When it comes to higher level techniques in Street Fighter, one that is commonly used but might not be as well known about by newer players is the cross cut Dragon Punch. Essentially, a player can buffer a certain input for a Dragon Punch while an opponent is jumping over them, then activate it deep enough so that the game will turn your fighter around and have them still properly anti-air the opponent who just tried to go for a cross up.
Because of the Dragon Punch input and the invincibility to anti-air moves DPs usually have, this technique is one that works consistently, but doing the same thing with a projectile shouldn’t work the same… Well, this Street Fighter 6 clip sees Guile essentially pull off a cross cut Sonic Boom and still anti-air his opponent, and while that’s fairly unheard of, there is some explanation for how it was even possible.
The clip comes from the Guile player in the footage, Lexx, who pulled off what I’m calling the cross cut Sonic Boom. In the online match, we see Lexx going up against an Akuma player and the scene starts out with Guile having a burnt out Akuma pinned in the corner with level 2 super active.
After a few pokes and some of the Sonic Booms that Guile can toss freely during level 2 super, the Akuma player finds a lull in the offense and attempts a grand escape. Akuma performs a Demon Flip that actually does go behind Guile and gets them out of the corner, but they happened to do this when Guile was throwing OD Sonic Boom, which can be extended with follow up smaller Booms while in level 2.
In this situation, Lexx tosses out some of the Boom follow ups, and miraculously, the game flips Guile around when Akuma gets behind him and auto corrects him to be throwing the projectiles the opposite way. Akuma lands on one of the Booms and… that’s all she wrote.
So, while this interaction definitely looks very strange on the surface and under normal circumstances likely wouldn’t work this way, here’s what actually happened. Guile’s Sonic Boom projectile is a back to forward charge attack, which means performing it as a cross cut would be very, very difficult — if not, impossible.
If the cross cut regular Boom was actually able to be performed in a traditional sense, had Akuma been doing a regular cross up jump and hit a button he would have won this interaction. However, in this scenario we have the Boom follow ups in level 2 and a Demon Flip, which changes the calculus of things.
Since the input for the follow up Booms is only holding forward and pressing a punch button, the input is much simpler and lends itself more to actually being able to work in this scenario. On top of this, Akuma didn’t hit an attack with Demon Flip and was likely going for the sweep option to hit low and get some pressure going of his own.
These two factors made it so that Akuma was hanging out behind Guile long enough without an active attack that it left him open to being anti-aired, and because Lexx was likely actively mashing the follow up Booms, the game corrected Guile’s stance and ultimately gave him a cross cut Boom here.
Guile cheap LMAOO pic.twitter.com/5wE6Kq6sFr
— Lexx (@LexxFGC) July 10, 2024
There are a lot of different moves and attacks in Street Fighter 6, and you can never know how every single one will behave when interacting with another in every situation. This situation definitely brought on a very interesting interaction to say the least.