When M. Bison was first unleashed into the wild in Street Fighter 6 Season 2, fans were quick to notice the incredible amount of damage he is capable of doing. With max resources and ideal circumstances, Bison is able to belt out damage that is likely second to only Marisa, who is essentially designed around her high damage output.
Within the first week of his release, some lab scientists found that Bison can actually clear over 8,000 damage with a single combo, and it wasn’t all that hard to do and could actually be seen in a real bout. Today, however, it looks like a new record for max M. Bison damage from a single combo has been set, but actually being able to land it in a real match is… another story.
This new combo comes from the mind of Kasai_AU, who released a quick tweet with the sequence and a YouTube video that breaks down what exactly is happening. Now, there are some qualifiers that must be discussed here before getting into it.
One thing you’ll notice right away is that the combo begins with a punish counter meaty standing heavy kick on the opponent’s wake up, which adds more damage, but isn’t really a practical set up. A character must be in the recovery frames of a move to be hit with a punish counter, so interrupting the start up of an attack with a meaty (like what’s being done in this combo) wouldn’t ever produce a punish counter state.
Right out of the gate, this does make it so that the combo is more catered toward being a training room-only sequence, but that’s not to say it would be entirely impossible to do in a real match. If someone were to go for this combo in a real setting, they’d have to do something like step back enough for the opponent’s wake up light attack to whiff then time it perfectly so that the standing heavy kick hits right as the light button starts its recovery — which would be really darn difficult to set up in a real match.
On top of this, a lot of what makes this combo work is very strict timings for the Psycho Mine explosion, so it’s also possible that waiting for a light to whiff might throw those timings off and cause the combo to fail.
With all of that having been said, Kasai_AU does utilize a couple of very high level combo techniques to make this sequence work, and it’s stuff we haven’t seen done too much elsewhere with M. Bison so far.
After a basic Backfist Combo to set the Psycho Mine, Kasai_AU dashes up and lands the meaty standing heavy kick for the punish counter. We then see another dash forward into crouching heavy punch, and that is cancelled into OD Scissor Kicks for the juggle which is all very standard Bison stuff so far.
Things get very interesting at this point as Kasai_AU is able to hit an OD Backfist Combo, which is supposed trigger the initial mine, but from what I can gather here the timing and the way that this special move hits in this scenario actually makes it so that the Psycho Mine timing resets. Instead of the mine exploding during the OD Backfist Combo, Bison simply keeps the juggle going and is able to hit an OD Psycho Crusher after this and still get the benefits of the powered up version as it makes contact with mine.
While these juggles seem fairly standard for Bison, there’s actually quite a bit that goes into them here in this particular combo. The OD Backfist Combo needs to be hit with specific timing, and as Kasai_AU explains it, there’s a three to five frame delay you need to manually perform in order to make the mine reset actually happen.
If you manage to get beyond that, the OD Psycho Crusher actually requires a microwalk forward so that Bison can hang on to just a sliver of his Drive Gauge and perform the final OD head stomp. There is also a slightly easier version where you can put the microwalk into the OD Backfist Combo input instead, but what we see here in the footage is the more difficult version.
The combo concludes with an OD head stomp into a medium punch Psycho Crusher, then closes out with a Critical Art. The final damage tally when all is said and done is an unreal 8140 damage.
M. Bison’s previous max damage combo record in Street Fighter 6 was 8050 damage.
New M.Bison Max Damage (8140) pic.twitter.com/loCrIRrWcc
— Kasai (@Kasai_AU) July 15, 2024