Ever since the Season 2 balance update dropped for Street Fighter 6, there’s been a lot of talk about Zangief looking like a scary contender in the competitive scene, and those in favor seem to be pretty validated at the moment.
With the 5th Topanga Championship underway, we’re seeing a grappler main stomp the stacked competition up to this point, and it’s coming from the surprise qualifier of the big event.
AMG|Kobayan is currently sitting at the top of the Topanga finals leaderboard over multiple Street Fighter champions and more of the best players Japan has to offer.
Just today, the young competitor was able to demolish IBSG|Kakeru’s Akuma in pretty dominant fashion with a final 7-2 set record (although many individual rounds were pretty close for reasons you’re about to see).
Kobayan’s fearless play style during the finals so far appears to be paying off big time for him because he does not really seem to care about taking hits, being pushed to the corner or even being in Burnout.
He’s coming to grab you.
Despite being under every disadvantage mentioned above against Kakeru in their second game, Kobayan made the ridiculous call out to catch Akuma’s shimmy back dash with a wakeup forward dash into Critical Art.
We have certainly seen him play Zangief more patiently too though he was going full pedal to the metal against his first two opponents.
Before that, Kobayan managed to take down SNB|Momochi in a similarly dominant fashion too.
And even with keeping his foot on the gas, the Gief player showed he’s not just sitting there churning out only 360s.
We got to see Kobayan cover up one of the grappler’s weak points of being thrown himself with the jump cancel tech against both Momochi and Kakeru.
Normally, Zangief’s SPD is not throw invincible at all, but he can cancel out of his pre-jump frames into the command grab to bypass that restriction and take his opponents for a ride instead.
Jump Cancel SPD! pic.twitter.com/G2wdcLzNyT
— HiFight(ハイファイト) (@HiFightTH) July 12, 2024
Jump cancel grabs have been around a long time and offer a 5-frame window to Gief to do so in SF6, meaning it’s not the most difficult tech to pull off, but doing so consistently and in the midst of long sets against some of the best players in the world is impressive.
Kobayan had to defeat the likes of BC|Tachikawa, IBSG|Cosa and Satoru in the Topanga qualifier just to make it to the main event, and he certainly wasn’t favored to advance there either.
He was placed in Block C against the likes of Rohto|Tokido, RB|Gachikun, SBI|Hibiki, CR|Shuuto, FAV|Sako and VRL|Mizuha where he managed to finish with a 6-2 set record to advance to the finals with Eva:e|Hikaru.
Now, Kobayan is sitting at the top of the leaderboard with a 2-0 record after the first day of finals, but he still has a tough road ahead if he wants to take it all.
It’ll be interesting to see if that hyper aggressive approach will carry on through the rest of his matches or if that was meant to specifically pressure Akuma’s low life total and Ed’s apparently tougher match up against the grappler.
So far, his Zangief has been consistently putting in the work and taking down many of the big names in the scene, so this run is definitely worth keeping an eye on in terms of both the character and Kobayan himself.