I really wanted to go to the Evil Ryu/Oni Akuma-only 2 v 2 tournament at Box Hill today, but I could not make it… because I had to make my missus a lasagna. Oh well.
But I did get to finally try out Evil Ryu today at Bluehouse!
I showed up just past noon with my buddy Pedro. Sat down, plunked in my two bucks and selected Evil Ryu.
I feel pretty excited; he looks really cool on the select screen and there are already a bunch of people playing him and Oni Akuma in the arcade.
He moves a lot differently from Ryu. His back and forward dashes are definitely different, and I wonder about his walk speed. He’s also taller than normal Ryu, which makes me wonder if his hitbox is fatter as well.
No matter. I’m up against an E. Honda player that I don’t recognise.
I immediately feel a bit lost in the matchup. I keep hit confirming into low forward and sweep automatically, which obviously doesn’t work with Evil Ryu and the Honda player punishes me every time. Without the means or know how to set up a safe jump on Honda, I feel a little lost on offense. I notice Evil Ryu has Akuma’s far standing fierce and his HP DP feels really good. He’s definitely no slouch in the anti-air department.
His low forward seems quite good at first try. It cancels into fireball and other specials pretty smoothly, and I find myself really appreciating the range. It’s the Third Strike low forward, and looks really cool in the SF4 engine. It feels a bit slower than normal Ryu’s low forward though. Despite that, it still feels pretty good to me and the range makes me miss my old low forward from Super!
I didn’t get to use his low strong that much, which is apparently really good and his main combo building block.
I definitely feel a bit weird playing Evil Ryu; I think an Akuma player would immediately feel more at home performing his BnBs like Lk Tatsu into SRK etc.
I fail an SRK FADC Ultra 1 but land an anti-air lp dp in Ultra 1 in the corner. I notice that Evil Ryu’s forward dash is very different; and wonder if the Adon FADC problem of dashing too far under the opponent and messing up the player’s directional inputs will occur.
After playing him, here are my two cents:
I will probably stick with Ryu.
Evil Ryu combo-wise feels more like Akuma than Ryu. He does more damage with his BnBs than Ryu, similar to Akuma. But he doesn’t have the full option of dive kick vortex options like palm, demon flip grab and such.
So if I wanted Akuma-like damage, why don’t I just play Akuma instead?
He does have what seems like a 3-frame DP into Ultra AND a teleport. I tried the teleport, and while definitely useful, it seems a little less good than Akuma’s teleport.
His hop kick is really good. Possibly a Dudley like high/low mixup game in the future?
He doesn’t seem as complete a character as Ryu or Akuma. He lacks the combos into sweep or low forward blockstrings of Ryu and the easy tatsu into sweep of Akuma. Maybe that’s just me not being used to the character yet.
His crossup tatsu knocks people away, and since my Super is a Demon, I can’t get crossup tatsu into Super or into sweep like Akuma would.
So he seems an uneven mix of the best and worst of Ryu and Akuma.
While definitely very fun, and definitely different enough from normal Ryu to be his own character (which is a very good thing), I think for me he’ll just be a fun character to play on the side. I don’t think he’s broken or anything.
Of course with everything I say I fully expect to eat my own words when someone out there manages to break the game with Evil Ryu.
So I eventually ended up playing normal Ryu at Bluehouse. And got owned by…everybody.
I was losing to Blankas, Hondas, and even Somniac’s Oni Akuma!
Somniac showed up and we played a bit. He hit me with that crossup dash punch into Ultra!
I was having problems dealing with Oni’s fireball game. I couldn’t tell when it would do multiple hits and go through my fireball.
His DP is funny. It seems slow when it hits, but I tested Ryu’s sweep into safe jump on Oni and he was able to DP me. It could be an execution error, and I should probably test it more, but for now I assume that it’s a 3 frame DP.
Oni Akuma is TOTALLY different from Akuma. How come when Akuma becomes more powerful he grows a slight beer gut to match Gouken’s? Hm.
But his air dash does seem very intriguing and he also seems very fun. That’s a good thing in my book and I hope the Vampire twins will pique even more interest in AE.
Debator even showed up and tore me a new one with Cody. Debator is a former Melbourne Ryu player and he quit the game a while back. Which made me a little sad because I need a Ryu mentor!
But it looks like he’s getting back into the game; just not with Ryu. I asked him why and he looked at me and shook his head. “Ryu sucks in this game,” was his death sentence. Looks like I gotta find another Ryu teacher… I’m looking at you Kilok!
I really didn’t know how to deal with his Cody; he was constantly in my face, frame trapping the hell out of me. It seems that a lot of Cody’s normals move him forward; so he is able to maintain the pressure much longer than Ryu would, for instance. I kept getting hit with random Bingos and Ruffian kicks as well. Overall I just felt really mindfucked playing his Cody!
It was an expensive day for me. Somniac eventually switched to Bison, and I lost game after game at the arcade.
I went home into a deep funk and didn’t do much better online.
Maybe I was having a bad day. But I think I just need to get a lot better. A lot of random people in the arcade were blowing through my zoning and footsies very easily, even though they couldn’t do normal combos. I’m really starting to feel my lack of fundamentals (through my wallet) as I play more and more in the arcades.
Spoony always tells me that I shouldn’t be losing to random semi-scrubby people in arcades because he doesn’t. But I think that I can only compete with certain players who seem “at my level” simply because I play against them a lot. When you put Spoony and me against the same stranger in an arcade, I do much, much worse than him and get revealed for the fraud that I am. Then my lack of fundamentals and adaptation skill really becomes apparent.
