Omex

rolling 5D might work fine but know he can wait for it to pause and have the persona attack you again from behind. rolling j.d is a bad idea so don't get it confused. you got 5C/2C being safer than 5B backwards, and 5A is the safest option out of all o them--Yosuke can very easily bait a 5B and just punish you afterwards, even if he takes too long you won't have time for 5c/2c and 5B won't come out due to the 'no repeating 5B quickly' mechanic. Whiffing a 5A or a 2A and OSing it with 2A+B is a much better option, 5A has the better startup and good recovery considering, and 2a has even better recovery and is a low at the cost of 2 more startup frames. :V I'm pretty sure any solid yosuke will be able to deal with 5C/2C pokes really easily and just counterhit you for even trying. Knowing how to deal with kunai is important, especially if he's pressuring you with dash spring--You have to roll it on reaction if you want to get through it (and you need decent spacing as well) and he can't block the entire way down. if he's whiffing the kunai on you expecting you to run at him use xD so you can punish the fall/land recovery. if he's dash springing flipping back and kunai-ing to make it 'safe', you have to immediately run forward out of blockstun and roll on reaction to the kunai then 214C him. but he has so many options off of a flip to screw with kanji it's nigh impossible to do anything. (Attempting to reliably punish dash spring (run) --> flip, or flips in general, by the way, is pretty impossible for Kanji, the invinc on moonsault and the availability of mirage slash (teleport low) to either go for the low or just moonsault out of the startup leaves kanji pretty open, as most of his options are too slow to punish or react to any of these things. If he's getting too friendly with the moonsaults though, either doing them or empty flipping over you to make you guess when to B+D just jump up and airthrow his butt.) edit: tl;dr clarification: yosuke's flips and general shenanigans are nigh impossible to punish for kanji because all of them have specific punishes that will get you hit if they do a different shenanigan instead. or they'll get away safely, either or. Yosuke's staggered blockstrings and whatnot, take note 5B is +1 and +3 in sukukaja, and he can jump cancel prettymuch everything in sukukaja so yeah. make sure to practice dealing with 5C 2C and 5C staggered 2C though since you can punish it on block(?) and definitely on stagger. and yeah yosuke's backflip can cross you up (Even in the corner, take note!) but B+D isn't a good option to deal with it though. if he flips directly into you in the corner it might be reliable but the 9 frames of invinc per flip plus his ability to make it more vertical/horizontal than normal based on button and the ability to not attack make it extremely hard to punish in any other situation. sure b+d punishes him if he's right inside you or he actually slashes, but if he doesn't there you go. his fast fall can be used to do an iad shorter in total duration than the startup of your 2b just sayin. not correcting you just bein mad at how silly that is. and the invuln on moonsault (9f) is more than a backdash, don't even try to 2b him since he can just flip on reaction to dodge it :C lastly if he does kunai non ex near the end of the round, for the love of god 236236A/B to chair him and finish it, I've had the situation come up sooo often. EDIT: oh yeah few more notes. you can b+d on reaction to garudyne if he does it on wakeup but be careful, if he's too far it won't catch. be careful if you try to punish garudyne with a quick 236236a/b projectile to end a round, the wind eats the chair so don't do it too early. make sure you learn how to deal with yosuke's sweep and mirage cut, especially in sukukaja--sweep is jump cancelable iirc or special cancelable (and if it isn't it probably is in sukukaja) and mirage cut is cancelable in sukukaja so don't get hit trying to punish it when he does roll. ex run has projectile invinc so don't get hit trying to poke him with lightning lol. his J.C wind shield jumpin will eat B+D for him and he can space it well enough where you either don't even hit the persona with B+D (iirc) or you just can't super cancel it on the persona trade to punish him too. even worse, it's always + frames so you can't just mash vs the followup either. 236CD is pretty bad to use against him in neutral because any yosuke worth his salt will keep a cool midscreen distance away from Kanji and be able to effortlessly outrun you/escape it and punish it. even in corner it's pretty hard to actually nab him with it unless you're point blank. sukukaja is like full invinc unpunishable on activate. 5a sweep OS also becomes twice as important when he's in sukukaja since he's so goddamn fast. what axis said about killing yosuke's persona is really important actually, if you remove his persona he can't do sukukaja or garudyne which means his wakeup is way more free and he can't do mirage cutter... completely removing all of his good damage punishes, he isn't going to get over 2k on a B+D punish anymore! he can just run the hell away while persona broken but at least you're a lot safter. learn to deal wtih his 2B air unblock setups after his combos leave you air teching as well. tech smartly and use j.214B to move far away from him if needed as well as j.C and... well whatever. he can't cover every option 100% of the time. lastly he likes dudes goodnight

Actually, charged B and uncharged B have the same amount of airborne frames, ie, if she charges it she has an extra ~20? frames where she's grab vuln. Pretty sure the full mook confirms this + shardz getting mad at it in person a few times. Pretty sure if you see her going for charges you can respond with a well timed grab or 214214C at the very least.

As far as I can tell, our best bet for getting decent punishes off baited bursts, especially considering how easily burstable most of our fatal combos are... it's probably going to be RCing a 5C or a 2B and blocking a predicted burst and having a good 'higher than normal air burst punish' like 5c air hit :V

Now that I full time own a second copy of p4a for PSN... anyone usually run online earlier in the morning? like, 8 am to noon cst? Midwest kanji player.

What Axis said. Except against Chie. Forcing Mitsurus to learn how to blockstring Kanji intelligently by using 236C to blow up every blockstring at season's beatings felt pgreat. 100% happy with the character here, I don't let downsides scare me away from a character :V

if you're free today/tomorrow before i have to leave for season's beatings/get pulled away for borderlands 2, I can teach you basically anything you need to know in the mu with kanji and run sets.

oh hey that one skyking guy i fought a few times was a dustloop guy! also if anyone wants midday/early morning player matches i'm hosted up under room name 'Omecross'. playing until my friends show up for borderlands 2 probably, which could be WHENEVER.

Try to remember wherever he stands when he does his awakening unblockable super, cause Kanji can actually blow up the recovery when most characters can't. I've been hitting people with 236C and 236CD a lot afterwards, and I haven't seen someone dodge it yet. I think you can actually nail him before he manages to take air actions. Also, I think R Action is a really big tool in this matchup. I mean, you can say that for a lot of things and matchups, but I've fought a fair amount of good, very legitimate teddies... who just leave themselves open to getting hit by it at times, lol. Just keep it around to help deal with those nice pokes of his.

how in the seven hells did you get that last 5B 2B to connect. I can never get the 2b at all.

You also need to work on your wakeup! You had a pretty good pattern going for whether you did it or not :C Anyone who happens to have their higher end yu blockstrings up for some matches today or tomorrow? I'm fairly sure that shite isn't blockable online (Anything involving raging lion A, anyway...) but it'd still be great to see it.

Done deal, then. Got my alarm set so I wont' forget!

Sounds great to me. Like I said, I run kanji. 7pm what timezone?

Any Aigis/Shadow Labrys/Yosuke players I can run sets with before saturday? I'd seriously love the help. midwest kanji.

I'll give you the kanji EXP just fine. Just send me a message of some sort, or contact me over... any messenger you could possibly want, just ask in pm if needed, lol.

So, one of the biggest problems there are with fighting Chie is the speed of her pokes and her resulting footsies. Particularly things like 5C, black dot, air dash J.B, 2B, and J.C. Chie can use her 5C to poke and outpoke everything Kanji has--the startup and range are ridiculous in comparison to all of Kanji's options, and she can dash cancel them to run forward and pressure him afterwards. Chie can seriously just sit there and wait for Kanji to do almost any of his moves and reaction dash up, 5C, dash cancel and combo, unfortunately. Kanji does not have a reliable counter to this, but if a chie is relying heavily on it, keep a few things in mind: If it whiffs (rather hard to do with her dash speed and it's range) you can go for a quick 2C or a 2AB in order to punish, but be careful with 2AB, as it might hit her persona and not her, allowing her to… press 5C and punish you anyway. 2C also has issues due to the speed of the attack, making it an unlikely punish. Otherwise, the best way to counter the attack is to try and make it whiff while you attack so she can’t cancel it and be safe. If you think you can bait her into it, the best option for Kanji would be to jump away as soon as she gets in range and instantly hit J.C, letting you get a nice fatal punish for the recklessness. Alternatively, it’s risky, but you can try doing a sliding 214D by canceling dash frames to ‘slide forward’ into the grab, else you’ll never be close enough to actually grab her through Tomoe. Black dot also sucks for Kanji because it’s really hard for him to do anything about it. Both are scary to get hit by and safe on block, and you can’t really tell which version she’s using until it’s too late. If it whiffs (unlikely to happen) just try to snag a persona card (and be wary of her spamming it a second time to catch THAT). Otherwise, your best bet for punishing careless use of it is rolling through the C version and C/CD grabbing Chie. D version is slower to come out, has her persona as invinc, and the active frames WILL catch rolls—only thing you can really do is do a quick 2AB to hit chie and stop the move entirely Chie’s airdash options, like airdash in J.B are all way too good for Kanji to reliably counter, as she can do them quite low to the ground and just land/block bait a 2B quite easily. Not quite sure what to do about these other than scare her with the occasional 236CD. Lastly her j.c isn’t really an amazing move but it gets special mention for being annoying as hell for Kanji when he’s cornered—if it hits, she gets to double jump, do another one, airdash, etc… basically making it really hard for kanji to reliably punish her dropping in on him. I usually try to land a well timed 214D or BD in order to stop her from doing silly shite with it. Chie’s footsies are way better than yours and once she gets in she gets a quick knockdown into great oki options. #fuckchie

As far as I can tell, 2B is COMPLETELY useless in this matchup. I ran around ~20 matches with a guy and tried it in a lot of different situations/approaches when I actually guessed her jumping in right. I think the best I ever got was a hit on her persona, and only once. Watched some Yamamura... and he landed it/used it once out of ~4 matches, didn't use it otherwise.

Okay, regarding setting traps, gunshots, everything with J.D... seriously, as far as I can tell, disregard nigh everything Siefer said. 1. Naoto can 'beat' lightning on reaction with Counter ...so what? Kanji recovers fast enough to block it, both with 5D and J.D. If Naoto immediately does the counter followup shot, it doesn't even hit Take Mikazuchi because of his startup invinc. Naoto has to delay the shot in order to actually hit him, giving Kanji plenty of time to walk forward SLIGHTLY and block it, protecting him and netting a free counterhit lightning followup bolt on Naoto. And this is all tested... on -2D-, which has the most favorable spacing for Naoto hitting him. With J.D, I can't even get her to hit Take-Mikazuchi with the counterattack if Kanji blocks, basically guaranteeing lightning counterhit if she goes for counter. As far as I can tell, Kanji has the complete advantage here, being able to delay the lightning strikes and Take having startup invinc. I don't think you actually tested this at all, I can't see how Naoto can reliably counter Kanji, at worst she can make him 'not run forward after blindly firing off a lightning' edit: in retrospect a not full screen j.d when jumping backwards might let take get punished but with the extra travel time you can seriously just walk forward and block it. no risk. Same thing with her gunshot--with J.D, you can time your fall so you'll be out of her gunshot range for the duration you can't block, and will at worst lose a persona card. If you jump back, on reaction to the bullets, you can do J.D, hover in the air where the bullets aren't hitting, counterhit her, and I can't even get her bullets to counterhit takemikazuchi during this. 2. Hitting Naoto when she's in the air to set an air trap/ground trap/whatever is a bad idea. No. First off, counter doesn't save her, and gunshot is too slow. 'Experienced Kanji Players' will know if a Naoto is trying to zone hard and hasn't put down her traps yet, he'll throw out lightning when he sees it and get to hold her in place with the followup lightning, on block OR hit, letting him get in on her instead of having a hard time getting in on gunshots/traps. Best case scenario, if you manage to actually hit her during the trap startup, you even get a Persona card. tl;dr lightning is useful in this matchup. "'experienced naoto players' will not let themselves get hit by lightning.'" Except... the same can be said about every character, in every matchup, and yet lightning isn't considered completely useless. If Naoto is doing something in the range your lightning is going to hit like jumping/gunshotting, then there's a solid chance it's worth using. Of course they can bait and run through it, but so can everyone else. if i'm missing some SECRET MECHANIC about the counter/etc, let me know, but considering you didn't even do your research on 'gunshots beats J.D', i doubt it.

