Who is the BEST CHARACTER in EVERY Street Fighter Game?

folks today we're going to be talking about who is the strongest Street Fighter character in every Street Fighter game so I'm going to be going through all the way from Street Fighter 1 to Street Fighter 6 and we'll pick out who in my opinion is the number one strongest character again this is my opinion I'm incorporating things such as top player opinions and Tournament results as well but at the end of the day this is just how I feel so don't get too upset with me if you disagree with my pics and I just I want to test something out real quick hit the like button did the like button just like light up and go crazy I heard that would happen so I just wanted to make sure but I put a lot of work into research for this video so I'd appreciate it if you could do that and subscribe if you're not already but with that let's get into the list and start out with Street Fighter 1 so Street Fighter 1 there's actually only one playable character I guess two you could say Ry and Ken but they play completely identically uh there have actually been ROM hacks that allow you to play as all the other characters which which are normally AI only only for single player mode but they're actually so incomplete that they can't really compete with the two shos so Street Fighter one it's a tie Ryu and Ken are the best character in this game but really this game is trash so you probably just shouldn't even play it on to Street Fighter 2 you know now we have a whole roster of characters to choose from and this game's pretty funny because this game prevents you from playing the same character as your opponent there are no mirror matches in the game unless you're doing Ryu versus Ken because they are you know pretty much identical in this game as well I would say the best character in this game is guile so guile special moves are very powerful obviously the sonic boom and the Flash kick are both really good also he has like the crouching medium kick of the Gods this is definitely one of the best normals in the game absolutely insane reach and really good Frame data as well uh but what's really silly about guile is he's really good at Disney in the opponent and even red dizzying meaning dizzies into another dizzy and essentially killing the opponent off of One Touch there are even really stupid ones that you can do just by mashing jab because he has the longest reaching jab hit boox in the game you can see I just did a to with just jab but also of course just regular combos off of his jumpins will usually dizzy as well and he has just tons of ways to kill off this look there's a nice red dizzy for you and yeah with the extremely high damage and dizzy values in this game and gu's just good move properties overall he is extremely broken but this game is pretty much not played in tournaments ever because of the mirror match thing and because of all the other bugs in the game so let's move on to one that was played a little bit more and that was Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition if you can believe it this is currently the most popular version of Street Fighter 2 on fight Gade so what came along with this game first of all obviously you can pick the same character as your opponent now so the game is now like tournament viable you don't have to do any coin flip things to see who can pick the character they want you can see they actually changed gu's farst standing jab so he doesn't even have the same jab animation anymore you can still get like five or six Jabs in one combo sometimes but you can see it's not going to be as many as before and usually you're going to need two combos to stun with just the Jabs versus the one he still has the crazy damage off of jumpins and stuff his special moves are still good but there is a new competitor who might even challenge Guile's dominance in this game and that is M bison so you can see they added the four boss characters to be playable in this game and M bison is pretty problematic in this one so first of all his psycho Crusher is a really really stupid move in this game so if you psycho Crusher with mbison do you see how much damage that's doing on block let me just go for it one more time here five hits on block did what like 25 % 30% on block psycho Crusher is also a really crazy crossup tool you can see that hit on the back so the opponent's going to have to switch their guard but it's really ambiguous which side is going to hit on so it's really tricky for that as well his scissor kicks are also really crazy in this game they are very Plus on blocks so you can do these ridiculous block strings that are super hard to escape from and deal tons of Chip and his scissor kicks allow him to get a really easy Touch of death combo so we got one dizzy right right there we can get another one right here that all combos and then you can pretty much just kill with whatever you want so that's you know a semi infinite a true touch of death combo that he can get off of a jump in or just off of Jabs uh pretty ridiculous but then in our next game here Street Fighter 2 turbo hyper fighting uh bison ate kind of a lot of Nerf first of all the chip on his psycho Crusher has been greatly reduced you can see it's only three hits now and it only does you know that much chip instead of like 20 5% plus that combined with other Nerfs to his damage and Frame data uh left Bison actually pretty low on the tier list in most people's estimations and so who came in to take his place it's good old honest Ryu a lot of people consider Ryu to be the best character in Turbo hyper fighting so why is this well a lot of it comes down to honestly ryu's Fireball Ryu has the the strongest Fireball in the game you can see we stunned right there with just two Fireballs two Fireballs is all it took to stun his Fireball is also insanely fast and the speed difference between his light and heavy Fireballs is huge which makes for really potent Fireball setups he's also got some of the best pokes in the game his sweep is special cancelable which is really ridiculous on block and even on whiff you know if the fireball whiffs you're still in a decent situation there's also a technique in these old games called cps1 chaining which essentially allows you to chain between normals that you're not normally allowed to normally they only want you going from light kick into light kick but you can utilize a glitch that lets you go into light kick into medium punch light kick into heavy punch and because he has such a fast and high damage SL stun Fireball he can do combos like this ridiculous stuff I mean crazy damage despite other characters like guile and bison having their instant stun potential nerfed a little bit throughout these games uh Ryu is still really good at it combined with his extremely powerful antier and Fireball Fireball Wars and Fireball traps are really the name of the game here in Street Fighter 2 turbo and Ryu is the best at it so that's why I would consider him to be number one in the game next up we have Super Street Fighter 2 the new Challengers this is the one that added t-hawk Fong DJ and Camy as well as massively upgraded Graphics but despite that I feel this is many people's least favorite version of Street Fighter 2 the game is a lot slower than turbo was a lot of the new characters feel kind of incomplete like they don't have a lot of their special moves that they ended up getting in the later version and there is an extremely menacing top tier that is really brutal to fight at all levels of skill and that is sagot okay so some of the reasons why sagot is so ridiculous in this game first of all his damage is completely silly look we got the stun off one jump in and then off the second jump in we kill so easy TOS his normals are completely ridiculous look this standing Fierce reaches like half the screen's length he has maybe the best sweep in the game this thing reaches forever and is actually an amazing antiair and part of the reason for that is because Street Fighter 2 lacks something called trip guard so if you are jumping you cannot block a low as you land so you cannot guard trips as you land so to speak and it turns out sag's low Tiger shot is actually a low in this game it must be blocked crouching so if you jump from any where on screen you can land on this Fireball and there's nothing you can do about it it is an unblockable Fireball as you're Landing his Fireballs are pretty ridiculous in general he has the high Tiger shot and the low Tiger shot and the speed difference between the light and heavy versions of these tiger shots is just unreal so his Fireball traps are the best in the game and half the time even if you guess right and you jump when he throws a tiger shot it'll be the high Tiger shot and you'll just get hit out of it or it'll be the low Tiger shot and you'll get hit by the no trip guard you can't block when you land so his tiger shots are unreal one of the best aners in the game as well with tiger uppercuts super invincible and it's only one hit in this game as opposed to super turbo where they made it more hits so some of them would whiff you wouldn't get full damage no this always does full damage and is really crazy for combos as well so the fact that his tiger shots make him an impenetrable wall that is impossible to close the gap on combined with his massive close range damage as well uh makes him an absolute Terror and he really holds down like the entire cast of this game so in the follow-up Super Street Fighter 2 turbo the game where they added super meters for the first time uh naturally they nerfed sagot quite a lot the aforementioned change to his Tiger Uppercut making it multiple hits means that in a lot of situations you are just going to get like two three four hits not the maximum and you're going to deal a lot less damage on antiair his normals are nerfed quite a bit as well he doesn't have the absolute insane range on a lot of his normals as he did before and damage and stun on his tiger shots has been nerfed so he's not going to deal the insane amount that he did before look it might actually take three tiger shots to cause a stun now so uh yeah that's pretty big and you know the Nerfs kind of did their job and sagot is a pretty fair and balanced character in this game or at least he would be if there weren't a cheat code in the game that lets you choose the old versions of every character as you can see sagot has no super meter I am playing the old unnerfed version of sagot where you know Dragon punch is just one hit his sweep is once again like the best anti-air in the game one of the best pokes in the game he even has some new unintentional Buffs like you can now cancel the second hit of his light kick which I'm you could not do in non-turbo Super Street Fighter 2 so I don't know why they added this and combined of course with his insane wall of tiger shots uh sagot the old version old sagot is arguably the best character in super turbo as well as regular super but in my opinion there is a new Challenger who has uh generally been putting up more consistent Tournament results lately and I think has taken the crown away from old sagot and made him no longer the best in the game and that is Vega or or ballog cuz this is the Japanese version let's just call him claw claw is truly broken with the best walk speed in the game normals that reach like the entire screen and our super high frame advantage on block his jump is also insanely fast and he has very far down reaching air normals which makes him the hardest character in the game to anti a he can whiff a back flip to build meter very quickly which is very stupid this is really hard to punish and his super is actually pretty cheap it is an instant unj jumpable command grab that does like 50% of their HP on hit he has a strong anti-air flip kick that combos into itself on hit and on top of all this he has probably the most