In an effort to combat gamebreaking setups like unblockables and vortexes, Ultra Street Fighter 4 introduced the delayed wakeup mechanic which allowed you to mess up the timing of your opponent if they tried to do a vortex/unblockable setup. No fun if you were on the receiving side indeed. Talk about unforgiving right? -) Characters like Ibuki and Akuma benefitted strongly from this and almost allowed for autopilot gameplay. A vortex like that could easily lead to stun, and a subsequent KO if you guessed wrong for more than 2 times. It was broken again with the discovery of so called vortex setups, which kept your opponent in constant 50-50 guessing state after being knocked down: will the attack hit from the front or back? It wasn't uncommon for even the aggressor to not know what side it would hit. The only way to block it was to do it frame-perfect, which is incredibly hard to do considering the game runs at 60fps. These unblockable setups caused hitboxes to overlap in such a way that it would leave your opponent in a state where he/she could do nothing other than to get hit with an the attack. Well, except for maybe Dee Jay, Honda and Dhalsim unfortunately.įor those wondering why there have been so many iterations of Street Fighter over the past few years: aside from introducing new mechanics and characters, SF has been 'broken' a few times in the past with the discovery of so called un-blockable setups. The game gradually went from favouring defensive characters to rush down characters, and now with Ultra Street Fighter 4, back to zoning/footsie characters: I believe Ultra Street Fighter 4 has seen the most diverse top 8 in tournaments (see Evo for example) from all iterations when it came to characters, which makes me believe that it is currently balanced quite nicely, meaning that almost all characters have a good shot at winning a tournament. Many players find this more exciting than the much more defensive oriented Super Street Fighter 4, but eventually the offense was toned down in Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition 2012, which struck a nice balance.Īs for (former) top tiers: you're forgetting Yang -) He was considered top tier in Arcade Edition too, and was nerfed considerably in Arcade Edition 2012 to the point many thought he was not tournament viable anymore. Yun, Seth, C.Viper, Cammy, Fei Long, Akuma and Rufus were all characters that put on a lot of pressure in this version and had very damaging combos. But, many players complained about how defensive the game had become, so in Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition, the defensive characters were reduced in power and the offensive characters became much better. Charge characters require you to hold backwards to do most or all of their special attacks, meaning that you inherently play them defensively due to the requirement of needing to hold backwards. Looking at the tier list, you can see that the top three characters were thought to be Honda, M.Bison and Guile, three charge characters. The game had a lot of value in more defensive characters. Take for example Super Street Fighter 4 (the second iteration in the Street Fighter 4 series). One interesting thing to note though, is that each iteration of Street Fighter has had different important features in matchup analysis. This is a really interesting article because I've yet to see real statistics done on all of this data we have of the game.

Street fighter 4 tiers