One of the players I admire most in the Street Fighter IV scene is Sako. He’s notorious for rarely ever leaving his house to play in tournaments, but he’s built quite a buzz for himself through God’s Garden online tournaments, his appearance at SoCal Regionals and from all of the YouTube exposure he gets from fans who upload all of his public matches. Why the buzz? Because he has the most amazing execution the world has ever seen in the Street Fighter IV series. He’s able to do combos that no one else in the world can do, and he can pull them off every time, in live matches, without breaking a sweat. The above combo video is an example of some of the stuff that only he can do.
Watching Sako play as Cammy inspired me to hop into training mode and give her a shot. I was hoping to at least master one Sako-like combo before moving onto something else. I didn’t even come close.
Having played Street Fighter for almost 20 years now, I understand the importance of execution. When the time comes, you need to be able to execute the appropriate normal move, special move, or optimize your positioning in order to defeat your opponents.
You think that with 20 years of experience, I’d be a master at this, right? I wish. I have a good grasp on how to optimize my normal moves. I can do virtually every special move without thinking about it. I can cancel most normal moves into special moves almost flawlessly. I can even pull off a few simple combos for most characters. However, other fundamental and advanced tactics are completely lost on me, such as linking anything other than repeated jabs and shorts, karas, option selects, hit confirming, most FADC uses and other high-level tricks. One of the tricks I was trying to learn was the instant cannon strike, which I would fail to properly execute 95% of the time. I’ve got it to a point where I can get it roughly 50% of the time, but 50% of the time isn’t good enough when a whiffed move can cost you the match.
There’s a number of reasons why my execution sucks when it comes to high-level techniques. For one, I hate practice. Unless I’m really motivated to learn a technique or figure something out, I’m online, taking on the world. It’s detrimental to my overall skill-level, but it’s hard to motivate myself to practice when I just want to play this for fun.
The second reason I can’t be like Sako is the knowledge factor. In the case of linking, I don’t know what the timing is to link for instance, Cammy’s crouching fierce punch into crouching forward kick. I can hit fierce punch and double tap forward kick in hopes of getting the timing correct, but it does not work consistently.
The final reason is one that kind of scares me. At the very least, it scares me more than any other reasons I’ve listed here. I fear that, as a Street Fighter player, I’ve already passed my prime. If I wanted to get serious about this, I should have done that back when I was a teenager playing Super Street Fighter II. It scares me to think that even with all my knowledge, I may not have the hand speed or coordination required to get better. Considering the fact that many combos in the game require you to hit a certain sequence of buttons within 1/60th of a second is frightening to me. I’m pretty sure I’ve never hit one of these “one-frame links” in my life.
Execution barriers are not new to any fighting game. If anything, fighting games have some of the highest execution barriers in any video game genre. I’m sure that most gamers will never learn how to consistently execute a Shoryuken, let alone execute one at all. I may be beyond that point, but I’ve hit the wall in my development as a player, and it sucks. Some of it I can improve on, should I be willing to dedicate the time and effort to do so. However, there’s a good chance that my prime as a Street Fighter player has already passed, too. I guess all I can do is practice and hope for the best.
In Third Person 