broken and degenerate move in all of Street Fighter 2 which is his wall dive so his wall dive is a pretty much unseeable left right mixup you have to figure out what side are they going to hit on and of course it knocks down so this can Loop into itself on hit and it is almost entirely unpunishable on block if it is spaced correctly you can see I can hit very low to the ground and from very far away and make myself completely safe oh yeah and also even if they are blocking they're still at risk because you can command throw them out of this so not only is it a left right there's also a command throw built in and it kind of just randomly happens depending on you know the spacing and how close you are to the opponent so yes this is without a doubt the most stupid move in the game many matches in this game even at top level just involve Vega getting one knockdown and then repeatedly mixing up the opponent with the wall dive until they die and uh even if they guess right he's still usually safe so like nothing good happens you just go back to neutral where you have to fight the character with the best walk speed and some of the longest range moves in the game other than dwon so yes even though old sagot has had a reign of terror throughout the past and is still one of the most overpowered characters I think if we just look at the more recent results we can see that ballog claw Vega the guy with the mask and the claw is the most broken character in Super Street Fighter 2 turbo except of course for there's this another guy who requires a cheat code to put in uh let's see if we can get him here yeah this guy Akuma is the true most broken character in super turbo but we don't count him cuz you know he's tournament banned he's an unlockable boss character he's not meant to be competitive so we don't really consider him when we're talking about these things so let's move on to Street Fighter Alpha 1 where once again we can put in a cheat code down down down left left left light punch plus heavy punch and we get to play Akuma and while Street Fighter Alpha 1 is very very rarely played in tournament these days uh in all the tournaments that I found Akuma is unbanned and by all the counts uh he is the best character in this game Ken is up there as well but Akuma has a few unique advantages over the other shos obviously he has a Teleport so this can get him out of a lot of troubles on wake up he can teleport and as long as the opponent doesn't really sit back and bait it it's going to get him out of most setups on wake up he also has an air Fireball and uh you know the recover on this is pretty fast this is going to be pretty hard for a lot of the cast to deal with and he can combo off it Alpha One also allowed you to chain very freely between your different normals something that's very rare in Street Fighter games and Akuma was really good at taking advantage of this and Cashing Out huge damage off any hit Akuma also has his extremely powerful signature level three supera in this game the Raging demon and he has all sorts of easy tricks for landing this you can do all kinds of jumpings and stuff into it and even though Ken was holding up there he could not escape and also there's even a bug where some characters can't jump it at all on wake up birdie was holding up on wake up and he can't escape uh so yeah that's obviously a little broken for specific matchups also this is an untechable knockdown most knockdowns in this game can be rolled making your mixups inconsistent on the opponent's wake up but uh raging demon is the only move in the game that cannot be rolled the only hard knockdown so yes between the super the air Fireball is high damage and stun and all of the amazing Sho normals he has access to even though there are characters like Ken and guy who are very strong in alpha 1 in my opinion Akuma Takes the Cake now moving on to a game that actually is still regularly played in tournament it's Street Fighter Alpha 2 Akuma is no longer a secret character no more code to play him in this game but there's another character who is even better and that is going to be Rose one of the funny things about Rose in Alpha 2 is if if we have the phrase the best blank in the game rose has a lot of those so she has probably the best normal in the game which is her crouching medium punch there are some players who are famous for being able to win entire matches just with this button if you look at the hitbox you can tell it's pretty big but also notably it has almost no vulnerable recovery frames like the second the hit boox goes away she's already retracted her arm where you're not going to be able to counter poke it it's also very fast to the point where you can link it off of her crouching jab making it one of the easiest and most consistent hit confirms in the game she also has the best Alpha counter in the game as you can see this is a very interesting Alpha counter it's a throw but it leaves the opponent standing on the ground and in a combable position so this does so many things it lets you escape the corner because you side switch on the alpha counter plus you get damage afterwards plus the fact that you're just doing a normal follow-up combo afterward means you're You're Building back some of that meter that you spent on the alpha counter so that is just ridiculous and she also has the best super in the game which is going to be her soulle illusion her install super so this is a PowerUp that lasts four whole seconds even on level one super so you get a lot of mileage out of it even only spending one chunk of bar this is going to greatly increase the damage of all of her combos you can see just one hit can lead to like 50% on hit and she can do insane block damage you see we can do massive amounts even if the opponent's blocking and we're safe because of all these clones that are attacking afterwards and you can use this to cancel any normal including her incredibly powerful down medium punch so you can