Additional Topic: Exploring Dee Jay’s Best Cross Up Combo Options (Spoiler: It’s Not His Back Charge Ones)
This is not a great approach to use because
it requires you to have a decent idea of what side of the opponent you plan to
land on. The best cross up options always arise, however, when you throw a
cross up Forward kick so perfectly that even you, the initiator, has a hard time
knowing on what side it will connect. These considerations thus create a bit of
a dilemma for Dee Jay’s cross up game. On the one hand, it means that you will
have to sometimes settle for less damage than you could potentially do, all
things considered, if you happen to land on a side other than the one you
intended. On the other hand, by throwing your cross up at the optimal moment, you drastically increase the chances of making it ambiguous and
difficult to block, more so than from any other approach. Note: I created a separate post on how to maximize the ambiguity of your cross up attempts which you can review right here.
Given the inherent drawback to combos
relying on your Back charge in this situation, what is the best way to maintain
ambiguous cross ups while keeping damage relatively high? Really, the solution
should be obvious: only use combos which employ a Down Charge rather than Back,
since a Down Charge is always a Down Charge, regardless of the side you
land on. Put another way, by switching to Down Charge combos, you never have to
worry about having sufficient charge before doing your heaviest strikes, or
having to put in additional hits which only water down your damage further.
Where Down Charge combos are
concerned, in most cases, this means comboing from a successful cross up
Forward into Dee Jay’s low attack which is then canceled into his Fierce
Hyperfist. When properly landed, and with the benefit of mashed hits, this
combo will do at least 250 damage all on its own (even more if you use heavier attacks for your hit after the cross up). However, remember that you can
also cancel out of the Hyperfist into some of Dee Jay’s even stronger attacks. For
example, when you have full super meter and Ultra, you can do the default cross
up Hyperfist combo above and then further cancel into Dee Jay’s Super and Ultra
1 for ridiculously high damage. You will usually have to cancel from the Hyperfist at a
slightly later number of hits than you would when doing the same combo from the
front, of course; nevertheless, even under this circumstance, the combo will do
well over 400 damage from W mode alone. Not a bad return on investment at all.
So what happens if your ambiguous cross up ends up not being a cross up at all and instead hits the opponent from the front? From here, you would still continue on with the default Hyperfist combo. However, in this case, you won’t normally have sufficient time to charge for the Super follow-up you used from the earlier cross up situation. Fear not, though, because in this scenario, you can instead do a Red Focus crumple during the early hits of the Hyperfist, then dash in and do a normal attack cancelled into an EX Hyperfist and follow-up juggling Ultra 2. When using this combo in W mode, you can achieve a damage output of at least 400 or more, which is only slightly lower than the damage possible from the cross up situation earlier. In other words, regardless of which side you land on, you have the potential of doing 400+ damage. With these combos, then, we may sacrifice a little bit of damage, but for a much greater degree of consistency and cross up success.
NOTE
1: if you can do the EX Hyperfist into Dash Ultra 2
consistently, you may substitute the normal Hyperfist after the canceled low normal with the EX version and then follow up with the heavy damage juggling Climax
Beat Ultra. The beauty of this combo is that it can be done on either side
easily, since it relies on a down charge only and you have time to charge for
the Ultra 2 while the EX Hyperfist is still animating. It only costs one bar of
Super meter, too. This strategy doesn’t work if you have only Ultra 1 at your
disposal, though, and is less beneficial when your Ultra Meter is at the lower
levels. Still, it’s an option for those who don’t want to put the additional
work in.
NOTE
2: The Hyperfist combo into Red Focus, EX Hyperfist
and Ultra 2 seems to scale a ridiculous amount when the opponent’s life bar is
low . . . as in the final Ultra 2 ends up doing only pitiful slivers of actual
damage. In this case, it is usually better to forego the EX and jump straight
to the Ultra 2 itself. Even in this situation, the damage is quite respectable.
For extra style points, I like to dash back during the Red Focus crumple and
then dash forward into a landing Climax Beat Ultra. A little extra gift I give
to my opponents for no extra charge.
NOTE
3: Even in situations where you don’t have a full
Super meter or Ultra available, you can still do decent damage off of a Red
Focus crumple from Hyperfist on either side. The key is to dash in after the
crumple and then land your heaviest damage normal canceled into your most
damaging specials. This will regularly get you damage of 300+. What’s more,
these combos tend to do a lot more stun than the other variations mentioned
above (since Supers and Ultras don’t add any stun whatsoever). Dee Jay was generally not known for his stun capabilities during most of SF4's run, but these combos will
definitely give you a better chance of doing so when they are successfully
landed. For more on maximizing chances of dizzies with Dee Jay try reading through the bottom section of my post on cross ups right here.
NOTE 4: See my next journal post to learn the best way to perform the Hyperfist/Machine Gun Upper from a low attack following a jump in medium kick. It’s not as easy as it sounds. :-0
NOTE 5: Examples of many of these hyperfist combos can be found in my second combo video right here.