So I want to go off on a tangent for a moment to talk about why Anti-Airs, Dragon Punches Specifically, are so difficult to land.
First of all its because the input is just Bonkers… trying to is simple enough but doing it faster faster and increases the likely hood of something going wrong, for me specifically I’ve had Unintended: Supers, Ex Dragon Punches, Fireballs, Forward Dashes, Crouching Medium Punches, Standing Medium Punches (specific to cross cuts), Forward Medium Punches (Command Normal) and even Jumps… this sort of thing is inevitable, the whole purpose of the motion is to stop you from doing it to quickly and yet the situations where its required demands that you be able to do it quickly…
For me specifically, the move has three alternate methods it can be performed relative to where the opponent is jumping from with which character.
: Default method for stopping straight forward jump ins. And the occassional neutral jump.
: just like the default method but doesn’t make your character stand up, allows the Dragon Punch to connect Deeper, perfect for defensive players and/or those who use Hitbox Arcade Controllers.
: Used for performing Crosscuts (Autocorrecting Dragon Punches)… I don’t think its worth practicing since you can only use it if you know for sure you’re going to get crossed up.
And : the legendary “wiggle” method Used for stopping ambiguous Jump, particularly in the corner. Perfect for defensive players such as myself, I’ve swatted a satisfactory amount of attacks using this method… unfortunately this is not a D-Pad friendly method (non of them are actually).
So yeah… its no wonder why everybody eventually screws up a Dragon Punches (if you haven’t yet that just mean’s you’re not going for them enough).
But this isn’t new… I’ve already whined about this before…
But James has shown me that it turns out theres yet another reason why its so hard to anti-air… playing Too Defensively… While it might seem like a good idea on the surface, Standing up to Block Jumping Attacks is actually the wrong reaction… standing guard is primarily for overheads. If you block a jumping attack though, in all likely hood, you’re still at a disadvantage… and that wouldn’t be an issue against certain characters, just keep blocking and stick out a jab or two in there and you’l be pushed out of the opponents range. But for other characters, Grapplers in Particular,… well… you have a character with an unreactable, untechable command throw that gives fantastic Okizeme, standing right next to you with a significant advantage, what do you think is gonna happen ? This was what the whole Rainbow Mika Season 1 Fiasco was all about.
So this leaves you with one option… Smack’em out of the sky before they have a chance to be a problem. And to do that, you might have to start playing more proactively. And I won’t lie to you… its gonna get worse before it gets better. In his attempt to swat people out of the air… Playing defensively was so deeply imbedded in James that even thinking about Anti-Airing got James kicked in the face so many times that he was losing 3 Times as much compared to his usual style… and I didn’t fare too well either, I suffered 27 Losses in a Row getting kicked in the face by the most reactable jump ins that could have easily been blocked. LoL… it was so discouraging… and the ever growing losing streak is trying to reinforce that defensive play style. At some point all logic goes out the window… cause now we had to view every blocked jumping attack as a failure… and every boot to the Face as a success “Atleast I tried” we told ourselves as we lost 35% health to optomized jump in Counter Hit Combos. LoL… its hard to see losing a round in 13 Seconds because of being amitious rather than cautious as a resounding success but theres genuinely no other way of seeing it… luckily for him it paid off… he made platinum (again)… and I was finally able to beat my Button Mashing Friends back to back…
So yeah… thats half of my view on Anti-Airs… the other half has yet to be determined.