do really simple setups like just knock them down and then do this on their wake up and even if they block they're still going to take like 20% on block and you'll be completely safe and back to neutral so you might be thinking okay she's got this amazing Alpha counter this amazing install super but those require a lot of meter right you're going to be burning through meter and you're going to be really starved for it which would be true if she didn't have a unique attack that lets her build meter first of all just by whiffing the soul reflect you build a huge amount of meter and the light version of this move is a soul absorb which if you just watch my meter do you see how much I get for one of these I get like almost an entire half meter and this is a game where Ken and Ryu are very strong characters in Chun as well so all these Fireball characters they really got to think twice about throwing a fireball ball at Rose cuz she'll just absorb it and use it to power up and do her insanely damaging and effective moves so again Alpha 2 is another game where a lot of characters are kind of knocking on that door of top one but in my opinion Rose Takes the Cake due to her Superior normals best super in the game best Alpha counter in the game and amazing control over neutral and Rush down in general all right let's close out the Alpha Series with Alpha 3 and if you're not familiar with this game this might be kind of surprising uh currently many top players consider dwam to be the best character in the game specifically vism doam so overall I feel like one of the reasons why dwam is so good in this game is he kind of Breaks the Rules of how dwam is meant to be designed so you know normally doam is designed to be really strong from far away and weak from up close but in this game he's really strong at kind of all ranges so his dive kick here his drill it's just insane how low to the ground you can do this it feels like I don't know Rufus dive kick or something from Street Fighter 4 we'll talk a bit about that more later but oh my God this thing is so fast and the hit box on both his dive kick and his yoga mummy are so insane these are like impossible to antiair whatever button the opponent's trying to press to stop you uh is just going to get completely destroyed by the sheer will of yoga mummy and yoga drill his slides are also really ridiculous in this game really good frame advant also I think there's some kind of bug or something where you can cancel the slide normally slide is not meant to be special cancelable at all but if you do it on like just the right frame you can cancel it into Fireball making it even more safe and more plus so what is that about does anyone know why that happens I I don't know why he's allowed to do that but yes that very much Breaks the Rules of doam in general to be able to special cancel his slide he also has one of the best and most consistent antiair in the game with his air throw look at the the janky animation where his feet are flat on the ground despite being Airborne yes this throw will really just catch opponents every single time no matter how low you are to the ground and also he's the only character in the game who can escape combos essentially whenever he wants so for whatever reason if you're ever being like juggled or like knocked down uh he has this unique move that just teleports them out of it so this isn't really as broken as it seems because you are vulnerable during the recovery of this so the opponent can hit you but really top level Alpha 3 Dooms they'll mix up the timing of that yoga escape and make it really hard to know when you're supposed to bait it out and they'll get out of your combos in situations where other characters just simply don't have that option at all also this game has a guard bar and it turns out dam is one of the best characters in the game at abusing the existence of this guard bar because he can make you block from like basically full screen uh he can destroy your guard bar and get a free hit on you relatively easily especially when this is combined with his Vis ISM this is just absolutely stupid like look look at how much guard bar damage I'm doing just off one activation there we broke his guard without him being able to really do anything except try to Alpha counter out which is very risky from that far away uh so yeah this is not even to mention his ridiculous vism combos which if you have the execution he can carry to the corner from like any hit he can deal huge damage he can deal massive damage off of an air starters off of poke starters whatever it's truly crazy how powerful this character becomes in Alpha 3 in the right hand moving from alpha 3 to Street Fighter 3 new generation this is another game that sees basically no competitive tournament play anymore but there is one character who is generally agreed to be the best in the game and that is Ibuki so some of ibuki's strengths very very abusable normals things like her jab standing and crouching her light kick or standing medium kick these moves are all extremely plus and abusable you can Rush the opponent down and be really hard to stop her towards medium kick overhead as well is plus and you can get a full combo off both that and off of a properly spaced Universal overhead that will also be able to link as well but a lot of these things that I've said were already some of her strengths that she has in Street Fighter 3 third strike so what is it in this older version that makes her truly overthe toop broken I would say there's three unintentional things that the developer ERS didn't realize we're we're so broken the first is for some reason she can cancel the third hit of her medium kick sumii I think that this is a bug it only works with jab and it actually only works if you're holding neutral on the stick and it's a three-frame window so it's pretty hard to do but this will enable you to do some truly degenerate combos let's see if I can do it right here