The New Akuma Match-up Thread *Recent Update*

Classic Fighting Games Ultra Street Fighter IV
561

has anyone played even a decent adon yet? All I’ve gotten online (first offline little get together thingy will be on like wednesday with a bunch of ppl…though I’m not sure how many have been playing super yet) is a bunch of stupid jaguar …walldive? whichever one that is…lol. Which gets SRK on reaction without even trying (i have this feeling it is safe on block because I have yet to find a way to hit these spammers consistently afterwards. I really feel like Adon is WAY more flowchart than ken ever was… the difference is that ken gets punished easily for SRK… adon doesn’t for wall stuff. I’m looking for a better way to punish this though because only getting a SRK worth of damage for that level of spam feels weak. I’m thinking maybe you can dash under and counter from behind? anyone tried that? Obviously FA won’t work cuz its armor break…

T.Hawk’s dive is basically the same situation, except you can c.mk him after that dive. Akuma I have no problem with t.hawk as of right now but again… the competence is severely lacking right now as with most of the new characters so I can’t get much of a feeling for him other than that ppl without a srk have a lot harder time against him than those that do. And its nice that you can cross-tatsu him unlike geif.

As for Hakan… he is a mixed bag now that I finally played a few pretty good hakans. I think the only real problem i have is that i hav3e a hard time simply deciding to not jump anywhere NEAR them on wake-up because normally you get to demon flip palm as a safe jump against ultras and you are okay… but against hakan his oil combination will catch you. Basically any jump and your toast for that damage. Up until he gets his ultra though he is rather free… i’ve yet to play someone that was using his crisco combos with FA though so the fact that in theory he can beat any poke due to the FA properties that might change a lot… but right now hakan is looking to be a easy-ish match-up as long as I can remember to just get my ninja turtle shell on as soon as he gets hit ultra. (note: hakan can’t really get under fb except with his lk slide which has decent range but basically is the equivalent range of a tip of foot hitting jump in. Any range farther than that and you are safe to GROUND fireball. You can jab him out of his command throws and instead of jumping back try to remember to basically always tele backwards because his kick command throw catches ppl in the air).

Ibuki really does kill fireballs very well but you can poke her out of her slide as well as block and punish it. I haven’t played anyone yet that would poke with her efficiently but I have a feeling she gets seriously man-handled by akuma’s top-notch defense (c.hp+srk+c.mk/c.mp+teleport). Not sure which ultra is best for this one but my guess is ultra 1… but I haven’t really tried to teleport towards her to punish an air kunai…so there is that. c.mk seems like its VERY good in this match-up though thanks to its increased duration of hit. If you see her start to slide you can basically stick it out whenever and it will still hit her. Until she gets her first knockdown I really question her ability to get in on akuma if he isn’t throwing fb willy nilly.

Dudley… I’ve no clue right now. I know he is 10000 times better than anything I’ve seen so far. But I will say that his counter kills cross-ups so akuma might have to play him rather gouken-like on wake-up (I’m not sure but palm might beat his non-EX uppercut cuz its priority sucks).

Juri… I don’t know … again there hasn’t been ANYONE I’ve played yet that could use her worth a damn. People don’t know how to poke with her very well yet I have a feeling

As much as bison is suppose to be “a lot better” I haven’t honestly felt like that match-up has really changed any. I didn’t throw fireballs often anyway.

Guile seriously feels stronger… I can’t remember if he could do this before… but I saw his flashkick auto-correct when I was using gouken yesterday… And the charge being sped up makes a HUGE difference to his game. As a side not though you can still FA dash ultra athrough his boom at close range though so I don’t think they tweaked his recovery (although it was always godly). Its hard to say but I wouldn’t put it past calling the match completely even now.

I have yet to see a rog run with ultra 2…lol…that shit is seriously BAD.

Cody is pretty good… his damage output is nice against akuma but his rock just can’t keep up with akuma and is pokes feel slow in comparison… this is the match where I finally realized the c.lk (A button) on my controller was broken because c.lk repeatedly wasn’t coming out and I wasn’t teching throws. Then I went and played fable and I was having a hard time talking to people and I knew something was wrong…lol. Makes lag feel worse than it is when you can’t tech or c.lk after demon flip.