Anyone who's willing/wanting to sit down and practice the kanji matchup, throw me an invite at Omecross--I'll be doing the polite thing and go through the thread tonight/tomorrow and grab the names of anyone else who's already thrown a 'add me everyone' post rather than hoping everyone else does the work for me, too. Especially looking for Aigis/Yosuke/Chie/Mitsu/Yu (in that order) atm. edit: situated in midwest (MN) and actually pay for good internet, so I should be fine to most people. edit: done trolling through the thread so EXPECT RANDOM MESSAGES/INVITES IF YOU'VE EVER ASKED. SORRY PEOPLE =3=

If Kanji does 5C --> 2C as a blockstring... hop J.C for a free fatal. Also, unfortunately, I do believe 214214C/D grabs you if you do the 5A whiff on their recovery after a 214C/D cruel followup. :C

Finally found a really great Teddy I can run matches with, so I should be able to get some good matchup details soon. First off, the obvious thing--When dealing with Teddy's unblockable awakening super, you have a couple different tools to keep yourself in the air and avoid the unblockable--Jump up and double jump into airdash, superjump into forward airdash (never backdash if possible, it won't hold you in the air as long iirc), super or double jump up and use J.C to 'hop' over it, or if you see it on screen and you're about to land on it because you messed up... use j.214 to hop over it and hope it works lol. If you messed up your timing however, like you whiffed your jump and it's STILL NOT COME OUT YET... use DP. it'll absorb the hit just fine and if it's taken forever for it to come out, it's probably about to pop out. Lastly, be careful of him landing shock on you and then doing it. I'm actually not sure what item of Teddie's he can use to land shock, but he certainly did it on me, which reduces you to doing DP or roll to avoid the attack. Finally, if you know you're going to have to get hit by it, do know that if there's something on screen that you can get hit by (Meteors, something else), not teching makes the super combo afterwards for like... ~1600 damage total, which is much preferable to the raw 3000/3600. (I could be wrong on the damage thing, i could have been in awakening or something at the time, but it seemed kinda consistent. will test later) Teddy's got a lot of good things going on with his air game. Be sure to know he doesn't have ANY overheads except for his AoA (Which can not only overhead, but cross up if he sets it up right), so you can block everything crouching. If he's got good spacing and playing an air game to try and set his items up right/get in on you, don't forget about 236CD to protect your airspace, because his size/speed is going to be VERY hard to hit with 5C/2B/whatever else. Due to teddie's lack of high/low mixup, he's got to rely on other ways to reset you--one thing to watch out for is his throw is great for resetting combos/whatnot in the corner, so be ready to tech at any time in block/hit strings, but especially in the corner. (This post was written at like 7am so i'll try to check it later to make sure I didn't say anything too dumb in a few hours)

So, you're saying that if a Naoto sits in J.D range, you should never use J.D because it's worthless? Every character can roll lightning on reaction. Is lightning completely worthless then? It shouldn't be used against anyone because they know it'll happen? Just... it's an option. It's worth mentioning. No Naoto player is completely perfect, and if they're sitting in your j.D/5D/etc ranges and they're being dumb, it's an important tool to use. EVERYONE can counter lightning that easily, it doesn't mean they can and absolutely will. :V And what about being further up than J.D range, and once Naoto goes for an action... airdashing backwards and using J.D, where the Naoto wasn't expecting it? Is it worthless because they know kanji can do it? :v I dont' understand this logic of 'Kanji has tools that help out his neutral game VS zoners, don't use them because the other player can potentially counter them.' and I don't know why you need to push at them like this. :v

5aa (second hit) and 5B, J.B are all great for counterhitting her persona. A j.C as soon as you start the match isn't always ag ood idea, but if they aren't immediately blocking it WILL hit aster... asterios? the persona. Be careful on wakeup if you want to consider doing a B+D--If Slab just holds 5D (Persona block) right over your wakeup, her persona will absorb the attack and leave you completely open for free. And... kanji is pretty boned against her massive slaughter(? persona command grab) loop, as far as I can tell. Don't get knocked down. :C

This is all assuming Naoto is at advantage when she does these things/Kanji is only reacting, is it not? There's a such thing as baiting Naoto into going for the gunshots or trap/doing J.D at a spacing where her gunshots won't hit him in the frames where he'll get counterhit. Cause, at least, I've managed to hit her plenty of times in the angles her bullets don't directly cover. Just trying to cut out any scenarios where 'well, if the opponent is PERFECTLY PREPPED for each option', since... that invalidates grappler matchups most of the time, and yet people can still win. :v

...If it holds Naoto in the air if you catch her with J.D so you can set up 236C/2B/J.214, we're fine, and if she can't cancel the the gunshots into counter, then we're fine, is what I mean. As for the double fangs thing, my apologies.

The question is, counter on reaction when they're setting a trap/shooting the gun? Because that's the general idea with lightning. Most people can run/roll on reaction no problem, it's when they're doing a special that you want to nail them. :V