like this into the Super and then we get a followup and that's a OneTouch stun so uh yeah her stun and damage potential because of this bug is really insane and it's also because of her super so as you saw her super combos in a lot of situations and she gets a combo off it I don't really know what they were thinking with this but yeah she just gets a free combo off this oh and by the way she has an infinite if you guys didn't know this is a true infinite her super is also a truly insane punish you can punish like any minus on block normal in the game it's pretty similar to Ken super R3 from third strike you know you can combo into it in like any situation except unlike Ken super you can combo off it and even go into a true infinite that you can 100% off of so yes Ibuki is a major major problem in this game you do not want to go back to New Generation and have to fight against Ibuki let's fast forward to Street Fighter 3 second impact we still got abuki in this game she still has hashino how however she no longer has the sumii glitch no more ridiculous instant stun combos that way her super R3 is still insanely powerful but uh no more infinites they smartly added a combo juggle limit to this game so uh yeah juggle infinites are going to be pretty tricky in general but hashino is still one of the best supers in the game still has insane range insane punishment potential you still get a combo off it just not the infinite her combo potential is still very very serious but she is not top one in this game despite all that the true top one is going to be Akuma who was not playable in New Generation now he is playable in second impact and he is busted as is normal for Akuma in a lot of these games his damage and stun are truly ridiculous yeah we're dealing nearly 50% his tatsumaki is insanely fast and a very abusable move and there's no red Parry in this game so the heavy and medium versions are extremely safe and hard to deal with and he has probably the most overpowered Akuma dive kick we've ever seen the fact that he can do this so low to the ground is just ridiculous he can just pressure you all day with this dive kick I mean just look how fast this is it is absolutely crazy and it is super easy to combo off of as well the hit stun on this is out of control so that combined with his usual Akuma tools and strong Sho normals really makes Akuma a huge problem Oh yeah this was also the game that introduced his Cara raging demons so off of a the startup frames of his overhead he can go into a true unj jumpable raging demon command grab and you can see the damage on that over 50% oh my gosh but then in the followup Street Fighter 3/ third strike naturally Akuma has been nerfed you can't do his dive kick nearly as low to the ground as you could in second impact it also does a lot less hit stuns so it's going to be really hard to get true combos off this as a jump in but more importantly they added a new demon to this game that is uh much more potent than Akuma and that is of course Chun Lee so Chun Le's biggest and most immediately visible strength is her normal she has like the longest reaching normals in the game she can put up this absolute wall and be extremely difficult to deal with and difficult to Parry because she has high Parry moves and low Parry moves that are both really really ridiculous this is combined with having one of the best car throws in the game a glitch that allows you to extend your throw range so now all of a sudden at mid-range you're guessing between her ridiculous normals and her ridiculous car throw which feels like it reaches like half screen moves like her standing roundhouse are really ridiculous because they are throw invincible and deal huge damage as well as having really strong frame Advantage her close roundhouse as well it is a high Perry can't be parried low and it's super jump cancelable so you can always keep yourself safe with this or use this to cancel into Super for example and in fact let's talk about her super her super R2 is probably the best super in the game of third strike what this allows you to do you can punish Fireballs from like any range or most Moves In fact if you block something like a sweep this is going to be a free super every time obviously you can see it does a ton of damage and you can combo off it so you can get even more damage that way you can go for a knockdown did I mention that she has the fastest walk speed in the game yeah that's another thing that helps her get into range to apply these really ridiculous normals and one of these normals actually has a bug associated with it you can cancel her crouching medium kick During certain recovery frames of the attack so we call this a late cancel so essentially what you can do is you can just throw out crouching medium kick and you can do the two quarter circles for the super and only press the follow-up buttons if the crouching medium kick connects oh yeah and because she can reset you after this super she can actually go for high low mixups and if they connect she can combo into her other super afterwards so she's an absolute wall in neutral by throwing out all these normals she builds a lot of meter and then as soon as she gets super every character has to be scared and they have to play really really careful and neutral or else they'll just get hit by a stray crouching medium kick into Super and lose half their life bar so ch is a menace she really holds down the cast they have a hard time fighting her other than Yun who people say goes even with her but against every other character she is nigh Unstoppable oh yeah and also she's really really short so like half your moves just whiff on her when she's crouching so that's pretty annoying too so yeah and now we bring ourselves to the 3D era of Street Fighter with Street Fighter 4 and there's been kind of a reexamination of this game where a lot of people say that if Seth or maybe Akuma were fully developed to their maximum potential they