The road to Saikyo

My epic Dan USF4 adventures have been on a bit of a hiatus recently due to generally not having much time to play, and when I did, being really tired or just generally playing rather poorly. I think my PP dipped to around 500 at the nadir of this… But perhaps inspired by watching EVO 2015 I got back in the mood a bit more recently, and found I was back on “normal” playing form too…

So here we go with some more thrilling Dan videos!

This one is actually from a while ago but I think it’s still worth watching… I call it “Fool me once, shame on me, but you won’t fool me twice…”. This guy was pretty good, and had an excellent “More Tea Please” profile slogan which is nearly as cool as mine. I’m also impressed that someone else out there is playing DeeJay. We went about 50:50 in the few matches we had, but I did think this was our most amusing match. Watch carefully how each round ends…

The Character stats in USF4 are a strange mixture of awesome and useless. For example it gives you your win rate vs every other character with each particular character which is great (now why won’t it use that data to give me a unique SKILL ranking with each character rather than the silly semi-grindable and not-used-for-matchmaking Battle Points…). It also doesn’t give you an indication of how many times you’ve played vs another character. For example I’ve won 0% of my matches vs Gen with Dan online apparently. But I don’t think I’ve ever actually played vs a Gen either, so this stat is a bit useless.

One character I noticed I was really bad against though is Dictator, I have a ‘true’ 0% vs him as I am sure I’ve played a few. I mean, it’s rare to see Dic players, but I was still shocked to see I’d NEVER beaten a Dic online with Dan EVER.

So I knew the pressure was on to win when I got this opponent with a higher current PP than me, but no real ranked match experience with Dictator…

Well that was a horrible scrappy mess, a pretty bad choke in round 2 (I was shocked he didn’t fall for my air taunt, hehehe!), but I still somehow I pulled out my first vs Dic win! 😀 I realised my issue is that after a blocked scissor kick it really feels like Dan should be able to get a counter-attack with something, even if it took an EX move, but it seems he can’t at all and they are pretty safe vs him.

Next up is an Oni player. Did you know that Oni, Evil Ryu and Gouki sit around discussing who is “teh most evil”…

Such a lame bunch of characters from Capcom that surely only appeal to teenage boys debating things like that 😦

He was clearly just spamming certain moves, and Dan knows how to deal with that – a Saikyo Ryu to the face…!

Anyway, this match proved that Dan is the master of the Ultra, both his own Ultra works for me, and my opponent’s Ultra ALSO helps Dan to win 😀

Next up another unusual and unfamiliar opponent. Decapre. There seems to be a lot more different characters being played online lately – maybe more people are going to be playing Decapre and Elena after EVO though.

I really wasn’t sure how to approach this one. Being Dan I’m still rather gung-ho at first until I realise I have to play a bit more tentatively… it also features a spectacularly awesome come-back ULTRA exchange, at least for Team Dan… 😉

I played this guy again and the first round again he got me, but then I figured out a couple of things to beat him and I demolished him in rounds 2 and 3 so it wasn’t so interesting to watch. I discovered that his long range game almost entirely consisted of trying to approach me with Decapre’s teleport dash moves, and if I leapt to meet him and hit him out of them every time it pretty much resulted in free damage for me again and again and he didn’t really adapt (this happened once right at the start of this video too).

 

Another rare but EVO inspired opponent perhaps? Adon. Rarely seen online but as I’ve played him a bunch and against him a bunch sparring training with Navan Daughn, I was a lot more sure of myself…

More, my ULTRA is better than your Ultra fun, naturally. Also note I’d figured out early that he was very trigger-happy on the “Rising Jaguar” – just like Navan 😉

Overall, my PP is back to around 1100 which is starting to feel like my “actual” skill level with Dan. Players above that tend to beat me the majority of the time, and I tend to beat players below that most of the time too. As I’d been in such a slump prior to this though to even get back to this point of PP I went on some pretty huge win % streaks. Overall my Dan is still coming in at over 50% win rate though, so I’m still on the Dan warrior’s road; the Road to Saikyo!