won’t have a clue what to do. What this will effectively do is discourage people from picking up Akuma because he’s now going to be even MORE difficult to play properly with very little reward.
Speaking as a scrub Akuma, I already have difficulties making my attack plan work all the time. Learning his setups, the distances for proper footsies and zoning, they take time and effort. Yes, all characters take time and effort to learn, but I don’t see Capcom destroying anyone else’s gameplay just to accommodate whiners who couldn’t deal with the fact that Akuma’s wakeup game was his strongest point. Now they’re taking a huge chunk of his setups away and leaving us with footsies which are subpar at best and really good zoning. Are you saying I should start playing Akuma the turtle way? Just chucking fireballs and AA fools who jump over them all day? YAAYYYYYYYY!! What fun!!!
His wakeup game is what made Akuma “Akuma”. Now we may just as well pick up Ryu or Guile because that’s what Capcom will make him into after this nerf. Not that there’s anything wrong with Ryu or Guile, just that they’re NOT Akuma.
Akuma is probably top 3 zoning so no need to attempt a list there. Keep in mind zoning isn’t particularly strong in this game so being top 3 in that regard only means so much.
Ground - Ryu, Ken, Rog, Bison, Fei.
And there is more. Akuma’s ground game isn’t as good as you perceive it to be. You should actually try using the character to see how good or bad his ground game is.
He isn’t Ken or Ryu. His normals may aesthetically appear similar to them but the hit boxes and active frames are smaller and hence have little room for error.
… and that’s only part of it: his weak stamina and stun make his normals de facto even weaker.
I.e. if Ryu and Akuma had all the same normals (same frame data and everything) but Akuma has 800 health and Ryu has 1000, who’s going to come out on top more often?
im not arguing against akuma being much weaker with his nerfs. i understand that he is
check about a page back or so.
tricks meaning but not limited to, oki, pressure mixups, vortexes etc. also you can eat a bag of dicks. if you dont understand something you can just ask me without insults
i fully understand that he isnt ryu or ken. akumas normals are better imo. yes he may have 1 less active frame here and there, but they dont have akumas range or his walk speed to use the range. i’ll give you fei, rog, vega, and chun. akuma is right behind them tho as far as ground games go.
and to top it off, even if you include ryu and ken above akuma, which i dont, that would put him at #7. you believe viper or seth are close to being that high up as far as ground games are concerned?
I didn’t know Ryu and Guile could zone better than Akuma. I didn’t know they walked as fast as Akuma. I didn’t know Ryu and Guile hit more damage than Akuma. I didn’t know that Ryu and Guile had a teleport. I didn’t know that Ryu and Guile had a 3 hit projectile that wasn’t an Ultra. I’m just so clueless, why would anyone ever play Akuma if he didn’t have a vortex…?
Fundamentals…
ANTI-AIRS: Akuma has cr.HP, a 3f DP with good invincibility, Ultra 1, and more.
FOOTSIES: Akuma has great footsies. Very good walk speed, a good sweep that can lead into mix ups, varying degrees of useful normals, great pokes, and one of the best normals in the game if the second hit of it connects on a crouching opponent.
DEFENSE: 4f crouch tech. Decent back dashes. Well below average health and stun. Great block strings.
OFFENSE: Sweep at any range, should it connect, initiates his extremely good oki. Can effectively pressure the opponent with his solid footsies, good frame traps, and the threat of crouching roundhouse. Can play run away easily as well.
For another example,
ANTI-AIRS: Seth has fst.MP, a 5f DP with great invincibility, and Ultra 1.
FOOTSIES: Seth has very bad footsies. Walk speed is among the slowest in the game. Sweep is fairly bad. Does not have very good normals. Has great pokes.
DEFENSE: 5f crouch tech. Above average dashes. Lowest health in the game, below average stun. Great block strings.
OFFENSE: Very limited ways to initiate his offense, but has among the most oki options once he finds a way to initiate it. Mostly relies on dash command grab and punishing bad mistakes to get momentum going. Doesn’t have many true frame trap options. Can zone out some characters, but can’t effectively zone characters with anti-fireball moves or characters that have an average zoning game.
Akuma can win without initiating his vortex. Seth and Viper simply can’t most of the time. It’s not a hard concept to understand…
First of all, you’re not Louis CK so don’t tell me to eat a bag of dicks, you jizz-mopping, hobo dickcheese eating pissant. That’s how you insult someone in an original way. Take note.
Now, on this issue of footsies. Your argument fails because of two things: first of all, you are looking at Akuma’s normals in isolation from the fact that he has such low health. He might have a great sweep, a great c.MP and really fast walk speed, but he will still lose more often than not in footsies against Ken and Ryu because he simply does not have the health to play that game. He can’t afford to trade hits or throw limbs out there all the time. That makes his normals de facto weaker than Ryu and Ken’s and others.
Secondly, you have overlooked the fact that for both Seth and Viper, their vortex is part of their footsies (defined, in your words, as “ground game”). They do not need a hard knockdown to get some kind of mix-up going. Viper has her amiguous burn kicks which are very difficult to DP or focus properly, even in a non-wake-up situation. Seth has his sonic boom, teleport/wall dive mix-ups. Akuma can’t do that. His mix-up options only come into play once he gets that sweep or forward throw. So you saying that Akuma has better normals than Seth or Viper is missing the point: in one respect, he does, but in another he doesn’t because Seth and Viper have shenanigans they can use without a hard knockdown.
