Annotated Appendix: Ken

 A good place to start the home stretch is many players' favorite character. Well, a character that basically everybody can play, at least. Ken is awesome in this game, which is something most anybody that's heard of 3rd Strike knows well, even if it's only from the Daigo Parry. It's hard to really know why, though, which was maybe the biggest point I tried to make with this episode. The other is what happens at the top: Ken represents competition -- in fighting games, in video games, in series lore-- and there's credit owed to him that I think both lay gamers and FGC mainstays often overlook. A little high concept, but that's also one of the reasons I make these things.

This episode was tough to make from a writing perspective. I hadn't written a script in a long time, and this one was curiously difficult to pound out while I got back into the swing of things. Flaws in early drafts meant that I just kept adding things (and adding, and adding, and then adding some more), and while I knew this episode was going to be long, I didn't think it would end up this long. Still, I don't think its egregious (at least, I hope it isn't), but I probably could have used an editor here. The Hugo script is mostly written at this point, and it already feels tighter. Maybe I just needed Ken to help me shake off the cobwebs. 

Things that should have been in this video: I mention Eliza as having a famously re-drawn sprite for her early appearances in the various SFII endings, but I just couldn't squeeze them in here without really mucking up the timing for everything else. You should look them up, though. It's some nutty shit.

Something that you might find funny about the match footage in the first part of these videos is how one player is always getting beat on by the others. I don't mind telling you at this point that this is me. I play with a handful of really talented players, and one in particular is just about great with the entire cast. When we get together and play (largely online these days), it's a real bloodbath for me. Most of the time, you can probably figure out when I'm playing now that I've said that. Just thought you might find it funny.

Things purposely left out: The Daigo Parry. Yes, it's famous and even alluded to in the voiceover, but if you're watching this video series you have already seen it, and probably dozens of times. It's also not entirely illustrative of Ken's abilities more so than Daigo's for pulling it off under that kind of pressure. At the point it happens in the match, Justin Wong's Chun had so little life left that nearly every character could have come down on him with a round-ending combo. This isn't to take anything away from Daigo and his skill, but he could have done it with Dudley or Yun or whoever. 

BUT, if you want to learn high-level Ken play, you could certainly do worse than watching old Daigo match footage, which is all over YouTube. For my money, though (and, surprisingly, Daigo's, too), Deshiken is the best Ken player on Earth. Your Ken homework should start with this video from the best American Ken player, FrankieBFG. I know I link to his stuff a lot in these appendices, but the guy breaks down expert play to the point of mutating them into master classes. All of these are worth a watch. 

With that, I think I owe you an apology. I went into this video series expecting to be finished a year ago, and this has dragged on way, way too long. I start basically every one of these appendixes moaning about how it took so long to make x episode, and that's something that needs to stop. It turns out, the pandemic really hit a lot harder than I thought it would. Between trading parenting duties with my wife and teaching our 5yo kindergarten while also working our full-time jobs, the thought of doing anything after the day is over besides having a drink and falling asleep felt like more work than I wanted it to. That ground things to a halt. I don't make money off of these and I enjoy doing them, but once they feel like work it can be hard to get back on the bike, as it were. The end is in site, though. As I said, the Hugo script is pretty much done, and the footage has been captured, so I should be able to knock that one out quickly. I just want this stupid year to be over. I bet you do, too.

I hope you're safe. Happy Holidays, and thanks for sticking with me.

Annotated Appendix: Gill

You know, I was really on a roll with these since the pandemic started, and then I finally got to the Gill episode and *poof* all of my footage had disappeared. That sucked. Anyway, we should be back to our biweekly schedule now (maybe!).

This is the first episode that is wholly affected by the Covid pandemic, too, and you can probably tell. I had always planned for this episode to have more CPU interaction as a last resort, since nobody I know plays 3S Online Edition where Gill is playable. That means I needed to be a little creative with the footage for the first part of the episode, and dig out my PS3 to record training footage for his move set for the second. It works out fine, but the visual differences between versions of the game kind of drive me nuts. Nothing you can do about that now, I guess.

But, and here's a little inside baseball, I thought there was. I also own the game on 360, where the quality of recording via Elgato is supposed to be better (PS3 recording only goes up to 1080i). It's not egregious, I guess, but I can tell the difference in the 30th Ann. Collection vs. 3SOE and I bet others will, too. Why did didn't I get 360 footage? Well, it turns out there's some weird HDCP issues with Xboxes using HDMI cables. At least, it was a problem I was running into. The footage was recording correctly on my computer, but the image on the TV was too distorted to make anything out. The real problem is the 2-3 second delay from button input to what gets recorded, though, and since I needed a single player run of the game to capture win quotes and CPU opponent paths, this was untenable, even for a busted character like Gill. History is saddled with 1080i, it seems. 

Other fun weirdness: 3SOE runs the game in its proper resolution, but only during matches (unless you were one of the savages that stretched the game to widescreen in the options menu. Please stop following me if this is you). The win quotes, player select, and opponent paths are all widescreen. This made the windows in the episode a little different to size. Not that big of a deal. This is the first, and hopefully only, episode, though, that I needed to pull SFIII game footage off of other YouTube channels. If you've ever watched my Annotated Symphony of the Night series, you can tell that this is something I try to actively avoid. I like to source my own video footage because I can control the quality of the output (above paragraphs notwithstanding), but since I don't own a Dreamcast or a copy of Double Impact, I needed to get Gill's ending footage from 2I from another YouTuber. This person was credited during the ending card. Oh, and yes, I call it "Double Impact" in the episode but show the Japanese version of the game, which is formally titled "W Impact." The Japanese box art is just cooler. An intentional screw up.

Things that should have been in this video: I mention at the end of the episode that Gill's face for one of his win poses is redrawn. Should have included that. The smirk on his face for NG and 2I is just too dopey not to see it. Sorry.

Finally, I thought about calling this one Gill and Urien, Part 2 just like how I renamed the Yun and Yang episodes. After finishing the script and the episode, though, I found that they don't rely on each other like the twins do. The differences in design inspirations are just too far apart for the episodes to be coupled together, even if we're just talking the title of a YouTube video. I also wanted to make it somewhat special by calling it another BONUS STAGE, even though it's not a video about punching a car or whatever. I mean, he's not playable in most builds of 3rd Strike, especially these days with 30th AC and Fightcade emulation being the most accessible way of playing the game, so it's a bonus, right?

...Right?

Annotated Appendix: Yang and Yun, part 2

See that title up there? Yeah, it's on purpose. When writing this episode, it became clear very quickly that it was going to be boring. If you had followed the series up to this point, a dedicated Yang show would have been a whole lot of retreaded info, from the Gundam allusion to the long discussion on imitative Kung Fu. After reading the script, I decided that it wasn't worth it, and pretty much started from scratch.

I didn't want it this way, honestly. I wanted each episode to stand on their own and viewable in a vacuum compared to the others. The more I worked through the roster, though, the more I was referring back to previous episodes assuming that people had seen those already. It seems that this original mandate had fallen by the wayside, so I swerved into it with Yang, making the whole of the script something of a self-referential recap of what I've shown you thus far. I think it worked for the most part, and decided that because he and his brother are so entwined, that I should rename the Yun episode to reflect it, and thereby make the twins a "2-parter."

One of the things I wanted to make clear with Yang is his changing status as a tournament character. While there aren't a lot of ways to verify this other than the anecdotal "people say Yang's good, actually," I can direct you to tournament results of the last several Cooperation Cups where Yang players tend to consistently end up on winning teams, and in the last few years, Pre-Coop Cup Yang squads make the top 5. Without crunching the numbers, he makes it into winner's circles at least much as Dudley and Urien, two consistently strong mid- to mid/high- tier characters.

For further evidence, look no further than NicaKO, without a doubt one of the best American 3rd Strike players, who is frequently seen playing Yang in US tournaments like last year's Jazzy Circuit final. Yang did not have this kind of allegiance in the game's early competitive life, especially after everyone figured out how good Yun and Chun-Li are.

(I know I could have just linked you to an actual tournament video for the final, but that short doc is definitely worth watching anyway, and still gets the point across. Also, Nica's 3S training videos are exhaustive, but phenomenally in-depth. That's your homework).

We're on to the next episode, a bonus ep about Gill. This one should be pretty beefy, I think.

Thanks again for watching

Annotated Appendix: Twelve

Like Necro, Twelve is another character that I have a perverse respect for after making this video. Specifically, I mean I didn't realize the two characters share more than a backstory after analyzing their normal move sets. Not that I want to play as Twelve after this, of course, but still, that's a cool touch that one would expect of Capcom games of this vintage.

I just never paid attention. I never wanted to. Twelve suuuuuucks. I know he has his fans, and there's a few decent high-level Japanese Twelve players out there, but goddammit, if the first of half of this video shows nothing at all, it's that none of my other player team or myself can do any real work with the character because there's. Just. Nothing. There. He's only got one actual combo, and everything else he can do is completely dependent on super meter. I mean, Samurai Shodown games are essentially built this way at their core, but at least in those, one good attack can do decent damage. Poor Twelve just can't dish it out.

But enough complaining. This video was a pleasure to put together because after being away so long, it's nice to come back with a character that doesn't have as much baggage as, say, Akuma or Chun. With the pandemic going (and going and going), I've been much more busy working than I thought I would be, and that's really ground things to a halt. At least with the Twelve episode, I can shake off the cobwebs because the next few are going to be meaty. One is going to be a Bonus Stage episode in between Yang and Ken, just to spoil things a bit.

And speaking of bonus stages, who knew that Twelve had a unique win pose during his? I sure didn't.

Things that should have been in this video: Twelve has a wide variety of combos out of the XCOPY that are dependent on the other character. Like everything else, it starts with crouching LK into the AXE, comboing the super, and then a move out of that. Imagine it like V-Trigger in Street Fighter V, but with a much shorter window for timing the post-super link. It can be a little easier if the opponent jumps at you and Twelve just goes into the AXE/SA/character attack, but this is one of those instances where I was frankly too lazy to record them. They're hard, and never worth it, since high-level Twelve players, such as they are, never even use the XCOPY. Yeah.

Speaking of Supers, SA2 can combo from a close MK, a super jump cancel, and then the SA. I should have notated it better in the video. I also could not for the life of me do it against another Twelve, which makes me think that it only works against taller characters like Urien. After inspecting the second 3rd Strike Gamest Mook which pictures it working against Necro, though, I'm probably wrong. It still might be character dependent, but like the above XCOPY screed, I just stopped giving a shit once I landed a combo that worked. Apologies.

Lastly, I wanted to show the exact translations of his binary code win quotes, and even get some footage of the console-specific Urien quote, but I honestly didn't have any room. I backed myself into a corner when I wrote and recorded the script, and it would have been too much to fix when I started editing everything together. Sorry, but you're just going to have to take my (and the internet at-large's) word for it when it comes what he's saying. I actually did try to run these codes into binary/ascii translation tools that I found online and they never matched up, which is why I mention in the video that they're not a 1:1 translation.

Today, I am trying again to file for unemployment after my work furloughed me. So far, it has gone as awesome as you may have heard from everyone else trying to do the same thing. I'd like to take this moment to really thank my Patreon supporters out there. I don't make a ton of money on these, but your help really means a lot to me, especially in this moment.

With that, I hope you're doing well and staying safe. These are hard times, and even harder in the face of racial tensions that, in a perfect world, should have been eradicated millions of years ago. As a straight, white 40 year-old dude, I don't have any right to say anything other than I support protesters, grieve for their losses and champion their gains. Black lives matter. In a way, it's a pleasure to work on a series of videos about a game, one of the first that I can think of across the medium, that embraced the African American community. Maybe you can find some comfort in that if you can.

Take care.

Annotated Appendix: Makoto

I want to talk about Kyokushin karate for a second.

I mention in this episode that the ghost of Oyama's style hovers over this game, and I am not kidding. Ryu as a character is profoundly influenced by both Oyama and Kyokushin, and we'll get to that way down the road. Makoto, though, takes things to a granular level. Even though her fighting stance (also like Ryu's) isn't a strict Kyokushin kumite stand (in all of the series, Guile might actually be the closest), her attacks, movement, grappling, and striking look like they've been filmed inside of a dojo.

But the real tell, and something I probably should have made more of a point of in the video, is the bowing and kneeling. In a mirror match, Makoto enacts the customary salutation bow of a formal tournament: a crossover arm movement (the actual "bow") to the judge --the player, in this case-- and then one to the opponent. Contrast this to how she bows to Yun; the same arm movement, but since it's not a "sanctioned" tournament fight between two Kyokushin competitors, there's less formality.

Another cool detail is her first round win pose when she turns her back on an opponent and kneels. In tournaments, fighters are gunning for points like other forms of karate, but only a single point by incapacitating the opponent. Think of the end of The Karate Kid. Any connecting attack to the sternum or head would net a competitor a point, and best two out three wins the match. In other martial arts systems where this tournament structure stands, any old bop to the top of the noggin will net that point. After elaborate dances of blocked kicks and punches, then, lots of matches boil down to a tired person palming the other on the forehead when they didn't expect it. Not Kyokushin, where the directive is to play offensively and bulldoze until the other person literally cannot fight back. A full point, then, is when the loser is practically on their knees in pain or on their back half conscious. It goes on like this for at least three rounds until one person is dominated or the judges rule a decision.

