Pound for pound it doesn’t get much more advantageous than when you have your opponent’s back to the corner, (even more true in Street Fighter 6 than most other fighting game) but does it often feel like opponents weasel out of this precarious position more easily than they should?
It’s impossible to be ready for every potential defensive maneuver a foe might throw at you, but it is possible to be ready for most. What’s better, you can be ready for most while using the same input and Chris F explains how quickly and efficiently in his newest helpful video.
It sucks when you’re cornered in Street Fighter 6, and can often feel like your opponent is psychically aware of every move you want to make to try to escape. Curiously enough, what seems so simple when you’re on the short end can suddenly feel like the opposite when you’re the one on the prowl.
Sometimes it seems like when you go for a meaty, they wake up with a reversal or a super, but when you wait to bait a defensive flail out, that’s when they jump out to safety or wake up with a normal to steal the momentum. If your corner offense intuition is off, there’s a technique that will instantly up your success rate.
Said technique is the tried and true delayed normal. It’s nothing fancy (though being ready with secondary follow ups can bring the razzle dazzle) but it’s oh-so effective as it covers many options simultaneously while mitigating risk to you.
The training exercise asks you to set your training dummy foe to wake up in the corner with various, go-to options like wake up reversal, throw, forward jump, neutral jump, parry, and jab. Turn on all of these options so they cycle at random and practice positioning your character just outside throw range and pressing a delayed attack on your foe’s wake up.
If they immediately launch into a reversal or super, the delay will allow you to block. If they jump, you’ll have time to see and anti-air. Chris shows how this works against other possible actions and offers a visual guide on how to set up and execute the exercise.
The timing can be a little unintuitive at first, which is why it’s so important to simply take the time to do this a few times and train your fingers, as it’s a practice you’ll use incessantly and wonder how you ever played without it once you get it down.