Yes, we’ve all seen and felt the power of Zangief to melt your life bar with crazy Drive Rush juggles into Super combos in Street Fighter 6, and thus have felt the fear of having the towering Russian march forward to deliver your impending doom.
We’re not saying he’s top tier, necessarily, but he is scary and stressful to fight. As daunting as it can be to have Gief breathing down your neck in SF6, though, MC Mura takes us on a not so distant trip into history to remind us of a grappler that was easily more terrifying than SF6 Gief has ever been: Vanilla Street Fighter 5 Rainbow Mika.
The year was 2016 and Capcom’s developers had just rolled out Street Fighter 5. The community didn’t know it yet, but they were about to experience the power of unscaled V-Triggers, anti-air jabs, and Crush Counters, all within an atmosphere of fluctuating input lag.
We know what you’re thinking, “how could things be made to be any more fun than that?” Well, enter a high-on-life, bubbly as can be grappler named R. Mika. Mika could take advantage of all the above in some interesting ways (you could manually alter the timing of her Crush Counter, for instance) and quickly shot to the top of the tier list amid her fellow insanely broken roster mates.
People quickly lost faith in trying to play honest neutral in early Street Fighter 5 because the risk vs. reward of fishing with heavy Crush Counters while playing input delay neutral heavily leaned in favor of reward.
This encouraged jumping to circumvent the fear of playing random footsies, but certain blessed characters (Mika was one of these, of course) could swat you out of the air with nothing more than standing jabs.
This would reset you in midair and afford your opponent a left/right mix up as they either walked under you or didn’t. This was scary enough against regular characters, but grapplers like Mika have the additional threat of command grab.
We haven’t addressed her incredible Irish Whip into invisible walls, the efficacy of her tag-team V-Trigger for both engagement and life-melting mix ups, and her damage output. Mura has you covered, though, as he details all of this and more in his full video below: