I think there are very few universal rules that ALL fighting games should apply. One of them, after having seen the effect over many different types of games, is that invincible reversals should be unsafe (and I’m glad to see KI move away from safe reversals for the most part) unless you spend instinct, X-factor, or another super valuable resource once-ish per match.
However, one of them I don’t feel should be absolute is that jumping forward gets you anti-aired easily. In fact, if you look at the complete set of fighting game works, surprisingly few of them have a binary “yes or no” choice for anti-airing… even if you just count SF titles, there are games with air blocking (CvS2, Alpha) or air parrying (3rd Strike), and baiting anti-airs with movement is a very real thing in SF4 and SF5 (mostly, but not limited to, dive kick type stuff). The question of “should I anti-air, or should I anti-air/block-then-punish the bait they are going to do?” is a pretty legit question to ask of a FG player IMO. And of course, if you get into genres without SF in the title, you have anime games and Marvel, where the definition of anti-air is basically just rewritten almost entirely.
I can understand the frustration of not being able to anti-air crazy air characters like Mira, Omen, Thunder, Sadira, especially if your character has stubby AA (though I don’t think Thunder does). But I think you will probably need to challenge this notion of “jump → reaction AA” as a 100% guarantee if you are going to enjoy fighting games in general, not just KI. And I definitely don’t think there is evidence to suggest that games without binary anti-air choices are scrubby or lead to degenerate offense.
If you’re looking for actionable replies, air-to-airs are often a pretty good choice for anti-airing and keeping yourself safe in case you’re wrong.
I do want to input that this conversation is a very important one to have. This whole “there is no neutral” (exaggeration I know but you get the idea) is a very prevalent complaint in this community and affects the way a lot of characters are seen (Kim and Arbiter are very underrated characters because of this since they rely on neutral control so much).
Now, whether or not I want to make a long post in this thread about what I think, I’d rather prefer fighting you guys with my Kim or Arbiter and have fun smacking you with MP over and over
Going to try and respond to the main thrusts of this topic without writing a bajillion words, so please forgive me if I gloss over some important point as I try to group some of these thoughts together.
So I wanted to begin with these ideas, because I think to a certain extent the root of this discussion lies along these lines. To start off with, I think it is hugely important to separate the idea of “footsies” from “neutral.” Footsies (in this context referring to the back-and-forth play of low-stakes normals) is a type of neutral, but falls very short of describing the idea of “neutral” in its totality. Neutral just means both characters can do stuff, and in Marvel that looks very different from SF; anime neutral looks quite different from KI or MK neutral, etc. So right off the bat, I think that there might be a bit of a gap between what people say they want, and what they actually want.
So let’s address the idea of footsies instead (because I think that is what you’re really saying you want), and break down some of the unstated assumptions I think are being made. I pulled these quotes out because one of the ideas that both of you mentioned was the idea that you want neutral that is (or has significant instances of being) reactable. I think this is something of a misconception of Street Fighter style footsies, and is somewhat obscured by using an edge case normal like Gief’s st.HP. In most instances SF footsies aren’t really about reacting to button presses at all. Whiff punishing isn’t usually “he threw something out and missed, and now I shall punish” - it’s usually more along the lines of “I’m in a good space to hit buttons and he is too, so I’m going to stagger my buttons/movement in x and y manner and then if I hit I’ll confirm.” There’s a reason you see Karin tossing out st.MK’s like candy or Gief chopping at nothing - because the vaunted whiff punishing skill is mostly a matter of getting into a certain space and then tossing out normals looking for the confirm. SF-style footsies aren’t really about whiff-punishing, so much as they are about hit confirming. The impressive thing isn’t usually that I clipped Karin’s st.MK on recovery - the impressive thing is the confirm that I’m able to get off that stray hit. The buttons that lead to that confirm are mostly just reads.
TL:DR - SF-style footsies are actually incredibly guessy; they just don’t have much stigma attached to them because they’re rarely all or nothing bets either way.
At the risk of being gauche by recommending myself, I would suggest looking at my matches against Dayton J, particularly the ones after he moved to Wulf. The matches certainly have oppressive oki, but at the same time I think there’s actually a decent amount of spacing out with normals and then getting those juicy confirms. Dayton did a fantastic job of utilizing Wulf’s faster walk speed and crazy buttons (shoutouts to overpower ) to whiff punish quite a few of my st.HP’s actually. I think the set with Thompxson had a lot of the more footsie-based neutral as well. There’s a reason I stick out st.MP with full wrath so often.