have the potential to be number one in the game but there's one character that stands out among everyone if we look at the tournament results one character absolutely dominated the original version of Street Fighter 4 and that character was sagot so sagot has all the usual things that make the character strong tiger shots are really powerful he has his characteristic huge normals things like crouching Fierce were really good in this game standing heavy kick was this Mass massive high damage to hit poke crouching medium kit can be special canell in this game which makes it really amazing for checking the opponent tiger knee was really amazing in this game at maximum range tiger knee could be Plus on block so you could use this to create really easy pressure he also had the ability to Cara cancel his towards light kick into specials so he could give additional range to his tiger knee his Tiger Uppercut becomes like a half screen antier but without a doubt the main reason why sagot was so overpowered had to do with this DP fadc Focus attack Dash cancel by using this you get an invincible reversal that is safe on block and for only 2 m you can confirm this into a massive damage combo let's see how much we get here was that like 65% off of a reversal it also works as an anti-air obviously yeah so uh DP fadc forward heavy kick Ultra with sagot was just way too much damage and you pretty much get an ultra every round because you get it by losing HP so like if you're going to lose you're going to get an ultra anyway so you just have access to this massive comeback mechanic that steals so many rounds even if things start going bad you always have that nuclear option of DP fadc and sagot just it felt like he won everything he didn't win Evo Ryu won Evo in the hands of go but Sagat just won like so many tournaments for the year or so that original Street Fighter 4 was played but then Super Street Fighter 4 came out and sure enough they nerfed sagot let's see how much damage this does now compared to the uh well over 50% it did before yeah now it does like a little over 50% which is still an insane amount but with a fully charged Ultra you are less likely to just completely steal the round and he got you know several other Nerfs so actually Super Street Fighter 4 I feel was one of the most balanced versions like the top eight at Evo for this game I believe had seven different characters which is pretty impressive and I believe top 16 had like 11 different characters but there's one character that appeared four times in top 16 the most of any character and in my opinion I'm going to go ahead and say was the best character in Super Street Fighter 4 and that was Rufus so Rufus was a really amazing character in original Street Fighter 4 as well he has one of the most cursed and annoying dive kicks ever seen in a Street Fighter game he has very easy ways to set up his Ultra it felt like almost anything you did with this character could lead into an ultra even without spending meter and he had an extremely degenerate move which is ex Messiah kick so ex Messiah kick is Invincible you can use it to fadc into Ultra and even if it's blocked the opponent can't really get like a full massive murder punish like they can on a blocked Dragon punch because you have the these different follow-ups you have low followup you have overhead followup or you can just do no followup and kind of keep them guessing so they're going to have to do something like a raw Dragon punch to get through this or some kind of guess and if they're mashing you can like delay the light kick followup and you have FC to make it safe as well so this was just a super frustrating move to deal with and could get Rufus out of a lot of sticky situations and he had one pretty funny thing which was uh jumping heavy kick juggle into ex snake strike this just did like ridiculous damage for no reason so uh yeah you could uh ring a lot of damage out of this and steal the occasional round that way as well so while in Super Street Fighter 4 a lot of the characters that relied on DP fadc Ultra like Sagat and Ryu got some Nerfs to that Rufus actually got one really amazing buff which was the addition of his Ultra 2 this allowed him to punish Fireball characters really easily from Super far away and get a massive amount of damage if the enemy dares throw Fireball so all of a sudden he became really hard to keep away and to zone out so that combined with his really powerful dive kick and his combo potential made him a very scary character to deal with in Super Street Fighter 4 but then we got Super Street Fighter 4 arcade edition this added some characters that really Shook Up The Meta in particular we got Yang but more importantly I want to talk about Yun so both Yun and yang had a really degenerate dive kick in this game similar to Rufus they can hit so low on the body and get massive plus frames or they can very easily make the dive kick whiff and then get a command throw and combo off it Yun had his classic Target combo which allowed him to go for easy confirms without relying on one-frame links he had this ex lunge punch which was just a ridiculous move from basically almost anywhere on screen you would just instantly close the gap and get in and this was safe on Block in this version and of course Yun also saw the return of Ganan so yeah this let him do all kinds of uh crazy custom combo type nonsense just like in third strike it maybe wasn't as powerful as third strike because you know you needed four ex meters which was kind of a lot but it was still very effective he also had lots of easy combos into Ultra including meterless ones and being able to combo into Ultra was just really valuable in general in this game because again if you're losing you automatically get an ultra just by getting below like half health and he could combo off his Ultra which was powerful as well so yeah it was really funny that apparently the developers of the game intentionally