It’s no secret that Rohto|Tokido is one of the best fighting game players who ever lived. He is considered one of the five Japanese gods of fighting games, has won numerous major events, and though he has played other characters throughout his career, is best known for being one of the best Akuma players to ever live.
Tokido continues to release content in Japanese over on his YouTube channel, but the fighting game legend has been gracious in letting us here at EventHubs translate some of that work into English so more folks out there can enjoy it. Today we have the English translation of one of Tokido’s recent videos in which he reveals some of the secrets behind his match up notes and how you can improve your own.
The English translation comes to us courtesy of our very own Nicholas “MajinTenshinhan” Taylor.
In this video, Tokido sits down with fellow Japanese competitor Kosaku. The two discuss fighting game note-taking, and both divulge some of the various techniques they use to keep track of all of the information they need to compete at a high level.
You can check out the video from Tokido below, and scroll a little further down to read the English translation.
Tokido was asked by his staff to show how he takes notes when it comes to fighting games, so for this video he decided to show his Street Fighter 5 notes in their entirety. The way he takes notes hasn’t really changed for Street Fighter 6 though, so it should still be educational for people who are curious.
For the video, he is talking with fellow Japanese player Kosaku.
Tokido: How about you, Kosaku-san? Do you take notes?
Kosaku: Well, yeah, I do.
Tokido: “Well, yeah?”
Kosaku: Yeah, I do to an extent.
They start by looking at Kosaku’s notes and how he takes them.
Kosaku: Well, it’s a bit embarrassing to look at publicly like this, but here they are. I use Evernote to compile them. I divide my notes up by character, and when you look at it like this… It’s very focused on characters that were common at the end of the game. (The listed examples are Rashid, Poison, Luke, G, Cody and Guile).
Kosaku: So at the very top, I write down the general feel of the matchup. Moreso than detailed breakdowns, it’s more about how do they usually move at the start of the match, and just general ideas of how to handle them. (Example in his Rashid notes: “If you get put in the corner at the start, it’s over. Walk and block and if you see him shine, just stop and block.”
Off-screen voice: So you don’t put in many details but more just the general feel of the matchup?
Kosaku: No, there are a lot of details too. I don’t delete anything, I just add more at the top and then have the general feel at the very top. So there’s tons of stuff written down here, even very old things. So the format is basically “My current thoughts are at the very top”.
Off-screen voice: Do you usually take the notes on your phone?
Kosaku: I feel like in Street Fighter 5 we had a lot more offline events so I’d always be taking notes on my phone while at events, but since I often play from home in Street Fighter 6 I have a google document up that’s always open and I just add notes to.
Kosaku: When it comes to Street Fighter 6, I also keep notes on players and their habits. I feel like that’s pretty important. I didn’t do this in 5.
Kosaku: So what do you think?
Tokido: Oh, I think this is a really good method. Dividing it up by character is probably for the best.
Kosaku: Yeah, but there’s so much to put in there. So when you do that on Evernote it becomes pretty hard to find everything, since there’s so much to look through.
Tokido: Also, in Street Fighter 6, the matches load so fast. The match already begins by the time you’ve even opened up your notes. So there’s a lot of times where you can’t rehearse with your notes before you’re already playing.
Kosaku: Definitely, yeah. So in order to see the general idea across most characters fast, I stopped using Evernote. At the top of my current document, I just write “These are the things I should be focusing on right now”. In Google Documents too, you can make certain parts of the document into headlines which you can instantly go to by clicking them, which is super convenient.
Tokido: Oh wow, that’s great! I need to use that. I’ll make mine into a document.
Kosaku: I definitely recommend it.
Off-screen voice: So Tokido-san, at what point do you take down notes?
Tokido: Well, I also use Evernote… Or I did, until today. Now that I found about the convenience of this new document, I want to switch over to that. So, I keep my document open at all times and whenever I’m looking at matchups and counterstrategies, I basically scribble down anything I think of.
Off-screen voice: Do you write things down while you’re playing matches?
Tokido: During Street Fighter 5, I did that a lot. Because we had time to do so. In Street Fighter 6, we don’t. “Oh, my opponent pressed rematch! I only have 10 seconds! Tachikawa, write this down for me!!”, that’s kind of how it goes.
Kosaku: Wow, he’s really being helpful then, haha.
Tokido: Yeah, in Street Fighter 6, Tachikawa is basically my advisor and he’ll say “Ah, OK, I’ll check it out in training mode!”
Off-screen voice: So you also used Evernote then, Tokido-san? You sent over text files for this video.
Tokido: Yeah, those are from Evernote.
Off-screen voice: So all of your notes are from an Evernote document?
Tokido: Yes, it’s all in there.
Off-screen voice: Do you ever delete anything from your notes?
Tokido: Well, once I’ve properly learned something and started applying it, I make sure to delete it from my notes. I mean, there’s a lot of actual data and I won’t delete stuff like this, but things like “be aware of this” or “remember to think of this”, and I’ll usually delete those eventually. Once I feel “I’m fine with this part now”, I’ll do my best to just remove it from my notes.