Charge characters receiving buffs? It seems that black guile (dee jay) will be a weird match-up because his command kick does through normals and his AA can catch the back of your foot depending on how you time your crossup (might have just messed up… hasn’t redone the event in training mode). Not to mention is taunts are annoying as fuck…lol

mokoto seems good… but I haven’t played against her while using akuma yet. I have a feeling EX tatsu might beat her rush punch though so if you see her charge you can just EX tatsu (someone want to check that?).

Rose is going to be harder as well. The fact that she now can do some pretty good combo damage output with her new ultra makes the match-up harder… but I never really got to play much against her before cuz she wasn’t highly played in tournaments or online.

I think it will take at least 2 weeks before people will really be able to give more fair assesments of moves and characters though. If just based stuff off NOW… then abel’s beathless would be godly… but its not very hard to see the offensive holes in it (defensively its still good… but abel always had decent anti-air as long as he wasn’t waking up).

562

can anyone help me with guy?

his ex tatsu kills akumas vortex completely - it beats every demon flip option and counters cross tatsus.
only workaround seems to be safe jumps. or is my timing off?

563

it simply beats everything…you gotta safe jump it…good thing is that if you happen to block it he’s in for some serious trouble since that shit takes forever to recover.

Don’t abuse demon flips because his air throw does like 200 damage and also don’t get too happy with air fireballs since he can run slide under them. It’s a match where you gotta really be patient and mix your air/ground/emtpy jumps fireballs a lot because he can punish all of those if you get predictable.

Punish his blocked mp or hp hozanto with lp srk (his jab hozanto is safe on block) and punish those damn slides (both the run and the normal version) with c.mp xx ex tatsu for some serious damage. Run version can be ultra’d on block

Oh, you can just spam s.hk > c.mp > s.hk on block since he basically can’t do shit about it if you’re close…you’ll probably get a lot of CH c.mp if he likes to press buttons and if you see he just stands there and crouch blocks all the time you can do a good old walk up throw or dash throw.

The vortex is severely limited because of his ex tatsu but you basically gotta make him scared of using it by safe jumping, then you can do some vortex on him although it’s risky…most of the times if you do an early df kick his ex tatsu will hit you just once doing shitty damage and you just made him waste one bar so that’s also not too bad.

I think the matchup is very slightly in akuma’s favour but you gotta be patient…a friend of mine plays guy (very very good actually, he’s been playing that shit for over 2 weeks) and a lot of rounds finish on time over or very close to it.

564

Can someone please tell me what are Akuma’s best frame trap setups to get counter hits?

I play against people who sometimes mash crouch tech and a Rog that mashes his Godly cr.lp when I’m anywhere close to him, since I don’t always have meter to SRK and FADC to safety if they blocked, I want to learn how to properly use frame traps setups to my advantage since at the moment I don’t implement it in my game at all.

ps. I wasn’t sure if this was the right place to ask this question, but I didn’t think it was necessary to create a whole new thread about it either.

565

my most used one is. cr. jab delay cr.strong into sweep if it counter hits.

566

I’ve been messing around with Adon and here’s what I have got so far.

A lot of people say that all of his moves are unsafe. However, they are safe at the right ranges.

If he does a fierce JT from full screen and hits you on the other end of the screen it’s safe. Throwing out a jab will get you DP’ed. If any JT hits you deep you can punish with whatever. You can also punish any JT with a SRK but since Adon can switch it from close, to mid screen to full screen, I think you can be baited to SRK and have him walk up and punish you. I’ve had some luck punishing any non EX JT with a Fierce FB, but as far as EX JT goes, either I don’t react quick enough or it doesn’t work. I either trade or eat the JT.

Jaguar Kick leaves you in more block stun than I thought. I haven’t found a way to punish one yet.

