Phantom_Miria

If half of what's shown in that list were true Nemo wouldn't have the win rate he has with A.K.I. You also wouldn't have anyone with an A.K.I. in Master and 2000 MR because it wouldn't be possible anymore under those conditions. That matchup chart isn't for A.K.I. or for any modern fighting game character, that's Twelve matchup chart from Third Strike. I'm having this feeling that Nemo is very interested in using A.K.I. competitively eventually, because he has been playing and researching her a ton since she came out and even before release, but he's not going to use her seriously now because who the fuck drops JP in the current patch. But having a backup character ready is a good thing to have if your main is a likely target for nerfs, and so why not give the impression that the newcomer is hilariously weak, maybe even by taking the spotlight away from the grapplers, who all suck dick with no exception and are all massively weaker characters than A.K.I., and Nemo fucking hates grapplers so it's even better? Because if A.K.I. is actually bottom tier then that means that I hit Master rank with Manon a while back, and I'm currently in Diamond 3 with A.K.I. on a 58,23% win rate, and I still have no actual clue of how the game works on a basic level. Because I can't even begin to fathom how a character who has a real Drive Rush, who is +44 after hitting her go-to combo ender that you can get from all of your cancelable normals and can go into safe jumps, frame kills into command grab or overhead, regular pressure and so on, who has a strike and projectile invincible move that side-switches getting you out of the corner, and deals a lot of damage and corner carry once you hit them in a poisoned state (and with all that oki you'll at least have a good chance to do so), is somehow bottom tier. Like, worse than the grapplers, the dudes who have to spend half of their Drive Bar to get a chance at putting you in a 50/50 and then hope they guess right or they die, and even if they guess correctly they're thrown on the other side of the room, and all to deal still less damage than A.K.I. or any normal character would have. I also strongly doubt that poison could ever be an impediment to A.K.I. in the way Drinks are for Jamie because A.K.I. starts off with all of her tools and the poison is built to be momentum-improving mechanic, not a momentum-killing one like Drinks are. The absolute worse A.K.I. can be is Ryu tier, which is regular mid-tier. I don't think she's high tier material because she has obvious weaknesses that the current top 8 of actually really strong characters (Ken, Luke, JP, Cammy, Juri, Chun-Li, DeeJay, Guile) don't really have or aren't fixed by some other overwhelming strength, but I definitely think that she can hover between mid and mid-high tier (basically between Ryu and Marisa) depending on how the character evolves. But if the pros and everyone else are dead-set on claiming that A.K.I. is worse than Lily and she needs mad buffs then so be it, I sure am not going to be complaining. If they ever over-buff her in the future and she becomes top tier, and then people complain tho, I will make sure to remind them that A.K.I. used to be literally non-functional back in the day, and thus she's mid-tier at most now that, I don't know, EX Slide is unthrowable and she gets out of the corner everytime unless she's in burnout and they doubled the range of crLP so now she can do 5 or 6 lights before hit-confirming.

You're clearly not supposed to be able to do it in this game, but weird things will always pop out in fighting games. In this game if your opponent has the back to the corner and you jump forward you will normally never end up behind them, so nothing like how it used to be in 4 and 5.

I'm having weird issues with training mode. I'm trying to lab an A.K.I. setup into overhead, it ends up hitting the opponent meaty enough to be +5 on regular hit, then you'd combo them into stLK because jabs would whiff due to corner setup and crLK isn't cancelable, and that's where weird things happen. I think that stLK in that circumstance only hits a crouching opponent and whiffs on a standing one, which is fine because it's an overhead so I'm trying to get them crouched anyway, however it seems that the dummy always gets hit in a standing position even if I set them up to be crouched and block crouched, and I can't combo into stLK. I was concerned that the setup actually didn't work or something, so I tried to do the opposite: have a dummy A.K.I. try the setup on me with a recording I made to see if anything changes with a character controlled by a person. Guess what? The setup works, the meaty overhead combos into into stLK if I'm controlling the character getting hit, but it always whiffs on a dummy. Even more strangely, if it's a counter hit then stLK will combo, which doesn't make sense because this isn't a frame data thing, stLK either reaches or not, and I don't think being countered makes your hurtbox larger. I heard that the dummy doesn't quite behave like a human, and there was also another thing where people found a weird interaction where you can crossup dudes in the corner but it doesn't work in training mode on the dummy. Any opinions?