Off-screen voice: At what point do you look at your notes?
Tokido: I read them before important matches, mostly to confirm things before I go into the fight. I also want to check them before regular matches as well, but I can’t say that I always do that even though I want to.
As for sorting my notes, during Street Fighter 5 I’d be doing that during my flights. During flights you have very long stretches of time where you can’t really do anything, so I’d usually spend that time going through my various scribbles and arrange them properly as well as delete things I didn’t need anymore or just improve the general readability. During the latter days of Street Fighter 5 when there were less overseas tournaments, there was much less time like this so my notes ended up becoming pretty excessive…
Tokido: Alright then, let’s have a look at the actual notes themselves.
This is what they look like. I have specific notes here for Luke and Urien. I probably still have Akuma notes too, but these are the ones I sent over.
(Editor Note: Tokido explains that he color-codes his notes and also bolds certain areas as well, but when you download the text file from Evernote as has been done for display in this video, it becomes a simple .txt file and such details will not show up.)
So what we’re looking at now are the Luke notes. You can already see one of the problems here, further down I’d be breaking things down by character, but because Evernote just lists “Luke” as its own document, scrolling all the way down there became such a hassle, you can see that I just add new Guile notes on top instead of going down to his section.
Kosaku: Yeah, I see you have Guile, Birdie, Dhalsim…
Tokido: Good on you for realizing this is Dhalsim
(Translator’s note: It just says “Da”)
Kosaku: It says “teleport”, so of course it’s Dhalsim!
Tokido: Yeah, but this proves what I was talking about – even writing the whole name “Dhalsim” got too much of a hassle, so I didn’t even do that anymore.
Wait, there’s some English here… Did I force English in?
Off-screen voice: Isn’t this just something you copypasted from elsewhere?
Tokido: No, I definitely wrote this myself. It says Urien and Falke can dash under Luke.
(After scrolling through the notes at high speed)
Kosaku: It’s so long!
Tokido: So my staff counted the characters in my Urien notes as well as my Luke notes, and we reached 12,000 characters.
Kosaku: You can’t even get to the bottom of this by just scrolling normally, can you?
Tokido: That’s right.
Kosaku: How can you not just divide this up into separate notes when it’s this long?
Tokido: Here it says “Kincho teleport 5th match”.
Kosaku: What is that?
Tokido: It means that in the 5th match I played against Kinchooru, the Rose player, something happened with his teleport so let’s go to the replay and look at it. Back then, I didn’t have Tachikawa to assist me. I couldn’t just go “Tachikawa, please look this up!”
So, there’s not much direction in these notes.
Kosaku: No, but there’s a lot of knowledge.
Tokido: There’s a lot of particular situations. I think the direction or gameplan itself is more in my head.
Tokido: So, next we have some excerpts from the notes chosen by my staff that we’re going to look at.
In my Luke notes, the last character listed for matchup information is Rose. I put them in alphabetical order, so she’s last.
(Translator’s note: Japanese alphabetical order is obviously different from ours, since they write with a different kind of letters).
And below this, I wrote various things that I realized. Like here – “Regarding the system, if you cancel late the EX move will not come out unless you press both buttons at the exact same time, it’s not just the final frame.”
Kosaku: Huh, really?!
Tokido: Yes, so that’s why when you do hitconfirms, if you’re sloppy in your timing on pressing both punches, it won’t come out.
Kosaku: There’s a lot of people who map a button to be 3 punches, right?
Tokido: Yes, this is why they do it.
Kosaku: So if you don’t have that, your success rate with EX moves becomes a lot lower because of how the system interacts with cancels… I had no idea. I wish I’d seen these notes sooner.
What’s this next part, “sitting height”?
Tokido: So this is how tall the characters are while they’re crouching.
(Translator’s Note: It lists Birdie and Abigail as the tallest, in the next tier you have G and Zangief, followed by a tier containing Sagat, Urien, F.A.N.G and Gill, and finally listing “other characters”.)
Off-screen voice: Did you research this yourself?
Tokido: This part, I think there was someone who was a real data cruncher who put this information out and I thought it’d be good to add it in to my notes.
Tokido: Here, the staff has put together some of the very specific areas in my notes for us to look at. But this is a compilation, right? There’s not a specific page like this. Yeah.
Here it says “can I catch it after he throws it?”
Kosaku: Sounds like you’re talking about a baseball pitcher all of a sudden.
Tokido: Haha, no, this part about “catching it after he throws it”… So, back in Street Fighter 4, this was an incredibly powerful thing to do towards the game’s latter lifespan.
So, what this refers to is Crouch Teching back in Street Fighter 4.
(Translator’s Explanation: Crouch teching is when you input throw while crouching, in Street Fighter 5 and Street Fighter 6 this will give you a whiffed throw input if you aren’t teching a throw, but in Street Fighter 4 it would give you a light attack instead meaning that the risk attached to it was very small).
