In the recent Season 2 balance update for Street Fighter 6, Zangief ended up coming out of the changes as seemingly one of the biggest winners even though he wasn’t made better across the board.
The giant grappler is still dealing with some Super Art jank in the new year despite his buffs, which are on full display in this unfortunate yet comical interaction.
RR|Christian Olivo recently shared a match clip of his Master-ranked Zangief going up against a similarly powerful Blanka player where he appeared to have the perfect callout to counter the opponent’s shenanigans.
The Blanka activates his level 2 Super on a blockstring into a Rolling Attack that sends him high up in the air for recovery.
Olivo attempts to use his Aerial Russian Slam level 1 to catch him out of the skies as the Blanka goes for a Rolling Cannon follow-up while still up there.
It looks like checkmate, but both characters simply pass through each other with no damage being dealt on either side.
Although Gief’s Super is notorious for missing characters above or behind him, we’re not entirely sure what’s going on here.
Our best guess is that Blanka had just started to pass through the flying wrestler right as the attack itself activated since Gief’s level 1 Super has 11 frames of startup once his feet leave the ground.
Either that or Blanka’s Rolling Cannon has an odd flag attached to the move which causes the attacks to pass through collision that isn’t explicitly stated in the frame data.
The way I lost all my energy to keep playing after this pic.twitter.com/K6uZAiA14e
— RR l Christian Olivo (@OlivoFGC) June 8, 2024
It’s just another one of those interactions where things visually look like they should work, but they simply don’t.
And unlike Jamie’s also notorious dive kick, Zangief’s level 1 was not touched at all in the balance update, so it’s still the same as before — though Aerial Russian Slam’s hitbox was expanded downwards in the Ed patch for SF6.
So it looks like Gief is going to keep dealing with this for at least a good chunk of Season 2 as well, but maybe not the whole year since SF6’s Director said they plan to do more balance adjustments moving forward.