Ill come back to this one, Storm. I’m going over sets for LunaDunno and she requested me to look over 3 extended sets for analysis.
Edit: also, why did I need mod approval to make this post?
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Warning: Big gap from 7:00 to 9:15 here.
I actually remembered to record something. I felt like I was just guessing wrong a lot. I also saw him doing a lot of things but couldn’t get my hands to adjust to it
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My thoughts on the Thunder fights:
- Thunder safe jump setups aren’t real on Hisako. She can always counter if Thunder decides to put a button out there.
- Don’t stand far enough away from Thunder that you cannot punish call of sky. You never, ever want him to get a free invincible dash. Play the MU at around st.HP range; if he tries to cheat neutral with Sammamish then counter him or AA him on reaction.
- Related: use st.HP to control neutral with Thunder. It outranges anything he can do that isn’t Sammamish or shadow grab.
- You still need to work on your anti-airs. Thunder has a suuuuuper floaty jump - you should be able to stuff him literally any time he jumps in neutral.
- You started almost all your combos with mediums. Try to mix it up more.
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@5:41
- Don’t guess break against Thunder. Tiger wasn’t punishing you super hard for it, but before Tusk and Mira Thunder was the game’s heaviest hitter.
- You have a tendency to use shadow ORZ to try and close out rounds. That’s an option, but I don’t think it’s a very good one most of the time. Only new or generally bad players are unable to break that shadow - against better players you’re basically forcing yourself to play the counterbreak game (trying to hard read whether the opponent will break or not) when you don’t really have to.
- Opener->ultra saves lives.
- Nice TK’s. Looks like you’ve gotten much better at them
- Don’t jump so much in neutral. If you have to back up you have to back up, but doing it as a general neutral strategy is a bad idea. Defend your space on the ground.
- @12:53. Just sit there and wait for him to pass over you and anti-air. There was no reason to dash under him here, and doing so cost you a free punish into combo.
- Walljump is an easy AA for the opponent if they’re competent. Either don’t rely on it so much as a way to get in, or use air-ORZ to stop your trajectory and punish their AA attempt. Thunder’s Sammamish has a ton of horizontal range, so you’re generally better off not doing it at all in this fight.
- @16:41 You could’ve just stuck a button out here. Thunder’s crow’s dash has recovery, so Hisako is quite good in general at simply checking him when he starts dashing in. With the benefit of the instinct freeze here, the punish was guaranteed.
- Shadow counter triplax; it’s a free SC every time.
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Oh, and stop using descent in neutral and stop waking up with jump
This is good, I actually have no Thunder game plan. I know fairly little about him, except that he does big damage and can throw you out of nowhere, which is a lot of why I jump away so much. So st.HP is the “god button” for this MU, rather than st.MP 
Yeah, Opener->Ultra, AAs, SCs (or my total lack of them), and combo variety (particularly starting with MP AD) are all known issues. The S ORZs in combos were all completely fat fingering and not intentional, same with any S Influence ender.
I’ll work on (wall)jumping and using Descent less. I know Descent has some uses (a Kilgore using missiles in neutral or TJ’s Last Breath), but @LetalisVenator recently showed me just how stuffable it is, throwing me before I could even pop Instinct! 
From watching your commentary, I believe the phrase is “that was unfortunate”
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Firstly, i can see some certain area’s where rollback bit both you and Dul. Tried to keep that in mind with what i was seeing.
Midway or so through the set, i saw you using more and more j MP and HP than at the beginning. Is it that you don’t really look to air-to-air Kan Ra as Hisako much?
Something i noticed was that most times Dul jumped back, he’d wait a good while before committing to an air normal or something. When you caught him going up off an instinct pop, he usually hammered out (i think) j MK to tag you coming out of it. Was that a read you didn’t see or one you didn’t want to commit a parry to out of instinct?
I don’t know if he tilted you into it or if you just put it away yourself, but i rarely saw much TK ORZ.
There were more than a few instances of you both reacting to stuff you guys did on one another. He would pretty consistently air command grab you out of wall jumps for example. But you’d adjust and wall jump but you air ORZ’ed early to make the command grab whiff and punished with Shadow ORZ.
Surprised the red skin Hisako didn’t make an appearance.
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Oh, I was trying. Kan’s air normals come out a fair bit faster than Hisako’s I think, or maybe he was just pressing them faster than I was 
A lot of Hisako play is scaring people into not pushing buttons. After a while you kind of get used to thinking “he won’t press anything here” as a matter of course. So yeah, most of the time while I knew it was an option, I genuinely just figured he’d respect me there. I was wrong, obviously, but that was the rationale behind it. I’m also generally pretty afraid of him simply choosing his sand dive instead, which will beat counter clean.