Both Jaguar Tooth and Jaguar Kick are armor breakers. (fuck)

I haven’t been able to stuff Rising Jaguar with sweep, jab into DF dive kick but it whiffs, leaving him open to be punished.

I’m assuming full screen range might be best way to play him. At mid range, his JK can go over low attacks and a properly spaced JT is safe. Zoning might be tricky with his JT and JK, both of which are armor breakers (fuck) that can go over low attacks. I don’t know much about his footsies yet.

567

what? a deep hit (blocked?) gives less stun even though it HIT ? So you saying basically it would be worthwhile almost as a trade to take a step or so forward and NOT block to be able to bpunish with a bnb for more damage than you received? I mean full screen its easy to counter with a SRK, but if he does it short instead of far that srk can get you in trouble. I’ve also considered trying to lk teleport when he starts his wall jumps but I haven’t tested it yet. I’m pretty sure it would put you right up in his grill if he short or mediums and behind him if he hk dives but I’m not sure where the relative recovery for each character would be… in which case it might be better to just dash forward once or twice…

You can rush adon down pretty well though… his rising jaguar is kinda ass and trades or gets straight beaten by SO many things you think it shouldn’t be. option select rushdown options really force him to block for his life because his rising jag is not a great reversal and everything else either doesn’t start up fast enough or can be OS SRK pretty easily. I don’t think mid range is a great range to play him though. You want either long range where you can bait a wall dive or more so at close range where you can just rush the hell out of him. And no… in this match-up, like with a LOT of the new characters, you can’t use focus attacks as a hold and wait move or you’ll get killed by SOMETHING. They really emphasized the idea of FA dash use as opposed to hold and let go.

568

Oh naw. My bad. I meant to say if you blocked it deep. Like if he did a fierce wall dive and hit you mid screen. Then you could hit him with whatever. I’m also thinking neutral jump might be able to give you the advantage. I’m headed to the lab to fuck around with adon now

569

Dudley seems a little crazy. Def need to learn that matchup.

570

Still having some trouble with Chun (Still on vanilla fyi cause im playing on PC), what pokes work best against her? she breaks me so easily up close.

571

Chun outpokes you. Up close is not the distance you want to be against her when she’s in the offense. So block and wait for unsafe stuff (i.e. hasanshu, sweep) when in her poke range. Be aware of teching throw attempts and blocking high for hasanshu.
Use air fbs to zone her. if she jumps over them it’s free srk /ultra because she hangs in the air forever.
If she has ultra, your only safe fireball is a jump back HP.airhado from full screen away (doesn’t work if you’re in the corner).
You can try to bait sweep with walkin in and out of that zone and punish with sweep for untechable knockdown. After that go for the vortex. On her wakeup choose the right demonflipkick so you hit her right in the middle if she does her ex.spinkick. If you scared her to do that, try crossup.tatsu->sweep (it works on her). If she tries to defend against that with her (in other cases excellent) focus attack, go for the palm strike und df throw and she won’t do that again. So if your on the offense, up close is OK. Otherwise work on your defense. If you feel she overruns you with her up-close pokes simply teleport out to give you some air to breathe.

572

Yeah I’ve started to get a hang of the chun matchup a bit more, though i still find it a bit hard to safe jump her ex sbk, i usually stuff them on wakeup with ex srk against spammers. Other than that, sim is retarded hard for me now. I’m not sure what to do because he can just keep me away all day. One guy just yoga towered through all my fbs or slid right under them and hp which would catch me from full screen too. Teleports are tricky because i cant react to them fast enough (srk them) but i tried just jabbing out of them and it worked sometimes.

573

As late as possible and as deep as possible.

574

I assume you are referring to Ibuki’s overhead normal attack? From memory it is very slow but if we can c.mk under it that’s even better as it can be punished even harder.

575

whaa? BLOCK chun’s overhead? never… focus that shit for a free combo or teleport out of a situation where there is a tech/overhead option (basically teleport out whenever she starts up a block string where she’ll legs to beat a tech, overhead, or throw… or end with sweep).

