Listen, I get it… It’s easy to jump on Twitter and complain about a match up that’s giving you trouble in a fighting game. But how often is it just salt and how often is what you’re tweeting about a genuine, legit bad match up?
If you’re a newer player, I can definitely tell you that you likely haven’t seen what a REAL bad match up not only looks like, but feels like. In one of his latest videos, fighting game legend Justin Wong goes back and takes a closer look at some of the traditionally worst match ups we’ve seen in fighting games over the years.
Justin begins by watching footage of the Evo 2008 tournament for Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo. Kusumondo is known for being the best E. Honda player in the world, and in this footage we see him take on two absolute masters of Ryu in that installment, Alex Valle and John Choi.
As far as the Honda vs. Ryu match up in Super Turbo goes, we couldn’t get any better examples of top level play than these three players. In this particular match up, E. Honda has to take all of the risk and rely on extreme patience (and the occasional wild play) to get anything going.
We can see that E. Honda has to hold every fireball Ryu throws, and if he doesn’t navigate around them extremely carefully, Ryu is either getting a sweep or standing medium punch to anti-air damn near every time. If Honda tries to bypass all of that with butt slam, Ryu can simply Dragon Punch it and shut it down completely.
One of the terrible match ups that I myself lived through and remember vividly is none other than Dhalsim vs. Yun in Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition. If you’re unfamiliar with this version of the game, Yun was notoriously known for being incredibly strong, overpowered, and is to this day considered one of the most broken characters to ever grace a fighting game.
While Yun was hard for everyone to deal with in AE, Dhalsim suffered REALLY badly against the Street Fighter 3 twin. Justin Wong shows a match between Filipino Champ and Daigo at NorCal Regionals 9 that will give you a great understanding as to why that match was so incredibly tough for Sim.
Be sure to check out JWong’s full video on terrible match ups in fighting games below.