I think I used it a fair amount to be honest, but Dul rarely gets hit by TK’s or the follow-up so that could make me use it a bit less than you’re used to seeing I suppose. We’ve played several hundred matches by this point, so he’s also pretty good about sandsploding if he sees me using it a lot.
I play color 10 and one of my custom color 1’s a lot these days. Actually haven’t used the red Sako in a while I don’t think 
https://1drv.ms/v/s!Apzrbyt1GZuBhkdi2RFtYFfsOgLa
Kilgore(Me) vs ARIA(LunaDunno) ft5
The quality of play by me is pretty rough by me but I do want to learn how to play Kilgore because he is neat. I think that this matchup is somewhat even since Kilgore has strong anti-Boost body tools and anti-bass body tools but I personally have a difficult time not getting overwhelmed and dying
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I analyzed KI top 8 at Combo Breaker on stream yesterday, in case anyone was interested in checking that out.
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I played some matches in Devil’s Landing (you should sign up for it. It’s fun). It’s a FT7 that’s streamed. I played a round there under Guess Who. Here’s the matches.
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Fun matches 
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In general, the Devil’s Landing series has offered up some pretty good sets to watch.
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Played an extended mirror match set with @CodeComplete85. Matches below:
A few notes:
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When you want to meaty TK-ORZ, you generally crouch near the opponent. For most of your other options you remain standing. That’s how I was able to counter so many of your oki TK’s. Recommend always crouching or always standing - don’t give your opponent any visible tells if you can help it.
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Still need to make sure you use both instincts per match. Holding it for the “perfect moment” costs you a LOT of damage taken (b/c you can’t see the mixup) and damage potential (b/c you only get the one instinct sequence).
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One good place to use your instinct is after you get wall splat. You started doing it later in the set, but I’d recommend popping any time a Sako splats you. She’s ill equipped to deal with the reset options there, and that’s a vortex you really don’t want to be stuck in.
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I think I shied you away from following up on your cr.HP->ORZ->stuff juggles. You can actually mix up your options there - can go for either light or med TK-ORZ’s, both of which will give you hard knockdowns to set up further offense.
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You probably figured it out already, but if you do instinct->influence and the opponent waits until you pop to do their influence, then you will always lose the exchange. Instinct activation shaves 1 frame of startup from all moves buffered into the freeze, so your influence (being faster by one frame) now ends earlier than the opponent’s.
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You mentioned it yourself, but just tighten up those anti-jumpout reset confirms. You tagged me with a bunch of them, but then stuck an extra button in there that made the ORZ hits breakable. If you hit someone with a stagger normal, you have forever and a day to confirm - don’t rush yourself. If you notice, whenever I hit you with a stagger HK, there’s always a big gap between when I do the follow-up rekkas.
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You’re still waking up with a lot of stuff that’s not block. I get that the Sako MU feels like maybe sometimes you should, but I got a ton of damage that was essentially free because you were trying to squirm or command grab me on your wakeup.
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MU-specific, but Hisako can stick a button into a Hisako popping instinct and still counter-cancel the normal. The result is that weird shing->combo drop interaction that you saw a few times. Most of the times a Sako meaties you on instinct pop with full wrath, it’s bait.
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I did it too, but don’t forget Hisako can wrath cancel the end of her rekkas - if the opponent blocks all three and you have the wrath for it, considering using it to blow up their punish.
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Don’t wallsplat mid-screen.
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Something you’ll see me do sometimes when I have full instinct is to wake up with cr.MK. It’s a pretty decent option at high level, as most players will tend to respect you having instinct if they know you will wake up with it. Recommend adding this to your game so that you can steal back turns you haven’t earned sometimes. Note: this won’t work if you don’t show that you will use reversal instinct.
Hope that helps, and GG’s again! 
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I did realize you were catching me with this and, one time, faked the TK tell and did Influence instead.
Yeah, I’m working on using my resources. The joke on the Discord is that my tribal name would be “Dies with Meter”.
TKing on cr.HP juggles is still very difficult for me, pure input wise. I want to use either regular air ORZ or Shadow air ORZ after cr.HP launch, but that’s still cooking in the lab.
I mostly figured my wheel of defensive options were high parry/low parry/wake-up H Influence. I didn’t want to get stuck in guessing twice after a TK or cr.MK. You went for meaty grab far less than I ever expected.
The extra-button-causing-breakable-ORZ and mid-screen wall splat ender were just plain and simple panic.