Dudley right now is rape bait for akuma… He has nothing really very good to keep akuma off him and akuma’s c.mk is the highest form of gutter trash when used on dudz. The overhead mix-ups that dudley uses don’t work on akuma as he can just teleport out so dudley has to do the whole jump in jump out spin-himself-about routine that geif and other close range knockdown specialists must do in order to avoid akuma teleporting out for free EVERY time (and ultra 2 makes its even harder for dudley since you can fricken c.lp him out of machine gun punch nonetheless ultra him during a teleport. The only thing I see right now going for dudley is that he can do massive damage off some pretty fast (though somewhat lacking in priority I feel) punches. And his ACTUAL sweep (not the launcher low) is pretty decent for knockdown. I guess part of it is that i’m probably better than most of the dudley regardless of character choice right now and that might be messing with my judgement on this one, but I see it 5.5-4.5 akuma really. And the only reason its not 6-4 is because of damage output. Against akuma it almost feels like dudley is a weak version of Rog…lol.

ibuki’s overhead sucks… you should really never be hit by it… its kinda sad really…but its not like with its combo potential she needed it to be fast. That being said doing c.mk is even easier than focusing and hoping I started it soon enough for the level 2 fa crumple. And the match-up isn’t bad… akuma’s footsies are better (remember to try and take lag into account for why maybe certain things don’t work online as well…) his mix-up on knockdown feels a little more random, they have similar damage output, akuma can decently get out of her mix-up with teleports and blocking (she isn’t all that ambiguous really…and her cross-ups aren’t extremely reliable), she actually has a good deal harder time getting out of the vortex since all of her ways of getting out of hit either cost a lot of meter, are very risky to having been safe jumped, or get beaten clean by divekicks. The only thing that gets me with the match-up is getting in you have to be very twitchy on low block and I don’t know how bad on block her slide and slide grapples are so I don’t know how hard I can punish it and tend to opt for a throw if i can’t seem to land anything else.

i actually think juri is possibly the hardest match-up for akuma of the new characters. EX pinwheel kills cross-ups, she has very good zoning and meter building simultaneously that akuma seems to have a slight problem getting in on. Her dive kick beats or trades not in his favor with his normals and the fear of it landing giving her a free ultra if they were looking for it can be huge… and stops you from using fireballs much except jumpbacks at full range (dive is beaten by fb…so the jumpbacks keep her long distance jump ins via dive kick hard to attempt). Does anyone know what her frame disadvantage for lk dive kick, 1 hit, on block is? It feel rather safe… maybe even neutral (I’m guessing -2? though). She also has pretty high priority pokes that turn pretty insane with ultra 1 active (though its hard to give her a reason to use ultra 1 over ultra 2 right now I feel since it requires a ton of meter to get much out of the ultra combo-wise and most characters can zone her long enough to be okay from the ultra being very effective while ultra 2 combos off a 1 hit divekick which can be canceled from jump-ins, comboed into off her overhead, etc giving it a lot of versatility). She isn’t super deadly without meter but she builds it so readily that its hard to find a time when she doesn’t have enough to EX pinwheel you. That being said, its surely going to be justa 5-5 and nothing worse for akuma because he has everything juri has except SRK>pinwheel and akuma can vortex people while juri doesn’t have the same level of knockdown mix-up as akuma does in part because she lacks the command throw akuma has (can you imagine if akuma had a GROUND based command throw as well???).

That being said… I’m hardly sold on these being where these characters will still be in 1-5 months as a lot of amazing game charging things can be found. I mean… its not like Magneto ALWAYS was known to have infinites.

As a random aside… I randomly forgot that there wasn’t the loop anymore in the middle of a match against this Satymal-somethign guy who was playing sim (he must play alot because he had something like 11k BP with him already…the guy was pretty good and didn’t just go for teleport combos all the time…lol) and so I randomly did a a HK after c.lk c.lp s.lp … and it worked rather easily. And I tried it on purpose a second time and it worked again. Just made me think maybe it would be worthwhile to put time into finding out if there are certain characters and combo situations where the loop still maybe apply as being a useable tool that can be performed with consistency… I’m really missing it in the balrog match :frowning: c.lk, c.lp, s.lp, hk, c.mp, tatsu sweep felt so much nicer than c.lk, c.lp, c.mp, tatsu sweep… it just flowed.

