Oh, no doubt. Dude, Sakura’s ex dragon punch is so sick in option selects. Think of how fast it moves, how far it moves, and how invincible it is. I haven’t tried it as extensively as I have Gief’s stuff, but it’s beaten every backdash and most reversals I’ve tried it against. I definitely think that eventually high level SF4 play is going to involve a lot of option selecting by both players.
At the same time, I think Gief benefits from this kind of stuff more than anyone else. There’s no one you want to escape from more than Zangief, and against Zangief even blocking is very risky. Dictator’s slide kills almost every backdash, but… why do you need to backdash against Dictator? Just block, and if you he tries to throw, try to tech it, and if you get thrown, that’s too bad but it’s not a huge deal. Basically, your default option is block, and occasionally you want to do something else. That’s not how it is against Gief, though. There’s no default option against Gief, you just have to guess what to do from among all your options. It’s much more important for Gief than anyone else to have ways to deal with as many of the opponent’s potential options as possible just because the opponent is going to try his different potential options much more frequently against Gief than against anyone else.
Well, not really. Against a lot of characters doing jab o-s sweep is always unsafe because their reversals beat the jab, so there’s no point in worrying about when you do the jab as long as the opponent still has to wake up into it, since regardless of how you time it, if they do a reversal you’ll get popped. But you can do it as a safe meaty against Rog, so you should take advantage of that by keeping your jab within that safe window. Iirc Boxer’s fastest reversal is 8 frames, and since your low jab recovers in 6 frames and your low short in 7, you really don’t have much leeway in terms of how late you can time your meaty.
But in any case, in my testing I haven’t found that timing the jab later makes the option select sweep work. Could be wrong about that of course, and that’s why I want you guys to test things out too.
Yeah, the guys above me are right that his wakeup command grab loses to all meaty attacks. As for why the cr. jab beats backdash and focus backdash, well, Honda’s backdash is really short and slow. It’s pretty useless.
I should probably mention this in the first post, but when I say “cr. jab” or something like “air attack cr. jab o-s green hand,” the cr. jab means do a bunch of crouching jabs like how you normally would in a crouching jab block string or combo. If you’re holding back while you do that, a properly timed safe attack will still let you block, since the opponent puts you in block stun before you 2nd jab can come out.
So against Honda, “cr. jab” means “do a full crouching jab block string or combo while holding back or down-back.” One crouching jab doesn’t beat Honda’s backdash or focus backdash, it’s the 2nd jab that does. If Honda does backdash, his backdash’s startup invincibility will move through the first jab, but his backdash is so short and slow that he gets hit by the 2nd jab because he’s still close enough and hasn’t recovered fast enough. Same thing for his focus backdash. He focuses the first hit, backdashes, and is still in range to get hit by the the next jab.