You lose a rough match in Street Fighter 6, but despite your immediate frustration you do understand why you lost as you went for too much offense and weren’t ready for your opponent’s Drive Rushes and jump ins. In your next match you turn the aggression down and wait to react to your foe’s forward advances, but after another rough loss you realize you were being too passive and let one too many whiffs go unpunished.
Rinse and repeat this process enough and we come to find that playing “proper” neutral is a lot harder than you might think. In fact, no matter how much you try to simply tweak the dial, you’re not honing in on the right spot and the losses keep stacking up. In a new video 801 Strider offers some advice you almost certainly need to hear when it comes to this avenue of play: proper neutral doesn’t exist.
This doesn’t mean you don’t have to practice things like whiff punishing, spacing, and hit-confirming, in fact it means quite the opposite. It’s one thing to know you need to level up certain aspects of your game, but a whole other to actually achieve the progress.
Let’s look at the specific example of anti-airs. You probably understand the impact of anti-airs and you know how to do them, but those two pieces of information are not sufficient to actually get you where you want to be. It’s quite easy for us as players to assume we can simply make the pieces fit together once we know they exist, but this is a foolish trap to allow yourself to fall into.
You need to train the concept of anti-airing so fiercely into your mind that it naturally manifests through your gameplay in the split seconds that you need it to. In other words it’s not enough for just your brain to know what to do and when to do it; your fingers must be able to do what’s right at the exact right time.
Thus we find ourselves amid perhaps the most difficult fighting game lesson to get through. Luckily we have a two time Capcom Cup finalist (across two different Street Fighter titles) to help set us up for success.
Strider lays all the brass tacks out in the full video below. Give it a watch but please note that there’s a decent amount of NSFW language as Strider’s words of wisdom come with a little extra seasoning.