Fighting Styles

After playing for a while, there are certain fighting styles that you can see people adopt (essentially, it tends to work for them). I'll describe the ones that I've seen.

Defensive
This guy (myself) defends like there is no tomorrow. Very apt at blocking, he waits for the counter. He might not even attack in traditionally preemptive moves (for example, if someone is coming with an aerial kick, a typical response is a shoryuken. I wait to deliver the dragon punch as a counter after defending the aerial kick).

A lot of character have opening for counters.

For example Ryu's fireball have some counters
- if close enough, jump above and do your strong aerial kick, and sweep, or whatever you like
- Hurricane kick can pass fireballs if executed after these are on-screen
- EX Fireball (an eternal favorite). It will absorb the first fireball and hit an unsuspecting opponent
- Ryu's ultra, if done properly, not only skips the incoming fireball, but you can connect all the ultra.

For Blanka's spinning charges
- Crouched light punch to cancel the oncoming spinning attack, then sweep as he lands
- Jump up and then land with a strong kick

For Bison's Double Knee press
- wait, and dragon punch
- or sweep
- or throw


Strength and Weaknesses
Defense strategies usually trade risk for chipping (they get chipped a lot). Their biggest strenght might be psychological. There has been matches where entire 20 seconds have happened without any major movements (aside from the occational poking fireball). This create pressure on your opponent to "start". Once an opponent decides to start the fight, defensive players open with counters. Most of the time their style is to apply a counter, get some breathing room, wait, and repeat. Their game is usually slower, and for a lot of the uninitiated almost impossible to penetrate.


The major weakness of the defensive player is that it can get thrown out of whack pretty quickly. Defensive players are like fine swiss clockwork. As long as every cog (read every attack) is matched with its counter, they work extremely well. The moment you start doing variances in the attacks (for example, a jump with a hurricane kick to do a cross-over) they tend to be less sure on the appropiate response.

Defensive players (at least the beginning/intermediate ones) have another achilles heel (namely throwing ). When you defend more you get yourself exposed to throwing. The more defensive the player is, the more open to throwing he or she is. To that note they are also vulnerable to over-the-head block-breaker moves (defensive players tend to be crouched, less exposure to injury), and are very easy to chip to death using safe-chipping techniques. (Say a balrog)


A typical situation:

A defensive player, instead of going for a shoryuken when attacked aerially, he blocks for the aerial attack (then crouch-blocks for any expected sweeps), and then proceed to then execute a shoryuken. A well balanced player will fall for this folly only once (ok, maybe twice).

But the easy counter is to jump aerially, not attacking (just jump close to the opponent, no kicking no anything), and then proceed to throw him. That is enough to get them "psyched" since now you're forcing them to do something (anything) or be subjected to more throwing.