made Yun and yang too powerful because they wanted like a sense of community among the players where you know they would feel like okay we have these villains that we have to defeat these two twins and it really worked because everybody hated fighting the Twins and all the top players including Daigo switched to Yun or Yang it felt like so yeah Yun was a massive problem so was Yang but uh Yun I think stood out a little bit more and was a more popular pick in tournament overall then we got to Street Fighter 4 AE 2012 update and uh the Twins were nerfed and I felt like in their stad there was one character that stood out to me as uh really taking over the game and that was Akuma Akuma was so popular in AE 2012 are we tired of hearing about this yet yes Akuma the only shto with an air Fireball really powerful he had some really incred inredible High frame Advantage normals that he could get big combo damage off of he had the demon flip mixup which was really ambiguous you never knew how he was going to mix you up with this he also had a normal jump mixup that was so ambiguous you never knew if he was going to go same side or if he was going to use the Tatsu to hit you on the back and it's worth noting that AE 2012 was before they introduced the delayed wakeup mechanics so if you got knocked down you could only get up at one speed which made these kind of Vortex knockdown mix Up Style characters very very popular and even though characters like Phong Cammy were really powerful in this version I think Akuma to me stands the test of time as being the truly dominant AE 2012 character for the time that this game was played but then we got the final update for Street Fighter 4 Ultra Street Fighter 4 Akuma was really powerful in this version as well Evil Ryu was famously powerful as well but there's one character who I think is the real villain of this game and that is Elena so Elena was a really powerful footsies character with some really insane normals her slide was really broken against a huge amount of the cash she could slide under Fireballs from like nearly a full screen away which made her really hard to keep away she had really really powerful link combos she could go from lights into all kinds of confirms into knockdowns for no meter she could cash out her meter whenever she wanted for Mallet smash which was super plus on hit and you could hit confirm off this her jump was super awkward and annoying to deal with the way her hitbox moves when she jumps makes her really hard to see and her hit boox in general was a little bit messed up in this game a lot of combos didn't work on her a lot of moves just wouldn't really work on her the way they were supposed to she would fall out of stuff she gets really really low to the ground when she crouches so stuff whiffs over her head they actually did an emergency patch which nerfed a lot of elements about Elena but even despite that she ended up being arguably the strongest character in Ultra Street Fighter 4 and then she had one more mechanic that really put her over the top of being annoying which was healing so as I've reiterated a couple times you build Ultra by taking damage in this game and Elena has an ultra that heals her HP so you can see we can regain our HP which then allows us to take more damage and get more Ultras and there was also the focus absorb mechanic you could focus attack and absorb hits and then regain the HP so that gives you even more opportunity to gain life so she can just keep regaining life keep getting more and more Ultras she basically had like 1.5 times the amount of HP as any normal character and if she got a couple good Ultras off uh she could get even more than that so all these elements combined with her annoying Hit and Run play style with a lot of overheads she just chips away at you and even if you're trading blows and you know you're getting hits in and she's getting hits in she is going to build up Ultra and get HP back to regain the life lead so this was not a character where like everyone was in Elena main but she was definitely a character where a lot of top players had a pocket Elena because there were certain matchups that felt essentially unwinable against Elena people would have to counterpick with characters like Chun Lee who was the only character that could use her Fireball without getting it slid under a lot of people picked up pocket characters to deal with Elena like people would play Chun Lee because she had a fireball that couldn't slide under so people would say this was one of Elena's harder matchups but in general I feel like Elena really controlled the meta and a lot of decisions were being made just around if I run into a good Elena player how am I going to deal with her I need to make sure I have a character that can actually fight Elena to stand a chance in tournament so yes Ultra Street Fighter 4 was overall a pretty balanced version of the game and a pretty fun version except Elena kind of acts as like a black mark on the legacy of the game because I think if we all kept playing Ultra and Street Fighter 5 never came out we would all really really hate Elena and then of course after Street Fighter 4 we have Street Fighter 5 and I mean this game went through a lot of iterations they added a ton of characters to this game I mean there are just so many but out of all the characters that they added one stood Head and Shoulders Above the Rest it seemed and pretty much dominated The Meta of this game from the time he was added to the time that Street Fighter 6 came out and that was Luke so unlike a character like sagot where he had that one thing that propelled him to dominance which was his DP fadc Ultra Combo doing like 65% on wake up uh Luke he doesn't just have like one thing he just has across the board almost all his tools are better than the competition if you compare him to Ryu and Ken and Akuma the other shos uh he kind of just does what they do better so his Fireball you can see