The A.K.I. that impressed me the most has been Nemo so far, I've stolen a lot of setups from him. It also seems like he's learning her for real, not just messing around with the new character.

At the absolute worse, A.K.I. is much better than the grapplers and Jamie, who's a good character hamstrung by the drink system. So, at the absolute worse she's Ryu tier, which would be very mid, but I think she can turn out to be pretty good. As good as the really good characters of the game? That's something that depends on how the character develops, but if it happens it's gonna take some time. Even then, no one is going to drop characters that are currently very strong and optimized even for a secret top tier that needs time to grow. There's a million dollars on the line and people weren't doing that for much less. My impression after playing her a while and looking pros is that she can get a lot stuff going off very little, and it can snowball pretty hard in her favour. As soon as you manage to land QCF+HP in midscreen, which is pretty easy to combo into, you get to choose how to do further pressure between double dash that leaves you +6, medium slide that leaves you +5, safe jump (with the malus that if they don't backrise you need to react and go for a crossup attack, but that's what dHP is for and this doesn't apply to the corner), raw Drive Rush shenanigans between overhead and crMK both leading to medium combos, if they don't backrise you get to do stuff like dash-in overhead that frame kills to hit on the last frame leaving you +5 on regular hit (combos into jabs) or frame kill stLP into stance command grab... So, you got options. In the corner she gets a lot of sauce I think, and also projectile pressure that's very plus on block and beats stuff like JP's Amnesia. EX moves being something you can do straight from the first second is probably my favourite part about SF6. I'd very much prefer for the Super Meter to be isolated and just be something you slowly build toward level 3 unless you have reasons to waste it on a level 2 or 1 when needed.

Looking at the way A.K.I.'s combos work, I think we can forget raw Drive Rush ever changing in cost. She needs raw Drive Rush for most of her Toxic Bloom combos, and a change in cost there would massively impact her combo routes. Like, basically every time you pop you want to rush into the combo extension for big damage and oki. Her go-to wall-splat after Drive Impact requires a raw Drive Rush after QCB+HP. With the way they married A.K.I. to raw Drive Rush they made it kinda difficult to do stuff like altering the cost without greatly affecting her functionality.

Oh, by the way, QCF+HP also gives you a safe jump. Heard it in Nephew's video and tried it in training mode. That's pretty nice.

My understanding is that his name is a pseudonym he uses while being undercover, not his actual name. Also, Punish Counter command grab does exactly 2222 damage. I wonder if that was on purpose.

