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Hi guys, Me, Paul, Carzy and Jasper arrived at Tokyo around 1.30pm and we went straight to the hotel and check in where we met with Rchan. I Haven’t Slept since last night and couldn’t get much sleep on the plane too so I’m quite tired.
We went to have our dinner at some nearby restaurant and the food there is quite good. After having our dinner, Paul and Carzy went back to the hotel to chill for a bit while me and Rchan went to the Taito Game Station Arcade. There weren’t many people in the arcade at first but it was crowded later on in the night.
I got in some few games with some of the grandmasters/masters (E.g., Shiro, Aojiru Guile, Hanamaruki, Aoi, Yoshiwo, Reiketsu, a Dictator grandmaster) there and lost to shiro (abel) badly. Also played another master ranked Abel and was very impressed. Their Abels there are very strong and maybe i dont have much experience against a good abel. His frame traps, setups, and most importantly, the consistency on their execution was very good, making it hard to react to it, and forcing me into making mistakes.
Examples- Both Shiro and the other Abel were inputting option select forward+MKs after their crouch shorts, and catching me with it whenever I backdashed against a crouch short.
Also, both Abels were able to keep their cross up MKs and cross up rolls very ambigious, and I blocked wrongly a lot.
So put these two together, and you have a situation like this: After a knockdown (normal throw or tornado normally), Shiro goes for an ambigious cross up MK, then goes straight into a cr.LK (OS f+MK) then 50/50 between a tornado throw or a frame trap (like another cr.LK> s.LP> c.LP> f+MK> dash> s.HP)… Really hard to make so many right guesses in such a short time frame.
Watched and played Hanamaruki quite a bit. Really impressed by his knowledge of character specific setups… Was seeing setups against Rufus and Akuma that I didn’t see before (sorry need to experiment a bit before I can explain what he was doing… will do so another day).
Also played against Reiketsu’s Vega… (and I’m pretty sure I also played, and almost lost a game against Reiketsu’s girlfriend… I would’ve lost but I managed to win with a GANGAT UPPERCUT). I feel that the main difference between Japanese and Singapore Vegas is that Japanese Vegas have almost flawless execution on their combos, for example, every connected cr.jab would definitely result in me getting Izuna dropped.
Yoshiwo’s Guile also gets special mention. I was really impressed by the sense of spacing he displayed, particularly he knew all the right distances for the Guile/Sagat match up and was scoring jump in HKs at a distance where if he empty jumped, my uppercut would’ve whiffed.
In general, what really impresses me about Japan is the level of play displayed by all their so-called mid-level players. Even a random C ranked Ryu was doing f+HP> d+HP> Uppercut with a 100% consistency. And all players, even low ranked ones, showed good knowledge of their character’s set ups and options in each situation. In fact, it seems that what seperates the grandmasters from the rest isn’t knowledge of the game, but their ability to execute the things they know consistently.
Oh, and wtf is Aojiru Guile punishing my Uppercut FADC backdash and Jasper’s Ex Green Hand FADC backdash with FULL ULTRA.
Anyway, tired now. Gotta go sleep. I look forward to the next few days, definitely hope that I’ll be able to adapt fast enough to the Japanese style!