I actually know the sequence you’re talking about. I raised an eyebrow approvingly :-p
That’s because you influence on wakeup a freaking lot. Got tired of it so just decided to force you to guess high or low for the counter.
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Guilty as charged
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Max uploaded a set from a recent KI stream:
The set itself is moderately interesting, but the thing that stuck out to me was watching how a more experienced player handles dealing with things that they might not understand as a set progresses. Max’s MU-specific KI knowledge is pretty intermediate (and he knew very little about Kim Wu), but you see him make some pretty quick and effective adjustments really early on that allow him to exploit player tendencies from his opponent. It was a pretty cool thing to see I think, and kind of illustrates the ways in which identifying and breaking down the player can often be more important than breaking down the MU. Even if you don’t understand all the ins and outs of a character, being able to adapt to the player will very often win you games.
Also - always use the meter if it will kill, and (if your intent is to win as opposed to look cool) always maximize lockout damage with standard damage loops. The Kim player threw away about 4 games solely on poor damage optimization.
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Storm and I matched up randomly in exhibition a couple days ago and we got a chance to run a long set of games. Figured the Kim Wu vs Jago set could prove to be something worth analyzing, or at least a good set to watch. There was a Kim Wu vs Hisako set as well. The connection was ok, but it’s still US East Coast to Singapore, it wasn’t flawless probably for either of us. Life and times of internet gaming, you know.
I could point out an absolute truckload of things I wish I did better or capitalized on better (a lot of typing worth), but it is what it is. Overall, I think it went ok for me. What I will note for you is in the second video, around the 5-6 minute mark, that recording seems to have de-synched and the match ‘ends’ with us just staring at each other. It loses itself right around the mid-round break, but if you’re trying to keep track of the set score, that one ended in my favor so just add 1 game to my total after that to get the set count.
But as usual, if you wish to analyze it on my end, be brutal, be honest, be ruthless. It’s been well over 1 year since i posted a set to be critiqued, and I still feel like there’s more yet for me to learn. On Storm’s end, I can’t speak for him insofar as any advice on his Jago. Thanks in advance.
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It’s been awhile since I’ve tried to give any critique on this thread, so I’ll give it a shot. I’ll edit this comment once i finish the sets.
Alright I just finished the first set. Was entertaining to watch. I’ll try to point some things out. Remember I’m no Kim Wu player, so apologies if i get something wrong
For you Wafer,
You played well throughout won’t lie, but i did notice somethings.
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Throughout the set, there were instances in where you would parry fireballs and instantly follow up with a dragon dash. That’s fine to get closer, but you weren’t always in the distance to start pressuring yet. You would still need to overcome a couple more fireballs before you could use your normals. It just seems like that resource could have been used for something more beneficial rather than a dash from full screenish. Kim Wu has options against zoning
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Twice in the set when you used that shadow overhead kick to counter fireballs and ended up getting blocked, you didn’t use a dragon cancel to avoid the Storms shadow counter. I think you had instinct as well in one of those instances. Just wondering why you let the shadow move rock rather than canceling it.
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I don’t know how iffy the connection was but i noticed that you seemed to struggle a bit in max punishing Storms mistakes. You punished some things correctly using Cr.HP (at least i think that’s her best punish) but 5-7 times you punished either a DP, failed counter breaker, or failed shadow counter with other moves. (Ik you can’t max punish everything but in most instances that i ssw you had enough time to use a better button. ) Once you tried to punish a failed shadow counter move with triple cr.lp to l.dragon dance and used up all your combo meter. That lost damage does stack up.
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One moment in the set, on Storms wakeup you used meaty cr.lk to shadow nunchuks. You did hit Storm with hit, but unless you had godlike reactions to the confirm, i don’t think it was a confirm. Can you dragon cancel shadow nunchuks before the first hit connects? Because Storm, if he had blocked it, could have shadow countered the first hit. Just wondering why you used that option
Hope this helps, I’ll add anything else i see in the second.
Also @STORM179,
- I was mostly focusing on kim wu throughout the set but i did notice one thing that might be of use for you. When against a whiffed shadow dragon kick and you know that the kim wu has dragons, theres a 9/10 chance she’s gonna cancel out of it. If she’s in the air when she does, a simple DP can shut her down before her jumping attacks can connect. Once or twice in the set, she got away with whiffing a S.dragon kick and pressuring with a jumping attack when you were in a good position to AA. Just something i saw. Its a lit more difficult to punish if she cancels on the ground tho.
Before anyone says it, I’m aware that light dragon dance is DP-punishable. Still can’t DP reliably out of blockstun on Hitbox.