Disappointed they didn’t go for this iconic Blanka design
No but seriously I’m so glad they went the savage beastman route and not the cartoon monster look he had from SF4.
It is nice and all, but in the end every Blanka player will be playing the story mode costume.
There is no other choice. It is by far the best costume that has ever graced SFV!
He wasn’t nerfed that hard, it’s just that he was never good to begin with. Itazan made him look half-way decent, but even he never won anything with him.
So 2nd place at the Millan event. He lost to Haitani in a favorable MU btw.
4th place at EVO.
4th place at Capcom cup and a lot of top 8 appearances and the character wasn’t good.
Not to mention Snake eyez finally doing well after failing for a year.
No, Zangief was VERY strong last season. He had a couple of hard counters, he will always have these because of his design but Zangief was very strong .
At least an A tier character that is around the top 10 area.
Are the servers offline for SFV ?
Getting 21009 error.
Lol what kind of downplaying is this? Guess we can say some of the top tiers wasn’t good in S2 because some of them weren’t winning much either.
Not sure I would say top 10, but he would 11 or 12th. MAYBE 10th place.
But he surely was much stronger in season 2.5.
Interesting how the meta on SFV is right now that two changes managed to hit him that hard.
Since when is Necalli a favorable matchup for Gief? And a ‘couple’ of hard counters? You mean Dhalsim, Menat, Abigail, Guile, Nash and Birdie? And those are just his REALLY bad matchups.
Just because Infiltration won 2 premiers with Juri doesn’t mean she is a very strong character, Infiltration carried her the way Itazan carried Gief. Itazan didn’t win anything with Gief for two years; the second he drops him and picks up Abigail he wins his first major tournament. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
But think what you want. I’m not downplaying him as I no longer have a dog in this race. Come Tuesday I’ll probably never play Gief again.
Gief player persecution complex is too strong
Fair enough, then you have to consider that Zangief destroy characters like Mika, M.Bison, Ibuki, Laura, Balrog, Karin.
All of these are really bad MUs where the opponent must switch to stand a chance. Also Infiltration Didn’t really win two premiers with Juri. He won one and EVO Japan was 95% Menat and 5% Juri. People shouldn’t just look at the GF and assume he won with Juri.
Itazan won with Abigail because Itazan is great and Abigail is overpowered as fuck. Itabashi isn’t even optimizing Abigail and he is winning with ease. Abigail being a top 3 character in S3 doesn’t have anything to do with Gief’s status in S2.
@Bea_Iank I agree and that is why i said around the the top 10 area and didn’t say a solid top 10. A character that is A tier and around the to 10 character isn’t a half way decent character. He was good, period.
Playing Gief means playing a borderline character where his highly favorable matchups are balanced by the worst ones. Pick your poison, reading every opponent during a stacked tournament is extremely hard to do.
S2.5 Gief was good, that is a fact.
He is less good now, which means in a game with some sense of balance like SFV, he dropped several spots in the tier rank.
Harder to win with, but still doable if you are stubborn like me.
I feel like Ryu just needs a good CC and he’d be in that mid to high tier spot. VT1 buffs are very nice.
Let’s break down his (supposed) good matchups one by one (for convenience’s sake I’ll use Itazan as the gold standard of Gief players):
The only high level set in a tournament (exhibition match) I’m aware of between Gief and Laura was the set that Snake Eyez and Idom played, which Idom won 5-1. The other matches I’ve seen was Itazan going toe-to-toe with random online Lauras. We can play theory fighter all we want, but based on actual results there is nothing to suggest that Gief even wins this matchup, let alone that he destroys Laura.
I honestly don’t know how he fares against Ibuki, but if he wins it’s definitely not by a huge margin. Gief-Ibuki matches are pretty few and far between. I remember Yukadon beating Snake Eyez at, I believe, Dreamhack, and I saw Itazan win 2-1 and 2-0 against Narikun and losing 5-0 against ACQUAACQUA. Maybe he wins the matchup regardless, but I seriously doubt it. I think this is 5-5 at worst for Ibuki.
Bison, I don’t know. Itazan beats Problem X, but then some random Bison bodied both Stupendous and DrDannyPham on WNF. Still, I’m pretty sure Gief wins this, but again, not by a huge margin.
I agree that he beats Balrog and Karin, but I see nothing to suggest that the matchups are hugely in his favor. As for Mika, I’m not sure. Itazan always loses to Fuudo, and I mean literally ALWAYS, as in, I have never seen Itazan win a session against Fuudo. I don’t think this would be happening if the matchup were very lopsided in Gief’s favor. I could be wrong on this. Maybe Fuudo is simply Itazan’s ‘angstgegner’, and he’d fare much better against other Mikas.
As for his place on the S2 tier list: Necalli, Cammy, Karin, Balrog, Birdie, Rashid, Laura, Ibuki, Akuma, Abigail, Urien and Guile all have indisputably better matchup charts than Gief. So even if you give him the maximum benefit of the doubt, he’d still only be in 13th place, and that’s being extremely generous. At the very least I’d say Bison, and Ken are also higher on the list than him.
Again, I’m not trying to downplay him, as my Gief playing days are over, I just find it curious that so many people seem to think he is a top ten character when he is clearly not.
Why the fuck do people down play Geif so hard? I get that because of his archetype that he mas some extreme hard counters but Gief is a pure grappler with actual fuck you vortex. Like if Gief had no pay off after getting in then I could understand but when Gief gets in, he gets in.
Top tier or not Gief was never THAT bad.
kof 2002 @ gog for free
Blanka should have a v-trigger that enables him pull Ono’s dick out of his arse.
Gief would still be really good if Abigail wasnt in the game.
It’s not so much how strong Gief is, just that Capcom unfortunately put in a big body so versatile that he invalidates most of the characters that revolve around command grabs now. He’s so good that even Laura and Mika players should consider using him
Capcom just finally realized that putting big CANADIAN body was the smartest thing they’ve done. The results are astounding.