Why Capcom will never let Blanka be top tier again.
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.พ. 2025
- We had a JMCup tournament for Capcom vs SNK 2!! Blanka is a PROBLEM in this game, but I had a lot of fun playing him! Stick around and find out - is it possible for me to win grand finals without using the green meanie? There's gift subs on the line. Wish me luck!
Twitch (I stream every weekday from 5-8 EST): / jmcrofts
Patreon: / jmcrofts
Twitter: / crofts
A year later Blanka wins the first major of SF6. This is on you @jmcrofts.
and he wins AGAIN
Ouch@@juice17776
They let him
Actually the most powerful thing about this iteration of Blanka is his character portrait
Yeah, that hairy chest
@@misuvittupaa8068 no no, he is talking about the image that appears above Blanka's health bar
@@jestfullgremblim8002 its the same illustration tho
@@aztro.99 i said what i said because i though that they were talking about the thumbnail
3:51 Gief's is terrifying too
Blanka's character portrait in match is nightmare fuel
Why did I have scroll past 100 comments to find someone talking about that cursed ass face staring into your soul
Not even that serious
I love Blanka but everytime I play against someone as him my opponent just looks miserable and Im sure Capcom knows hes just one of those characters lol
That's a fitting name.😂
Ahhh have you forgotten El Fuerte already?
I 100% am that guy that says "Man, I wish my arcade had fighting games when I was younger." Because back in the 90s when I was born, there was a physical altercation over a fighting game so they removed all fighting games in the only arcade on my island.
That sucks! That’s like blaming
Video games for causing violence IRL. Instead of removing fighting games from the arcade they should’ve removed the people who started the fight!
Lel someone gets out played and puts hands on someone. Fragile mindset.
@@Kdawg4859 granted the other player could have been antagonizing him 🤷♂️ not saying it's right but if you push the wrong person far enough, it stops being all in fun. Also could have been someone throw looping in SF2...
@@CrazyDrgonRider They didn't want to have any potential future incidents, maybe they noticed a trend where people seemed to be getting heated over FGs.
dam, I couldn't imagine. I'm from Hartford, CT where you can find an arcade by mistake.
i love how happy this dude is. he could be getting totally destroyed and hell just go "yooo sick combo bro" like this dude has the best energy
As a life long casual Blanka main, CVS 2 was such a nice change. I'm just glad the dream happened in such a good game.
Same
Possibly my favorite fighting game of all time, even if it is super broken lol
It never occurred to me until just now that Sagat's character portrait is based on his hilarious victory screen in SF1.
Good catch never realised that either
I cannot unsee this now. 😔
I can´t believe I spent almost the whole video without noticing JM Chang in the background there.
Blanka will always be top tier in my heart.
Your heart will always be green, fuzzy, and sad
@@dbycrash But also full of lightening.
@@ryanjones_rheios and full of belief & every steroid, PED known to man on top of super sonic anime steroids. Like a real man
@@notsoberoveranalyzer8264 Man, its a good thing my heart doesn't have testicles.
I feel like Capcom is slowly regretting making Blanka a character since they now realize that people actually like this character. Which means they have to make merchandise of Blanka. Blanka-chan confirmed merch? Maybe?
But I always found Blanka pretty fun to play. He's not my main, but he's the character that taught me about charging.
At least publicly Ono was always saying Blanka was his favorite character. With him off the team I'm wondering if the character has enough staying power to be kept in the game... and when we see him next if he's going to play completely differently.
Thankfully Blanka is in SF6.
As a heads up, Blanka is very good in Hyper Fighting. His vertical ball hits on the way down in that game and it leads to many bite traps. Plays kinda like a grappler because of that.
I think you can trap the opponent with electricity as well and prevent them from getting up, without limits from what I remember.
Old school heads could trap you in the corner with no options to escape with only jumping rh. This was thought to be game breaking until Tomo Ohira(the original daigo) figured out you can escape it with a correctly timed mk tatsu
Exactly! It was incredibly easy to cheese and anyone could do it. It didn't have a bizarre short frame window necessary.