I guess that’s what arcades are for; to improve this aspect of my game. I only hope my wallet can hold up in the meantime!
Being a Scrub 
I think a word of advice I gave during our playing at Bluehouse rings true for fundamentals, I even said it later that day at Boxhill.
“If you can block, you can uppercut” in regards to people jumping your fireballs 😀
I think a word of advice I gave during our playing at Bluehouse rings true for fundamentals, I even said it later that day at Boxhill.
“If you can block, you can uppercut” in regards to people jumping your fireballs 😀
Thanks for the advice man, and it is definitely something I should be doing. But I’m actually always, always thinking in my head during the match that exact mantra “If you can block, you can uppercut” but I can’t seem to actually do it while playing.
I wonder if I will ever overcome this obstacle. And of course, against you I need to work on a lot more things than just pure AA! As you proved today again.
Nice read, I think that his overhead kick is beyond gdlk, it’s like better than Viper’s overhead.
Cheer up mutton, don’t doubt yourself because that’s when you’ll lose more 😦
I think it’s more or less people are willing to jump because you haven’t shown them a reason to. So you know sit there don’t throw a fireball, just watch them fly into the air for the so called predicted fireball and DP / C.HP him and if they are persistent and waiting for you to fireball walk forward then c.mp / f.hp / c.lp / grab I was doing this with my scrubby ryu today it works wonders for people waiting for a fireball XD.
A word of advice I asked from Mike Ross because my AA skills are way ass LOL, I tried to predict jumps instead of reacting, which you definitely took advantage of, he said and I qoute ” sit there on the ground, know your anti-ait before hand and just input it when they jump and also be prepared for them to jump after everything you do.” (might be not fully what he said in terms of word usage).
Also I don’t think adapting is essential to winning, like obviously if you can adapt on the fly it’s much much much easier to win, but like if they can force you into a style of play then unless their character is completely anti-your main you can force them to play a certain way as well. (IMO)
Thanks Carlplight.
Well, against some characters that have nice long range pokes that do well against my cmk like Bison and Balrog, I find it necessary to throw footsie-range fireballs to fight them effectively in footsies. But at that distance fireballs are extremely punishable. But if I stop throwing them altogether, I give up a lot of impetus in the footsie war.
So when people are focussing through my fireballs, jumping everytime on the dot I throw a fireball (because they read my simplistic patterns easily), then that’s when I get mindfucked.
But a lot of what you say makes sense, so thanks for that.
In regards to adapting being necessary or not to win…
I think some characters are able to force their style of play onto their matches a little better than other characters. (I’m not sure if I wanna use Viper as an example, but maybe.)
But with Ryu, he’s such a basic character.
And I think to win at a high level you have to basically use a mixture of strong fundamentals to take advantage of his basic but strong tools, and heavy adaptation to the matchup/player style.
In my opinion, at least for Ryu, (and I’m sure it applies to every character to differing levels) great adaptation skill is a extremely necessary tool to win.
Yeah, I know what you mean giving up the one tool you can use that’s nearly safe and giving up momentum alongside advantage entirely is rough, playing as Viper everything that’s not a Seismo is pretty much that lol. But sometimes you have to do that like, Daigo’s matches he like gives up the normal fireball game sometimes if the character can better footsies to deal with it.
I was playing like crazyandy with Ryu because it was way too laggy to feint properly with Viper. He would focus the Fireball all day without messing up and that was really difficult to deal with and that put me on tilt. Then I played a Boxer and he had gosh darn amazing pressure and footsies and like I think the only way I won both of those matches was to give up fireballs when I was in the safe zone for c.mk xx hp Hadouken (ironically -_-) and won with like a bunch of CHs like c.mp and when I did use a Hadouken it was like 75% EX and I would only throw the fireball at like a far range.
I think I worded that wrong, actually so many typos in my post LMAO, I’m not saying you should like not learn how to adapt faster but like instead of adapting to stop them from doing stuff you should concentrate on not letting them put you into situations where they have the advantage forcing you to adapt. You’re right some characters are so well suited they can change the entire way a match is played but every character has some degrees of effeciency in this area and the more suited they are at forcing their gameplan the less adaptation they have to do.
I’ll use Viper as an example like FlashMetroid’s Viper is pretty much Seismo = Fireballs and TK and Seismos = Anti-Air, like from the other player’s perspective he’s thinking damn I’m being put into a difficult situation here but Flash is thinking I can’t let him put me in a stupid situation so I’m forcing him to play a certain way so it’ll be hard for him to do the same to me. So yeah like I mean if Ryu stopped throwing fireballs they’re probably thinking “damn his momentum is pretty much like always either strong or neutral, I need to take a risk to get out”, kinda like the way that Eric H Ryu was playing against Chi-Rithi, Chun has a very strong footsie game but Eric just say outside c.hk and was dancing back and forth doing nothing (I’m surprised Chi-Rithi didn’t s.hp). He didn’t need to gain momentum, he was perfectly fine at sitting back at an advantageous positioning and waiting for his opponent to take risks.
Mike Ross’ words of how to anti-air better definitely increased my anti-air skills a lot and it’s helped at how I can be more relaxed when people start jumping like mad men on me and anti-air more accurately. Hopefully it’ll do the same for you :D.
Well if Mike “Majestic” Ross said it, it must be true. So I will try to take that to heart.
for the throwing the ex fireball I mean inside footsie range lol sorry