Starting from scratch with Ryu and the learning process

So greetings people,

It's been a while since the last post and I figured I'd update things. So first of all, the hotels for Evo have been booked. So I'm definitely going. Before then, there is at least 1 major I'm going to attend (Winter Brawl) maybe 2 (Civil War).

Now to the meat of this post. I decided to learn Ryu and main him. I really do like the character in just about every way. Even from just the character design and story, he simply wants to be the best, which I can identify with. In the game sense he has a great set of tools that for the most part can let him handle just about every character in some fashion, sure he has some hard matchups but that's just part of the game and you have to work around them.

Like with any character the first thing you learn is yourself, learn your normals what you can do, what's good and what sucks. That is relatively easy, anyone can do a dragon punch or c.mk to fireball in a few minutes.

Then you get to see what happens with your character versus other people. First I started out with some simple goals of working on my footsies and successfully dragon punching jump ins. After a while you realize it's not enough. You need to have a game plan and that's where learning matchups and reading your opponent is important.


Not everyone you run into online is going to be playing the same game you are, you'll run into all kinds of random stuff that you just kind of look at and go "really?, did you just do that?, why?". What I've realized after a while of playing on my own and later with some instruction is that for Ryu, matchup knowledge is crucial and you have to read your opponent. When I say read, I mean learn to predict what they are going to do.

This reading of your opponent is known as "Yomi" and for Ryu it is incredibly important to learn to read your opponent which is a skill I am in the middle of developing of. Part of reading your opponent is testing them, seeing how they react and keeping that in mind, at the same time though keeping in mind your opponents other options.

I've been getting some help though in upping my basic game play, trying to move beyond the wall of people online with the random BS that you run into. I've taken a couple lesson with Air-Ryu and once I did that I noticed my gameplay became much more solid. But it's at that point you realize how important the Yomi aspect of Ryu's game is. I realize I have that much farther to go, but I'm up for the challenge.

I'm going to make a list of some issues I have with my game play so that I have a record of them and work on them.

1. I need to make my AA dragon punches deeper, I'm letting people off too easy
2. I have to consistently punish jumpins much better, I tend to get mindfucked when people just keep doing the little hops over me, gotta remember that I have a nice C.FP.
3. Be more careful with anti-fireball hurricane kicks, the ground hurricane kick has it's uses for that but you have to have down their fireball pattern first.

I will add more of these soon. Feel free to leave comments.

Peace out,

Jon