So what this is about is where you bait them to crouch tech, and then you punish them for the attempt. So punshing the move that comes out from the crouch tech, is what “catching it after he throws it” means.
Being able to counter hit them after a crouch tech is very difficult since that’s just a 3-frame window, but with the recovery of the move added as well, you can make sure you’re slightly out of range and whiffpunish their move instead. This is easier because you have 6 or 7 more frames to do it. Since they’re still going to be in recovery.
So I was thinking, might I be able to do something like this against lights in Street Fighter 5 too? But, light moves had much better range so I ended up concluding that it isn’t possible.
“When doing a DP input on 2 player side, does it come out the same way as on the P1 side? Yes it does”… Well, yeah, of course it does.
Kosaku: But hey, this is probably about leverless controllers when they started becoming popular, isn’t it?
Tokido: Yeah, that’s probably it.
“What I should be focusing on – Confirming crouching medium kick. Confirming crouching heavy kick. Confirming crouching medium punch.” … In the end, I never really used crouching medium kick, though. I just decided it was risky, haha.
Kosaku: In that game, it’s way too dangerous!
Tokido: Nishikin.
For some reason, the only player-specific countermeasures still in my Luke notes are aimed at Nishikin.
Tokido: “Phrases – Zeku, when he’s old, that’s your chance.”
… Wait, who am I even saying this to? I mean, it’s true, when Zeku is old, that’s your chance. That’s DEFINITELY your chance.
Kosaku: Yeah, I definitely get it, haha.
Off-screen voice: Why is it written like this?
Tokido: This is just me theorizing, but when it comes to straightforward situations like this in matchups, you want to go pretty hard. So to emphasize that, I wrote “When he’s old, that’s your cue to go all-in, so let’s push him.” It’s like a determined declaration. By writing it in this specific way, it’ll stay with you, I think.
(Editor’s Note: From here, we are moving over to Urien notes, and first thing visible on screen is Tokido writing “I did it! ^^)” in his notes)
Kosaku: Haha, that’s so cute.
Tokido: I must’ve been really happy.
“In the corner, when doing light punch, light punch, medium punch, can I cover throws and V-Shift as well?” This was probably my anti-V-Reversal strategy. I don’t think I ever got this working in actual matches, though. I wrote “I did it! ^^)” and was all happy, though.
Here it says Umehara (Daigo)… Oh, these were my Urien notes? … Ah, this is from the Street Fighter League. This is Street Fighter League 2021. We had to fight against the Umehara Gold team in the grand finals, so I think these notes are from then.
Off-screen voice: What’s this sentence here about V-Skills?
Tokido: I have no idea. V-Skill is renpai (consecutive losses)… ?
Off-screen voice: Maybe you meant “harenbai”? (Expression in Kyushu dialect)
Tokido: No, that’s not… I’m not from Kyushu, you know?
Kosaku: What if it’s just a typo, maybe you’re saying “harenai ka”?
Tokido: Oh, yeah, that’s it, I just mistyped. So, it’s about whether or not I’ll be able to activate Urien’s V-Skill during the match.
Kosaku: You made a lot of mistakes like this, you know? Look over here, instead of “after” you’ve written “language”, and you probably noticed it but figured “I understand it so no point in fixing it”. You weren’t planning on showing this to others anyway, so…
Tokido: Yeah…
Off-screen voice: Did you take notes for games before Street Fighter 5 as well?
Tokido: Before Street Fighter 5, I took notes for Street Fighter 4… Also, for KoF 13, specifically. They were really colorful, and I even had schematics in there. I had charts and graphs (the ones shown on screen are not from his actual notes). You know, I’ll send them over.
Kosaku: Did you ever have a time where you were writing it down analog? As in, with pen and paper?
Tokido: Oh, yeah, I totally did that. That was way earlier, though.
Kosaku: It’s really good to do, though…
Off-screen voice: You’d recommend that people do it?
Tokido: Yes, I definitely think people should take notes.
Off-screen voice: Even for beginners or mid-level players?
Tokido: You’re not losing anything by doing it, so yes. Just by writing it down, you’re putting your focus on it, right? You definitely SHOULD review your notes later, but even if you don’t, it’ll still be affixed in your memory in a different way. It makes you more aware of it.
Kosaku: Also, this is a more shallow reason but, it’s just fun to sit and tinker with.
Tokido: At the start, it really is.
Off-screen voice: It’s like you’re creating something.
Kosaku: Yes, just like that. It’s fun.
Tokido: Alright, that’s everything for this video! How was it?
Kosaku: There were so many areas I never really reached myself in your note-taking that I loved it.
Off-screen voice: You may have had different levels of depth, but when it came to the note-taking itself you were pretty evenly matched.
Tokido: Oh, his organizational skills were way better. It was so good. Google Document, right? I’m going to start using it.
Kosaku: I didn’t get to show all of its benefits, but it’s super handy, so I recommend it.
Tokido: I’m going to learn how to use it and make my notes even better! Thanks for watching and see you next video, good bye!