It’s that time of the week again where Ayano-san gives you some insight into what our Japanese counterparts are requesting for the update. What do you guys think of some of the requests and observations in this week’s blog?

Hello everyone, Tomoaki Ayano here!

Going a bit off topic for a moment, what’s your favorite stage background music in Super Street Fighter IV AE? Lately the SSFIV team has been talking about our favorites so I wanted to ask you all as well. Leave a comment talking about your favorite piece of BGM! …What’s mine, you ask? Why, thank you for asking! I have a lot of favorites, but in particular I really like Vega’s, Cammy’s, and I’ve always loved. Aside from character themes the India stage BGM is also pretty cool.

But you guys are here to check out the balance requests from the Japanese fans, right? So let’s get right down to it!

Balrog

Please extend the forward range on his Focus Attack. Right now, except for escaping from other Focus Attacks it’s pretty useless.

Please reduce the recovery on Buffalo Headbutt.

Since Balrog has issues against Focus, it’d be nice if you could reduce the recovery on Dash Low Smash, and give him some sort of mid 2nd hit follow-up.

Balrog has always been a character with an aggressive play style, but in ver. 2012 he’s kind of turned into a turtle. This doesn’t fit him at all, so please give him the tools he needs to be aggressive again.

Ayano: The most common requests for Balrog have been to reduce the recovery on Buffalo Headbutt, give him a crossup, and to make his U2 Dirty Bull stronger. His U1, Violent Buffalo, is pretty powerful and easy to use so it’s easy to see why U1 would be preferred over U2. As part of our adjustments we will look into increasing the usability of U2.

Gen

Mantis style is pretty much perfect, except there’s not much use for medium kick Gekiro. The major problem is that all of his standing kicks in Crane are absolutely useless. It would be great if you could give him more reason to use them. For example, if his standing heavy kick was considered airborne from startup, or he could dash cancel light kick like Abel.

His other major problem is his ****nketsu Ultra. It would be great if you could make it the same as it was in the Alpha series, but if that’s not possible at least let it lock-on to airborne opponents so we can use it as an anti-air. That’s all I can ask for, so good luck with the adjustments!

Ayano: The most common requests we get for Gen are to make MK Gekiro more useful, to buff ****nketsu, and to reduce the recovery on Oga. Since Gen has two different play styles balancing him requires the work of 2 characters at once! We’re looking into adjustments that will make some of his lesser-used tools more viable.

Evil Ryu

I feel like E.Ryu is very fundamentally sound as is. The one thing that bothers me though is that even though it looks like his sweep has more range than his crouching medium kick, they actually have the same range and startup. Why is that? Crouch medium is a great footsies tool, but it stays out there for awhile making it easy for his opponents to counter-poke him. Giving his sweep more range would improve his footsie game and make things more fun overall. So please make his sweep reach longer to match the animation.

Ayano: For E.Ryu the most common requests are to make the startup of crouching medium kick faster, improve his Hadoken, and to make the distance his Ashura Senku travels a bit farther. E. Ryu is a character that requires more precision than Ryu, so in our updates we’d like to do more to further separate him from his not-so-evil counterpart.

E. Honda

U1 and U2 aren’t very effective, and there are very few chances to land either in a match. U1 is good for anti-fireball and catching back dashes, but it comes out and moves so slowly that there aren’t many situations where we can use it. I understand that if you decrease the start-up then he could combo into it from Hundred Hand Slap, so instead I’ll ask for an increase in movement speed and an increased hitbox. If we could get a bigger top/bottom hitbox then it would be great as an anti-air.

The problems with U2 are that it’s extremely easy to jump out of on reaction, it has no range, and the inputs are too difficult to get out immediately. So there isn’t any reason to pick it over U1. I would take a slower startup if the Ultra animation would start after the throw’s active frames go into effect. Also, it would be nice to have the range of Oicho Throw, and if the inputs could be a 720 or even a 360.

Ayano: Honda’s most popular requests are a normal move he can use for anti-air, increase the recovery on Super Killer Head Ram, and to buff his U1 and U2. However, one request in particular asked for a new move – a laser beam. Lasers! So…Honda would become a projectile character? Personally I think that’d be kinda interesting, but giving Honda a projectile just might break the game…

Dhalsim

It would be great if you could reduce the startup on his heavy kick slide, or at least make it so that the frames that lower his position come out earlier. What I’m hoping for is to make it more effective against fireballs, and to improve its overall usefulness. It’s an important move for knocking the opponent down but due to its limitations we Dhalsim players don’t really use it that much. Sim doesn’t need major changes, just a few tweaks to let him use his moves better according to the situation and I feel like he’ll be a contender.

Ayano: We’ve gotten a lot of requests for his heavy kick slide to go under projectiles more easily, to increase the reach on Yoga Shangri-La, and to reduce the recovery of Yoga Fire. Compared to other characters Dhalsim hasn’t had a whole lot of requests for major buffs, but we have gotten some interesting ones like being able to do Yoga Tower indefinitely, and for Dhalsim to smack his opponent 10 times instead of just 2 in his Yoga Smash throw (without changing the damage!). Dhalsim is not a character for everyone, so it makes sense that we would get some unique requests for him!

Well that’s all for this week. See you next week!