We’ve been enjoying the Season 2 patch for Street Fighter 6 for over a week now, and that means our communal understanding of the myriad of buffs and nerfs are no longer restricted to just text on a page.
Marisa, one of the characters who saw some interesting improvements, was already terrifying to defend against thanks to the fact that she’s designed to be the hardest hitting fighter on the roster, but things are even scarier now. In a recent video 801 Strider takes a closer look at what some of her seemingly more innocuous buffs really imply, one of which puts her in what may be an unprecedented Street Fighter situation.
Playing into her big brawler archetype, Marisa can charge up a good many of her attacks to enhance damage and other properties. This includes her jumping heavy punch and that means Marisa can be a particularly potent threat from the air, but the amount of recovery she’d have after performing this move tilted the risk/reward of using it often out of her favor.
Capcom buffed this jump in by causing it to recover three frames faster which may seem like a fairly mundane alteration on paper, but when Strider reveals the further implications we see just how potent this tool has become.
In the fairly common situation wherein Marisa lands a Superman punch in the corner, she can now instantly leap forward and threaten her opponent’s wake up with a charged heavy punch. Doing this before would leave her open to anti-airs and Perfect Parry punishes, but the mere three frames of recovery changes all of that.
This sequence now becomes a safe jump, meaning that Marisa’s attack will land on her rising opponent perfectly in the window where if they do an invincible reversal she’ll be able to block. If they block the attack, she’s an astounding (and perhaps unprecedented) +18 in their face in the corner.
It’s scary to get hit by most any character in the corner in Street Fighter 6, but if you’re in the situation against Marisa, there’s a good chance that her next successful hit will end the round. That’s not all, however.
If you block Marisa here she can continue to pressure with close to anything she wants, such as a frame trap with her charged standing back fierce. This leads into a string that, by itself, lops off about one and two thirds Drive Gauges.
The potential for snowballing with this character just got turned up to avalanche levels, and that’s just the first of a handful of changes that Strider puts under the microscope for us. Take a look at them all in his full video below and let us know if you’ll be switching to Marisa afterwards in the comments.
If you’d like more analysis of the latest update be sure to check some of our takes on the biggest winners and losers of the patch.