Additional Topic: From Max Out to Jack Knife Punish (AKA How to Upgrade Your Upkick Charging For A Better Projectile Game)
to do a Max Out/Air Slasher and follow-up with an anti-air Upkick if your distancing and charging are efficient. Since this helps get around one of Dee Jay’s largest fireball game issues - and because this is a technique that no earlier version of Street Fighter has easily afforded him - I figured it was worth exploring just a little bit more.
To begin with, you have to make sure your charge buffering
skills are up to speed, which starts with knowing the logistics of how that
works for Dee Jay in USF4. For a refresher course, you can read up on it in my
earlier charge buffering post here and my input mechanics post here.
The main thing to keep in mind when doing this technique is that your roll pause needs to be very slight, to the point of being almost imperceptible to muscle memory, and to not press the punch button for the initial Max Out until you are already well into your next Down Charge (or Down/Back Charge) for the Upkick. Done properly, you will cut down on the charge time for the follow-up Upkick by A LOT so that you will, yes, even be able to clip opponents who jump your Max Out on occasion. Want a demonstration? Check out the video below . . .
Notice how jaw-droppingly quick Dee Jay is able to go from his Air Slasher to his Upkick when you have your charge ability at maximum efficiency. Of course, in the first handful of cases in the video, this is made easier by the fact that the CPU doesn’t do an early jump attack when crossing over the Max Out, allowing slightly more time for Dee Jay to charge than would ordinarily be the case (let’s also keep in mind that the CPU on highest difficulty is jumping right from the start of the Max Out, which a human opponent is not likely to always do, so in real play, you will gain a few extra milliseconds of charge on the front end when your foe is starting their jump, at least in some cases).
That said, this tight window to fit in the Upkick is not optimal, so are there any ways that we can improve upon it? Sure is. For one, you can try throwing your beginning Max Out at a much farther distance from the opponent and then do a low Roundhouse slide kick immediately after. Why is this a better set up? Mainly because the farther distance means the opponent must spend more time in the air before initiating a jump attack, which gives you that extra bit of time to charge up the Jack Knife anti-air. The slide is then done to move you into position to get that perfect anti-air Upkick as your opponent jumps the projectile (while also maintaining your down charge). This slightly modified technique is also demonstrated in the above video.
NOTE: A further benefit of this set of techniques is that it allows Dee Jay to deal with a distance which is usually very bad for him (roughly 2/3 of the screen away from the opponent). Without a down charge, you have to use your normal attacks to anti-air an opponent who jumps your Air Slasher; problem is, none of Dee Jay’s normal anti-airs work very well from this distance (which is why we generally advocate staying out of it). With the new charge buffering trick above, however, we are able to negate this weakness, at least part of the time. Using this little set of tricks, your Dee Jay fireball and anti-air game will rise to an entirely new level (both literally and figuratively). In other words, one more way to make them “eat the beat” before they ever know what hit them.