576

Been playing against Dudley lately here, he can give Akuma some trouble imo, mainly since teleports and hurricane kicking out can both be punished by ex-machine gun blow easily. So if he has meter, you’re forced to take the high-low mixup.

577

lolol.

Gouki takes this match. Bet it. Duds stops stupid teles. That’s it.

578

viet, just look at the little bit i said in the post before urs about dudley right now and you can see why the match-up is akuma’s right now. Dudley has no reversals worth a damn, you can cross him up for free because his anti-airs are kinda weak, to combo into his ultra outside of the corner you basically have to land a FADC uppercut, which has horrible priority so the only way you’ll get it is to combo into it off a target combo or jabs, his pokes are trash, and if you just use ultra 2 in the match-up you can teleport to your heart’s desire on him… either he tries to EX machinegun late to try an hit you during teleport frames where you can’t cancel into ultra(I don’t think ppl are that advanced with anti-tele strats anyway…lol) and you have time to block it and punish with a srk or he goes for a teleport punish at any other time and you counterhit with ultra 2.

While its just a “feeling” from having tried to use dudley for a few match (I don’t care for him all that much… but I might try a little harder to use him later on) I feel his air-to-air is rather weak compared with a lot of the cast and his lack of a good poke with ANY range means that he HAS to rely on specials and jumping to get close. His f+mk is pretty decent to try and close a TINY gap, but the range is weak and lows like c.mk OWN this. Hell, c.mk PERIOD owns dudley because it lows the hitbox from a lot of his higher moves, beats his low moves and faster moves, and stuffs his specials. Dudley knocking you down is hardly a bother as they HAVE to be RIGHT on top of you to do anything to you. This means that if they are even a step backwards you basically know they are looking for a teleport and you can just stand. High low stuff doesn’t even net that much damage for him without basically a full bar of super unless he is in the corner, and if you get in the corner its actually worth while to teleport out if he atches you are not because his game basically REVOLVES around having someone in corner pressure. Also note he doesn’t get a lot of untechable knockdowns so quick tech means you don’t deal with the mix-up UNLESS you are normally knocked down in the corner (part of why he needs you in the corner).

also… the easiest way for dudley to build meter against akuma is to take a fb to the face…lol…

don’t take me wrong though… I’m making it sound like its a 7-3 match-up, its not. Dudley’s knockdown pressure is pretty decent and like others as long as he blocks right or guesses right against a vortex, he is out of it. Its likely between a 5.5-4.5 and a 6-4 for akuma. Dudley can do some big damage, especially with 1 stock of EX and an ultra or with a super off mid screen (j.hk, s.hk, EX machingun, duck upper, ultra 1 basically combos from mid-screen for nearly 500 damage), the problem is, similarly to gouken, its sometimes easier said than done to get the initial hit of the combo. But the fact he doesn’t build meter super fast and once you knock him down he starts having to really blow through meter if me wants to get out of akuma’s intense pressure (demon palm is basically free on him unless he uses EX uppercut, and if you safe palm him then he has to burn 3 bars to have made it safe). Its obviously unfair to say but I’ve yet to lose to a dudley and I’ve played some pretty decent ones.

