One thing that I feel good about my Ryu at this stage is my consistency with basic combos.

Unlike a lot of online Ryus I play, who do combos like crossup jmk, hp srk fadc ultra without hit confirming, risking punishment and wasting meter, I always try and play safe by hit confirming my combos such as crossup jmk, clk, clp, srk fadc ultra.

I feel that after playing Ryu for so long I can hit these combos reasonably consistently and in the clutch. However, I feel that my current Ryu lacks damage. While being safe and hit confirming all day is good, I need to upgrade the damage of my combos.

I have been trying to do this in a few ways.

One of the setups that I use a lot is after a crossup combo either blocked or on hit, if I can get a untechable knockdown (most of the time through a tick throw on my blocked crossup), I will try and do a fake crossup or an ambiguous crossup with jfp after the throw.

And if it hits, I do cmp, chp, hk tatsu. Why this combo? Well this does 316 damage, and a boatload of stun. (Jhp clp clp srk only does 259 damage). It also is a lot more hit confirmable than Jfp, chp, srk, and if the opponent blocks I can throw after a single cmp, or continue into a cmp cmk hado blockstring.

After I land this combo, plus the stun from my earlier crossup hopefully, and the opponent will be precipitously near dizzy. Just adding this single combo to my game makes my Ryu that more dangerous, and has allowed me to garner quite a few more clutch comebacks.

Another thing that I’m working on, is maximising crossup damage.  Most of the time in training mode, I will choose Ryu/Ken as my dummy. And basically, crossup jmk, clk, clp, hk tatsu whiffs on the skinny shotos. Me, being lazy, never bothered to research crossup combos on the rest of the cast, and therefore I would just do crossup jmk, clk, clp, srk on everybody.

That’s not good enough. To be good at Street Fighter 4, I can’t just rely on universal combos that work on everybody. I need character specific combos. So I’m currently in the process of testing crossup combos on every member of the cast with Ryu.

Some interesting notes after a crossup jmk:

clk clp chp tatsu doesn’t work on Ryu and Ken but it works on Akuma!

clk clp chp tatsu also doesn’t work on cammy, balrog and sakura.

However! cmp chp tatsu works on cammy! Weird.

I’m still in the process of testing, but there are a lot of wierd instances such as cmp chp tatsu whiffing but cmp cmp chk hitting.

Hopefully I will be back with some more numbers.