A fighter might still get their bell rung and be able to carry on the match, though. In this odd case when someone needs a quick break, or maybe the judge needs to be sure this poor schmuck is healthy enough to carry on the bout, the other player turns around to face their teachers and kneels. It's not a sign of disrespect (at least, I never looked at it that way), but a way to let the other person catch their breath and get their shit together.

I know these things because I lived them. I know a little about the different forms of kung fu, or savate, or boxing from internet research and through the sort of Jungian-shared knowledge we all have with stuff we're interested in but have never experienced first hand. I trained in Kyokushin, though, for a few years in college and then slightly beyond. I don't train now and haven't in a long time, but it's burned into me, these bows and kneels and perfect knife hands to the temple. I won a tournament. I got my ass kicked by Japanese exchange students. I met legends of the system. This episode, and eventually Ken and Ryu, are oddly personal to me. This Footnote episode I keep threatening people with about Tekken will very much play into this, too. Look forward to that when I can get it done. Trust me that I wanted to basically make this whole episode about Kyokushin karate, but with other characters coming down the pike that have just as much to do with it --though in very different ways-- the fact that I don't bring it up every five seconds is what you might call a measured approach.

Smaller picture, though, this episode came relatively fast because like all cast members that were new to 3rd Strike, there isn't a whole ton to talk about. For extra homework, the best Makoto player in the world is likely Tominaga, a man that can do the touch of death combo about as easily as you can make a peanut butter sandwich. You can do a search YouTube for many of his exploits, and hipcat FrankieBFG has a good 3rd Strike Film Room on his play style here.

I guess it's good that we're all living through a pandemic and can't leave our houses so I could deliver you a little bit of extra entertainment sooner rather than later. I hope you like it and hope you're staying safe. The next character we'll meet is Twelve, and things are really going to get weird.

Annotated Appendix: Chun-Li

By now, hopefully, people see what I'm trying to do with this video series. By breaking the episodes in half, I can see where a character comes from and what their inspirations are, and then expound upon how they're played. In a few cases so far, that had to do with how the competitive community looks at a character. Chun's episode, then, was all about getting to the heart of why many high-level players roll their eyes whenever she's picked. In my estimation, it's because she's just built to be good.

That, of course, doesn't really come through in the footage from the first half where it's a few guys bumbling around with her other supers to capture them. In reality, though, Chun vs. Chun matches are typically boring to watch even if both players are at a high skill level and using SA2. Chun-Li seriously doesn't have a lot going on without it, no matter how well she's animated.

Still, this episode gave me a chance to look a little deeper into one of the three oldest characters in the franchise and shine a light on how she evolves both in terms of play and (sigh) lore. Another aspect of this franchise that this video series tries to tackle is just where all of this vast internet knowledge about some characters comes from, like her connection with franchise antihero Gen. Lucky for me, Arc Hound found something concrete about it; something we can definitively reference as opposed to what might be found on a citation-free wiki. I call that a big win.

And before you grab your pitchforks, the "thirsty cougar/voice of reason" examples of Misato and Ritsuko were suggested to me by a friend over Twitter. I thought it interesting because the ghost of Evangelion floats heavily over this game (and most of Japanese pop culture of the period), and that by the end of the series, the opposite is true as to who that thirsty cougar wound up being. See? Another example of irony. You already got that, though. You're so smart.

Something I intentionally didn't include in this video: Some time ago on Twitter, Ultra David and a few of the old 3S players came out and said that they knew that Chun's SA2 was busted in location tests, but they kept their mouths shut because one particular player (whom I can't remember) was a Chun-Li main. This is likely apocryphal, and even if it wasn't, one location test for a game in the US doesn't dictate how good one particular move can be, but it's a funny story if anything. I couldn't for the life of me find this conversation again, though. So, without actually going back to Ultra David to ask him about it (something I probably should have done anyway), this might all be lost in the ether of the internet. If you find it, though, I am begging you to put a link to it in the comments of the episode.

Something shameless I did in this video: Reference a story for USGamer.net that I wrote. That's mine. I typed all the words and everything. You should read it.

So, as far as further viewing and extra homework is concerned, you're off the hook. There are some very, very good Chun players out there (3-time 3S EVO champion Nuki is a good example), but none of it is as zany or really that instructive outside of actual play time. Of course, I'm sure I'm wrong about that, but it's just my opinion. So, if you're curious, there are several Nuki videos on YouTube that you can search for. Just don't expect nutty acts of showmanship like what you would see in a Sugiyama Necro video or a Shinobu Urien compilation.

With that, we're on to Makoto. That's going to be a good one. I mean, there all good, but you know. You get it.