And emblem… you’ll like this… I think people are already starting to tier whore with sim…lol. Give it a few weeks for some official tier list to come out and people will stop complaining as much about sagat (he is still good but nowhere near what he was…which was the best, non-overpowered character in the game).

speaking of sagat… this match-up is 6-4 now, no question imo. There can even be argument for it being 6.5-3.5 (I don’t think its as bad as a 7-3 though unless someone finds an easy way to even get one rep of HK loop off consistently on sagat). Sagat is really risking his meter (which is actually feels like he NEEDS now) to do a random scar and HOPE his next uppercut isn’t blocked/whiffed. The only time I could finding myself with sagat using a random scar is (not random actually…lol) if I see they have what I PERCEIVE to be about 90 chip damage or less left on their health and I have full meter to burn so I could get 45 chip on the first hit or the kill and I can then FADC scar uppercut again for the kill if they blocked… even that feels like a waste. Which means the onyl other real use is if someone is being focus happy (but who is really focus happy against sagat??). Everything that worked on sagat before sans looping still works and its still worthwhile to go for the untechable knockdown becuase he just really cannot deal with the vortex without throwing out random punishable TU or guessing correctly… and a correct guess still nets him in a bad range especially since now he doesn’t have that same tiger knee pressure he once had. Its like they tried to underpower sagat a bit and turn him into more of a zoning machine… and of course for the akuma match-up that is the WORST thing they could have done to him since akuma has no problem getting in c.mk range of him and once he is in the only way to get him out is to land a random special. Ohh yea… and the weakened chip damage hurts as well. Sagat can still put the hurt on akuma with scar combos, but he really is still only going to be getting scar combos via landing a random uppercut since sagats pokes against akuma are gutter trash. And the only way to get UBER damage against akuma with ultra like before is to have 4 bars to drain… not the 2 it took before (You can still do FADC, f.Hk, Ultra… but the damage is a good deal more for uppercut FADC scar, EX uppercut, Ultra). In short the weakened non-scar uppercuts, weaker knee strings, less chip, less health, and ultra that doesn’t really net you that much of a new advantage (I’d still rather have the extra damage of ultra 1 myself) means this match-up is better for akuma than in the last game… but still not a complete gimmie (but a decent akuma vs. a good sagat… akuma is going to probably win that match most of the time because now you don’t even have to have the skill of landing the loop to play the match-up right andsagat isn’t going to get the chance to mash SRK during the hk combo to try and net something… NOBODY should be dropping hk, c.lp/c.mp combos… nobody).

And for sim… I think I might need to see if there is a new more sound strat than s.lp to counter his teleport once he has ultra 2… because losing a round to that ultra is frustrating…lol. The sim match-up definently got worse… I’d go as far as to say its possibly akuma’s first bad (4.5-5.5 likely…possibly a a little worse but not much) match-up in super. It was already basically even before but now with less damage for akuma and more damage for sim plus a new ultra that WORKS against akuma… the match-up is surely more annoying than it was before. It feels SO risky to FA through a limb until you know you are close enough to punish afterwards. The match-up is just simply harder. Less reward for every risk and more punishment for every mistake… and that ultra 2 means it SEEMS like its almost he best option to just teleport now if you see him tele towards you once he has his ultra 2. And of course that feels silly, so I’m really tryin to figure out a better strat for that (wanting a 100% counter option… not a “well…MAYBE … if this or that” type thing. I don’t want to be hit by his raging demon noogie ever again…lol).

579

Huh? I can summarize your post alot better. Gouki beats Sagat down just as he did in Vanilla except now he can’t loop.

Did I get that down correctly?

Gouki for #1. Bet it. lol@anyone who tries to argue it.

580

the uppercut damage nerf makes it worse since most sagats made the match close only by landing semi-random safe uppercuts… otherwise yea…lol (though its was never even close to 7-3 in vanilla, it can be argued MAYBE for this one… but I already know how you feel about the match-up in vanilla so I digress)

I don’t know about #1 though. Top 5 no doubt about it, but he lost a lot of damage and might actually have a bad match-up or two. If he is #1 though its not by a landslide like sagat was in the last game because akuma is more of a 5-5 or 6-4 type character while sagat had a lot of 7-3 type matches that akuma will simply never have. Not that I really care about the tiers… as long as akuma goes 5-5 with everyone i’d be happy. He also lost some of the edge in some of his old match-ups due to other characters getting nicely boosted (guile, rose, abel, and a bunch of others are closer match-ups than before due to certain new ultras and changes to normals) so if he is #1 then he will be the weakest #1 in a capcom game ever.