BST|Daigo Umehara has been a pro fighting game player and one of the very best in the world for over two decades at this point, but that doesn’t mean you can’t teach him some new tricks.
A random viewer recently dropped into one of The Beast’s Street Fighter 6 streams to give him some new tech that caught the legend’s attention.
The first bit of advice was for getting max meterless damage off of Drive Impact just short of the corner, which was to do forward dash, stand heavy punch, run cancel, front kick into heavy Shoryuken.
That wasn’t the part that caught Daigo’s eye, however, it was the next combo to punish Overdrive reversals in the corner.
To do that, Daigo is told to crouch light punch for a frame kill, crouch (or standing depending on the character) heavy punch, heavy Jinrai kick, Overdrive Jinrai, heavy kick, heavy kick, medium Jinrai to heavy and then heavy Shoryuken for a whopping 4,020 damage.
This only uses two bars of Drive Gauge and gains almost a full one back by the end, so it’s quite efficient and got the gears turning for the competitor to get a better punish on characters Luke, Cammy, Dee Jay, and Juri.
“I was really diligent about this stuff back around middle school,” jokes Umehara. “I was always trying to optimize.”
He’s also impressed by a meterless version that does 3,450 damage from Jinrai into light and then medium Shoryuken that’s a 300 damage improvement from what Daigo was previously using as a punish.
He tries out a bunch of different variants with the other strength levels and incorporating Supers for the extra hurt, so it’s cool to see a seasoned veteran get in the zone and start experimenting with something that interests him.
How much this will truly help him remains to be seen since it’s character specific and requires the corner, but Daigo still seemed pretty impressed nonetheless.
You can check out the full exchange below, but be sure to turn on the English subtitles to have an actual idea of what’s going on.