Marisa is a heavy hitter in Street Fighter 6. The towering fighter is designed around dishing out big damage, with some feeling that she deals too much damage for her own good.
One of the biggest complaints we hear about Marisa is her ability to “2-touch” the opponent, which usually involves landing a big combo into her level 3 super against a burnt out opponent, then scoring a “guaranteed” stun set up using Drive Rush into crouching medium punch. Under the right circumstances, this set up has been known to be unavoidable, however, top player Snake Eyez may have cracked the case on how to actually get out of this terrible position — even if you don’t have a super stocked.
In Street Fighter 6, Marisa is able to completely deplete an opponent’s full health bar with just two combos. Now, in order to do so, she generally has to be equipped with the right resources, and have the proper circumstances in play before she can actually do it.
To start, she needs to save up and use her level 3 super in order to successfully 2-touch KO an opponent. On top of that, she needs most (if not all) of her Drive Gauge as well, and the most common situation where she is able to do this also requires the opponent be burnt out and not have a super that acts as an invincible reversal stocked.
If all of those things line up, then you’ll very likely see Marisa players use her stun set up that the community thought was inescapable. The set up goes like this: Marisa lands a big combo into level 3 super (which automatically corners the opponent), then on the opponent’s wake up she Drive Rushes in and hits a meaty crouching medium punch into Drive Impact which, if not properly countered, results in a stun of the opponent.
The only way we’ve seen this set up countered in the past was with the use of a strike invincible super. Most characters have a level 1 super that fits this bill, while some need to use level 2 or level 3 to get the same result.
However, if you found yourself in that situation without any super stocked or not enough to get your invincible one, then Marisa would get what appeared to be a guaranteed stun that you could not escape and ended up with you losing the rest of your health bar.
For the first time, though, we see a new way of escaping this bad situation courtesy of Snake Eyez. In a recent set of replays featuring Snake Eyez’s Zangief going up against 801Strider’s Marisa, the top level grappler player demonstrated a brilliant alternate way of avoiding the stun.
Essentially, what Snake Eyez is doing here is purposefully taking the hit from the crouching medium punch — but there’s a twist. You see, in Street Fighter 6 there always needs to be a gap in between a normal and Drive Impact in order for the Drive Impact to actually grant the highly sought after Drive Impact effects.
If there isn’t a gap, the Drive Impact will either simply push the opponent back on block and not wall splat or, if the normal hits, it will combo with the Drive Impact instead and again will not provide the expected wall splat result.
Typically with this set up from Marisa, there is a tight gap in between the Drive Rush crouching medium punch and the Drive Impact, and thanks to being a bit further out when doing this, she is also usually out of range to be grabbed. This set up leaves just enough of a gap that the Drive Impact will still stun, and blocking, getting hit, jumping, back dashing, essentially everything you try to do outside of a proper super gets you tagged by it.
Snake Eyez’s solution, which is so incredibly smart, is to take the hit from the crouching medium punch, but to make sure it’s a counter hit by trying to hit a button before it lands. When doing so, the added frame advantage from the Drive Rush and the counter hit make it so that there is no longer a gap in between the normal and the Drive Impact, which results in it becoming a true combo.
As we see in the footage below, Marisa’s set up ends up hitting as a 2-hit combo, which sends Zangief flying back, but does not result in a stun. Snake Eyez was able to escape in this scenario, and managed to actually take the round as well.
The down side to this counter is that you do need to take intentional damage for it to work. However, if you have enough health, you’re not looking at a ton of damage from the measly two hits from Marisa. Compare that to the remainder of your life bar being drained if you do get stunned, and that’s a really good trade off.
Surprisingly, taking damage to avoid a bad situation isn’t a new concept. Most people are likely familiar with this idea from back in Street Fighter 5 where “take the throw” was the better alternative to hitting a button when cornered and losing half of your health bar.
In Street Fighter 6, a lot of pro players also intentionally take damage when they’re very close to burnout so that they don’t block and end up losing that last bit of Drive Gauge they have.
This application of the concept by Snake Eyez is brilliant, though, and it’s a hard counter to one of the set ups that some people have had major issues with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXg_NbmrDxg