Beginner Hisako tips (?)

[Marbledecker]

@STORM179 posted this in the GGs thread - but I’ll be damned if it’s not totally appropriate for a beginner Hisako to read. Despite the intermediate concept of Resets being the catalyst, I think it provides good insight as to how Hisako uses her options to influence the opponents actions - which is Hisako’s single greatest strength and the crux of her gameplan, and that’s totally helpful for a young Hisako to know early on. It’s a great post.

@STORM179

{re: Resets and influencing opponent’s actions}
…“just hold up” - it’s actually pretty solid advice against 90% of the Hisako’s you’ll run into online. While you’re correct that it isn’t hard to punish jump-outs once you’ve worked on it a bit, most Hisako’s haven’t worked on it, and will only know how to hit you with the command grab reset. More to the point, you don’t really have a choice in the matter - if you never jump out or otherwise avoid one of her command grab resets, then you’ll just keep getting tagged by them. Anyone I’ve played on these forums can probably attest to that - if you don’t avoid them, then I will just keep doing them. I think that’s true for most Hisako’s.

What you can do though, is actually backdash out of her resets. Appropriately mashed backdashes will avoid both influence resets and the cr.MK anti-jump reset. I don’t generally recommend that because I think it’s harder to pull off (at least on stick), and if your timing is off you’ll get tagged by whichever one I happened to do. If you can mash DP fast enough, that will also beat any reset attempts.

The thing is though, is that there are still counters to each of these items as well. If I know you DP while I’m comboing, maybe I’ll drop it into a counter instead (that one really puts someone on tilt). If I know you mash backdash, then I can just drop the combo into a raw ORZ. Or maybe, because you’re now super focused on avoiding all these different resets, I’ll instead just do super traditional combos into HKD ender to keep you in the vortex. After all, if you’re mashing DP you’re not breaking, and if you’re mashing backdash then your attention is slightly divided.

And that’s the rub. The resets aren’t just for damage - they also serve as a very important distraction to all the damage I’m doing within the traditional combo system. Essentially, good Hisako play (I think anyway) is a lot about just putting so many options out there for the opponent to think about that they’re a little slow on some of the fairly basic things that are happening around them. My advice is to kind of approach some of that stuff the way you approach Spinal’s mixups - make your guess and make your peace with it, and then deal with the aftereffects whatever they are. Sometimes you’ll get it right and sometimes you won’t, but keep playing your game…

…one of the ways I think opponents should regard this dynamic (which exists in every MU, but Hisako relies on), is that all that really means is that I guess better than you do. There are reasons for that, and there’s a lot of conditioning on my part that goes into making those guesses, but at the end of the day that’s all they are. Guesses. Hisako relies on guesses - on being able to dictate the pace of the match such that she has a decent idea at any given moment in time what the opponent wants to go for.

{re: Fighting Hisako}
You can’t get away from that when fighting her, but you can use it against her. Disrespect her. Jump in with obvious telegraphed jump-ins and push buttons. Meaty her with the exact same button she just got done countering. Do all kinds of ridiculous nonsense that will have me saying “I don’t believe he just went for that”. If you play at a Hisako’s pace you will lose - sometimes you just have to kind of toss out absolute nonsense that makes me truly have to guess what it is you’re going to do next.