But hey, those are just a few matches out of dozens, and Hisako, Orchid, Wulf, and Jago are characters that excel in those spaces. Those certainly don’t mean KI is mostly a footsie based fighter - it isn’t. Its neutral is generally more about spacing out with powerful specials than solid normals, and to an extent that is what it is. But at the same time, if that’s what you’re interested in, then KI does have characters that can and do play that normal-based spacing game. If that is something you crave, then Sako, Jago, Orchid, Wulf, Kim, and Tusk are probably characters you’d enjoy using. You might actually be surprised how much these characters can force other characters to play their game. Not the whole cast, of course, but a bigger chunk of it than you might think.
I have more to say, but this is too long already. Part II later.
If you’ll permit me to pull out a few of your quotes @CHANCHULA and address them.
I think you might be underselling how much flying, teleporting, extreme zoning, and “stuff” is a function of those fundamentals you mention above. If Gargos is “extreme zoning” Thunder at the start of the match, then it means Thunder let him get away with floating backwards even though he has one of the farthest-traveling DP’s in the game. If you let Gargos fly away as Thunder at the start of the fight, you have lost both the mind and reaction games, and are missing easy punish opportunities. If Spinal or Hisako or even Fulgore is teleporting raw in neutral, then you are failing on fundamental levels in terms of your punish timings.
Shenanigans are certainly a thing, but they do not occur in a vacuum. “Crazy” play is seldom rewarded long term in KI - the question is if you understand your own toolset well enough to make them pay for it.
As memory serves, Paul B got 5th or something at EVO this year in a tournament of over five hundred, and Rico got 9th. Gutter topped out somewhere in Top 64 or 32, and then won an LCQ at KIWC just two weeks ago. Fiyah Liger qualified by points for the Cup with one of the most fundamentally solid and basic Riptor’s out there.
My point is simply that “solid” play is pretty demonstrably rewarded still. Bass, Dayton, Thompxson, Sleep, and even Nicky (yes, Nicky - try to jump in on him and see what happens), are incredibly sound players fundamentally, and their tournament results have consistently been solid. How much was “yolo” play rewarded in KIWC? How did Ita do? Again - gimmicks work up to a point, but the wall for such play in S3 is actually probably a bit higher than it’s ever been before. The new flipout breakers ensure that neutral occurs more than in prior seasons, so you wind up with more interactions where a player has to actually land that all-important first hit.
As I am wont to do, I would like to challenge you to stop and think about why people get hit when you hit them. Really and truly try to break it down, try and think about what options you’re punishing and why people want to go for those options. And from that point, think about how you can control the pace of the fight based on those dynamics.
The last time we played you asked me what you could do against me, and basically said you felt like you had to play crazy to beat me. My response was that you actually needed to play more solidly. I literally just held my ground in the neutral and fished with st.HP’s and let you walk into them, dash into them, and otherwise just catch that button with your face. Eventually you got frustrated and tried to jump into that range, but then I just down+HP’d you into recap for full combo. Then you got really frustrated and started trying to DP your way in, and then I just countered your follow-ups.
In our follow-up conversation you responded that there didn’t seem to be anything you could do, because I was confirming at ranges where Thunder couldn’t reach. My response was that was true, but that I couldn’t hit you either, unless you tried to walk your way into my space. You were basically losing because you were letting me dictate the terms of the fight, and let my patience entice you into making poor offensive decisions.
I say all that just to reiterate: think about why you or your opponent get hit when they do, and the circumstances and mindsets that lead to those particular interactions. Thunder can’t walk up on Hisako, but can Hisako really just walk up on Thunder? If not, then why play her game? Relatedly, do you have to go into DP shenanigans to get the opening against X player, or is it just something you’re doing because “it’s good and it hits sometimes.” There’s absolutely a time and place for DP shenanigans, but I would just encourage you to be intentional about when and where you play that card.
And if all else fails, play another character for a while who has to walk across the screen like a normal human being. I main Hisako and mained Sadira before her - I learned Jago right before S3 specifically to teach me how to claim space in a more “standard” manner.