it has slow startup but it travels the screen so quickly it is a really really powerful screen poke crouching medium kick Fireball is really strong with him he can play footsies really really well with this tool he has some of the best anti-air in the game with his Dragon punch which you can see he has multiple ranges that are air Invincible to cover the opponent jumping in from different ranges on screen he has powerful meterless damage you can see because he can charge up these knuckle attacks he is able to do really powerful combos without spending any meter when he does spend meter he gives himself access to really good buffers and hit confirms similar to a character like Karen he could just do this hit confirm it for the top level play where they're able to you know see the opponent is not crouching they can get this and start their combo and get big damage that way his stand jab is an extremely annoying normal you can see he takes a huge step forward when he does this attack so you can check opponents in neutral really effectively and this gives him the ability to confirm off of light normals from like any range his s heavy punch as well you can see he takes up a big step and this move is cancelable so you don't have to worry too much about the frame data on block you could just you know turn it into a fireball or into a knuckle or something and keep yourself in a good position regardless of whether it hits or not his vtrigger one is also really powerful you can use this to throw out multiple sand blasts which will really control the neutral and of course it has the ability to cancel any normal into the activation which is a strong aspect of VT triggers in general in this game so yeah I would say that there's nothing that Luke does that is like completely overpowered but if you compare him to the other characters in the game he really just kind of has no flaws and he does everything a little bit too well and he just outshines the competition in a way that made the game a little bit boring by the end when it kind of felt like like Luke Fighter 5 when you played and ranked but uh surely when Street Fighter 6 comes out they're going to balance Luke and make him not the best character in the game right well maybe not because in Street Fighter six Luke is an extremely powerful character his crouching medium punch is like a god button his jump heavy punch just has this massive hitbox that makes it really hard to antier once again he has some of the highest damage combos in the game but I think at the start of Street Fighter 6 there were other characters that might have had the claim to best in the game like maybe JP was considered one of the best Blanca as well was extremely powerful Luke definitely could be number one in the game now that we have the season 2 patch and some other characters have gotten nerfed but there's one character who I think might also have the potential to overtake him and that is auma so you know again Akuma was released not very long ago so it's entirely possible you guys are going to be watching this video and laughing saying how could you think Akuma was the best character in the game but right now he is by far the most represented character at master rank in the game his demon flip is very very powerful in this version with both the high and the low follow-ups being Plus on block they gave him a command throw which is really hilarious and just adds to his mixup game where now you're going to have to second guess even more when you're defending against Akuma he utilizes the drive system very well with some amazing normals and his crouching medium kick Drive Rush is just as strong as you would expect from aotto and of course he has Drive Rush demon now which is just kind of hilarious kind of amazing they have limited demons somewhat by making it so that you can only use it when you're low on HP just going to make it a lot more predictable but I still think that it's a very strong option and of course he's got the air Fireballs he can combo off his air ex Fireball into some really crazy juggles now he can combo off his overhead now thanks to drive rush so just in general auma in this game seems like his traditional really strong self we've seen he's been really powerful in multiple games throughout this video so far and he seems to have been aided really well by the system mechanic changes here in Street Fighter as well so we don't know yet we've only had one major tournament I guess two major tournaments so far combo breaker and um dream hack and Akuma has not won either of those tournaments but he is a new character and we'll see once people get more comfortable with him will he be the problem that people are stared to think he is of course we're in the age of patches now as well so Capcom could tone him down but they've been pretty uh pretty gun shy with making too many changes to the balance so far so Akuma might be an extremely powerful character that they let Rock for a while but we'll have to find out let me know what do you guys think am I off my rocker with this Akuma pick this is just my prediction for the future and also I know some of you are probably going to be sad that I only covered the mainline numbered games in the street fighter series if you guys want to see Street Fighter the movie or uh Street Fighter EX or puzzle fighter or some pocket fighter uh I can maybe do those in a separate video the best character in every spin-off game let me know if you'd be interested in seeing that or if you want to see the worst character in every Street Fighter game I would love to do a video like that as well but with that I think it's time to end things thank you for watching till the end of the video you guys are amazing and I'll see you in the next one bye everybody

Channel: jmcrofts

Views: 379,261

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Id: oNaTbgL-1Vg

Length: 46min 14sec (2774 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 05 2024