Wow it appears I never should have never posted in this thread.
I think both sides of the argument are taking it to far. First off Akuma is really really good. (I think with enough time invested he is the best overall in the game.
Why else would you play a character. ) I do not think he is so strong he needs the +2 frame nerf. I also think it is too early to tell how much affect this will have on his overall game play. I can think of a few machups that it will hurt me but maybe in time I’ll be able to come up with new setups. So that’s how I feel.
What I don’t get are why people feel they need to back these changes. If you are for these changes in my mind you are one of two kinds of person. Ether you play Akuma and are absolutely self hating . Or Akuma is a bad match for you and somewhere along the lines you got raped by him so many times you feel justified wasting your time posting about how happy you are about a nerf.
P.s This is directed at no one and thx for the read though a pointless debate.
Did I say better? I said they can keep up with us, and quite easily at that. Sure we have the Shakunetsu, but the startup on that makes it a risk to use all willy-nilly and pretty much is a giveaway: any decent opponent will see the flames around Akuma and pretty much stop chucking plasma to jump over it. Guile’s LP Boom is slow enough for him to walk in with it. You can’t jump over it, you can’t FA it at close range. Even trying to snuff it out with a projectile of your own works when you do it early. As for Ryu, the prospect of eating an AA DP fadc into EX Hadou or Ultra 1 is a pretty effective zoning tool, thanks! Especially in the case of Akuma who can’t afford to take that much damage, even once. As for our air fireballs, they do shit damage (unless you manage to get both hits of the EX version) and they’re pretty easy to avoid. Heck, just walk up and cr.HK us when we land. They aren’t really usefull on wakeup unless you do it TK’d or x-up ,even then, you just need to block. But that’s not really zoning, is it?
Look, we’re not saying Akuma is ass and he needed to be buffed. We just wanted him to be left alone, not mangled like Capcom did right now. Really, what other character has been consistently nerfed after every revision?? First he was rushdown in Vanilla. Then they took away his damage/stun capabilities and made him more setup/vortex oriented in Super. Then they took away his tatsu escape and more stun via his ex tatsu nerf in AE, but retained his setups. Now they’re going to take away our setups in 2012 so that what do we have left? Some ok normals, fast walk speed, and a fireball game. So I guess we should start playing keep away… With a 850 health character. That’ll go well!
Exactly!! So now that Capcom is taking many of his vortex setups away… Basically they’re going to make Akuma into a weakened version of Ryu or Ken. Why would ANYONE pick him now? I guess we’re the fools who are gonna stick with him, eh?
I’m probably the king when it comes to whining about Akuma’s nerfs, but I think that saying we got “just that” is a bit going overboard. I mean you can’t just separate normal and walkspeed, they basically work together and that’s what makes his normals good. We win certain matchups without relying on the vortex (like DJ, Hawk or Gief), those tools cannot possibly mean anything.
Yet still, I definitely think you’re not gonna win anything big with 850 health and very good normals in this game. You need to couple this with either some heavy mixups tools (we mentioned Viper and Seth) or huge comeback tools (Ryu, Sagat, Viper etc). Evil Ryu was crap in AE because even if he’s a crouch tech nightmare in the right hands he still got weak mixup game, and you can’t be a zoning type character with such horrible health.
Akuma belongs of course to the first group, but his options get weaker in AE off a forward throw (which is not something negligible in his gameplan), and among the mixups heavy type character I believe he’s the one who gets the less reward for landing mixups and taking risks.
I don’t think it will be impossible in v2012 for Gouki to win a major. Tougher, yeah, not impossible, but that’s only because Akuma = Tokido, and the guy’s a freaking monster. If he wasn’t playing him I don’t really think we’d see Akuma that high in tier lists or considered that strong. But to be honest, majority of time it’s just people who ignore how Akuma’s game works who bitch about him, stating crap like his vortex is some brainless, autopilot shit, that he stuns people in 2 mixups (lol, right), that his damage is top tier material and so on.
My question is after all is said and done how will Akuma fair in AE 2012. Which matchups will become much tougher for him, which will stay the same? His matchups against Yun and Yang look to be easier just based on their heavy nerfs and Fei Long as well? I’d be interested to hear what everyone has to say about future speculation for good bad matchups/where this will move Akuma. I think everyone here can already agree about this ruining his setups but if Akuma was lets say top 5 before, where does he fall now in relation to everyone else?
Added note: Just my opinion I think Viper, Ken, Fei, Sagat are all looking to be top tier material in no particular order.
Well, the three matchups you bring up aren’t exactly all love, luck and lolipops for us are they? It’s not like we get the knockdown and think “Ok, here we go!”. At this point, out of 35 characters, there are only those characters and maybe a few others where our vortex options are gimped. After AE 2012, nearly the entire cast is going to be in that situation for us. So we’re basically going to be playing everyone (or nearly) like we play Gief or DJ… Snoooooooooooooooore