Don’t want to derail the thread, but same question I posited to Chanchula: why do you need to get in? If you don’t approach me, what am I going to do to you?
I’m obviously not some purely defensive statue who’s not going to ever try to approach you, but seriously, what are Hisako’s options to close space, and how counterable are they?
Effective neutral play isn’t always about “doing stuff” - sometimes doing nothing at all is a fine option.
Would like to stress from Storm’s followups that people often don’t even really know when they’ve been out-neutralled. The case in every fighting game ever is that wacky play works at low level, and sometimes mid level, and then stops working when you actually get to high level. There, space control (whatever flavor of it your game has) and patient, intelligent play always wins.
I think the people who want a game full of grounded, solid footsies have never tried to play someone world class at that style. It is one of the most helpless feelings you’ll ever experience in video games, and games that focus really heavily on it are often defensive wars of attrition that, IMO, don’t make for good playing or spectating experiences long term.
I didn’t watch the set obviously, but it sounds like Storm played Chanchula in casuals and won by playing controlled and patient. But Chanchula’s point of view is that “I have to act crazier to win”, which is the opposite of the truth, and then posits in this thread that the game is full of crazy play winning when there is lots of evidence that solid play is actually the real way to go. Not to pick on him specifically, because it’s something a lot of people believe. Losing to the solid play many people in this thread want more of is very frustrating, and when it happens to you, the only answer is to slow down yourself and play more solidly. You will not have good long term success out-crazying good neutral, even in KI.
And that is why solid neutral play is always the end result, even if a lot of craziness can get you through the intermediate players pretty easily. We are spoiled to have the 30 best SF players in the world playing literally every single weekend the entire year and showcasing world class neutral play, but it would be wrong to assume that this is a) indicative of ALL SF play (it’s not, mid-level SF5 is the wild west and you will get dunked by whatever the opposite of footsies is to you all day long) and b) other games don’t benefit from solid neutral too.
This is something Im working on and has beaten me many times by just being on the offensive the entire time while my opponent just sits and waits for me to make a mistake or block my approach.
Infil’s point is not that nuttiness does not exist - it is that nuttiness only prevails up to a certain point. Unthinking play does not consistently work at the highest levels of KI any more than it does at the highest levels of any other fighter.
Ok…so what do you think footsies (of which I believe you are claiming to want more of) is actually made of? Genuine question.
Yes, Hisako generally outranges Thunder. Is it the case that every fighter who outranges another fighter (in any game) therefore always wins the footsies/neutral battle between them? Of course not. The range/quality of normals is just a portion of your tools to control neutral. It is your job as a player to understand how to apply those tools to work around the other guy’s strategy.
If you think the fact that Hisako’s st.HP outranges any of Thunder’s normals is the reason you lost that set, then I have to tell you that I think you’re missing some steps. At what ranges is st.HP a factor? In what situations? It’s not a fast button, so I’m not dashing into you and tossing it out. Hisako has the slowest walk speed in the game, so I’m probably also not walking into its range and then fishing with it. It’s a very particular button with a very particular range of efficacy, and the fact that I am using it tells you something about how I want to play - if you are willing appropriately analyze it. It’s not just a function of “this button has good range”, I promise.
Yes, he could. He could also walk near st.HP range and toss out a triplax (allowing the priority system to just stuff me), try to back off to get the call of sky buff, or try to whiff punish with buttons of his own. He could also try and watch for how my use of “check” normals correlates with my wrath (hint: directly proportional), and use that to try and manage when is appropriate to come in and with what.
There are a lot of options available to deal with a character who outranges you. If all you (generic you) see when someone is spacing you out is “his range>my range”, then you are missing out on an awful lot.
I actually learned this by myself while playing against Shin Hisako when she first came out. I thought there was no way to beat her, so I labbed and tried to bait the poke, counterhit with laser sword, and cancel into shadow windkick…
This isn’t unique to jago. If you counter hit her with, say, spinal’s soul sword, fulgore’s blade dash, or TJ’s backfist, if you’re doing it at the max range of her fierce you won’t be able to cancel to a shadow move.
) to whiff punish quite a few of my st.HP’s actually. I think the set with Thompxson had a lot of the more footsie-based neutral as well. There’s a reason I stick out st.MP with full wrath so often.