Early impressions from labbing A.K.I. as someone who's very bad at labbing stuff. Her only plus button is fHK, what used to be F.A.N.G's stHK, it's +2 on block. Literally everything else is minus, but generally also pretty safe. Like, even standing Heavy Kick is just -3, and her sweep (which is done with punch, not kick) is -8, which I think is on the safer end of things as far sweeps are concerned (Not that you'll ever be able to make that sweep safe because she moves forward a ton with it). QCF+HP seems like her best special. It's an anti-air, it leads to juggle on anti-airs if the opponent is already poisoned, it combos from everything, it moves A.K.I. forward so it has a little more horizontal range than you'd expect for a fully vertical move, upon landing it on a grounded opponent you're +44, and that's without Toxic Blossom. You're massively plus and your opponent isn't thrown very far at all, in fact if they don't recover backward they'll be within range of her command grab and with time for A.K.I. to waste. If you double dash after you're +6, since A.K.I.'s forward dash is 19 frames long, and I've messed around to see what you could do there. It feels like you could have a lot of options to try to sneak in or that are very much real, but I'm not an expert at all. Her overhead and especially her command grab are on the slower end. It says it's 23 frames of startup, but I think it's not counting the frames of getting into the stance, so overall it seems the fastest the command grab can come out is 33 frames. Her overhead is 24 frames, which I think is also pretty slow. Fortunately it seems you get a bunch of situations where you have a lot of frame advantage to threaten with them. Her EX Slide is indeed completely invincible for the entire duration to both fireballs and strikes. There seems to be a case where she turns vulnerable by looking at the in-game training tools, and it's when you touch your opponent toward the end of the animation, too late to cross on the other side. So, when used defensively you should be fine, that seems to be an issue if you were to try to use that move to get in your opponent's face rather than run away from him. The way I'm thinking I could play her is use her fireball into command dash/Drive Rush to open people up and poison them, find a good opening and then try to snowball them. At least conceptually that's how I'm envisioning her gameplan, but I haven't gone online yet because her combo routes are complicated and I hate not knowing what I'm doing when playing online, so I'm practicing in trials and training mode.

Didn't they fix that in a previous patch?

Something I noticed with A.K.I. is that a lot of her Toxic Bloom combos end up in re-poisoning, either because the combo extension you get from the explosion contains a poisoning move or because you get the time to lay a poison puddle. This might help A.K.I. in getting snowball-y with her offense. Also, she doesn't have a real reversal but EX Slide has the advantage of side switching, so it doesn't just get you out of the corner but puts your opponent in the corner instead, and if you want to keep her in the corner you'll have to go for throws a lot, which can make your pressure more predictable. It's like a not-OP version of JP's Amnesia where your opponent doesn't really have to fear a normal reversal out of you outside of Super but it still changes how they'll approach you on wakeup compared to a character like Zangief or Manon who are free on wakeup. If they're afraid you'll try to escape with Slide they'll go for throw, so it will be less risky for you to tech, but if they seem to go for normal offense that means you have room to escape. Also, if they ever get rid of throw loops A.K.I. will become even harder to keep in the corner, and I'm expecting this character to be annoying to keep cornered, even if getting a punish counter throw on her EX Slide even once is going to be devastating for her Drive Meter wise.

Even then, you can't turn moves that are supposed to be safe or plus into heavily punishable stuff out of pressing parry at the right time. You'd be turning everything that's visually reactable into extremely dangerous moves to throw out that you just wouldn't be able to do anymore in competitive matches: Dragonlash, Marisa's Gladius, Gief's stHP, Manon's overhead, etc. crMKxxDR is already annoying as it is and it could help having further scaling on it, we don't need the defensive version of it too on top of that. The huge scaling on perfect parries seemed counter-intuitive at first to me too, then I saw how it actually plays out in matches and that it was a very smart move. No, I shouldn't lose even 30% because I threw a move that was supposed to be plus on block, not out of something that if you fuck up you're still blocking and reduced Drive Meter cost. If you get a perfect parry you get a small punish that you can optimize a little, and you get to completely switch the momentum in your favour, and maybe you have oki and the corner as well. That sounds more than enough.

Because you really don't want to play a game where someone scoring a random perfect parry leads to you losing 40% of your life, at least, and then get cornered as well.

Damn, she brought the whole witch's cauldron.

That thumbnail tho.

Looks like none of her stuff is charge from that video. Shame.

On block she's punishable (-5 for the MPxxMK string, -8 for the HPxxHP one), on hit she's plus obviously (+2 for MPxxMK and +3 for HPxxHP, not that it changes anything since you're in a hit or throw mixup anyway).

In my experience canceling EX Wheel into Super 2 usually fixes the issue. I don't know if most people know you can cancel that EX move into Super 2 tho.

Just A.K.I. having a normal one*. * Normal one: drinking highly lethal poison, assaulting and killing a local policewoman in a public space through contortionist martial arts, showering in highly lethal poison.