@@mattb9664 there is a very interesting video on TH-cam about when HF was just being released and this was discovered with blanka. A guy named Jeff Shaeffer was getting 50 plus win streaks with just that tactic and suddenly Tomo(the god of old school SF) figured out how to escape it after only losing one match! There are plenty of great stories from modern sf but imo the best ones come from the original SF2 era. They are like stories your grandfather would tell you about a war he was in or something along those lines.. true lore lol
Exactly - when his upball lost it's ability to drop on someone's head it became a bit useless. Also, when they added that weird jump-back roll attack that was almost useless too - to actually land that was hard, and it's slow startup made it hugely vulnerable.
5:00 I'm so glad that most Americans generally pronounce "Ryu" correctly now. Anyone who thinks "rai-you" needs to understand that neither Japanese (Ryu is a first name) nor Korean (Ryu is a family name) has that syllable structure. It has always been "riu." Trust me. I'm a Ryu.
His character portrait is also top tier
It’s the same with Vega too. He committed crimes in the past and deserves punishment
He saved Balrog from the trash bin, and forgot to leave himself.
Claw was always a shitter in st, i remember watching a top 4 for that game one time and it was all just him
Chun on the other hand just gets to still be at her lowest, balanced and fine, with current one in SFV being pretty damn good, despite the many warcrimes of the past across multiple titles. Some people are just privileged like that.
@@AgentBacalhau well, that’s what popularity, *”popularity”*, and being extremely iconic does for you. Most people who play video games know Chun-li more than Claw or Blanka
His sexual assault against chun li .. justice must be served.. for justice, not because I'm jealous
And Blanka in this game was even nerfed from it's previous iteration on CvS1. Aside from some tools like the electricity (which make up from the rest) and V-combos that doesn't exist, what he have is waaay better. He is a lv1 character stronger than most lv2 in all aspects.
Also, his ball is much safer, at 'low' health on snk groove he got his pretzel electricity super which is ridiculous, and he can easily juggle his lv3 from grab mid screen (60~70% hp loss against some lv1 chars). Oh and he is one of the characters that greatly benefit from the C super bar glitch: [ get your hp/hk blocked by the enemy -> grab him = success ]
Ohh man, I be so down for one of those history videos about how Justin Wong won Evo with Wolverine, Storm and Akuma.
I mean the reason why Blanka is so strong in this game is obvious, just look at his portrait! It's the stuff of nightmares!
16:47 - Kirby from Smash 64 to Melee. Consistent Top 2/Top 3 character in 64, now bottom-tier in Melee. Not only did he get nerfed himself, many of the changes to the game from 64 to Melee also adversely affected him. Pretty much the only character considered worse than him nowadays is Bowser.
Ew. Smash.
What makes this even funnier (or more sad) is that this means that Pichu is better than him. Kirby is worse than a character that they made bad on purpose, and he doesn't even have the excuse of being in an archetype that they still don't know how to balance properly like Bowser does.
And now Bowser is pretty good
JM Chang is GENIUS! Your face superimposed on Chang is awesome, lol!
I feel like they've done the same with Claw. He's still atoning for his sins in ST and CvS2
What game does ST stand for?
@@SpiritOfBagheera Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo
@@Flying_V Ah, so basically S=Super and T=Turbo. Thx!
@@SpiritOfBagheera yeah. Everyone shorthands it to Super Turbo or ST
It took me far too long to realize he put his own head over Chang's body.
I was staring at that the whole time lmaooo
look how the tables have turned
Well this didn't age well.
Was hoping someone commented this😂 cuz if you didn't I would have
This video aged well.. (sf6 Blanka)
I have never mained Blanka in any game,, but it just wouldn't be street fighter without him. Ono would be sad 😔
I wish I was around in the Arcade Era.
I was born in '91 in a place where there just weren't arcades. So naturally as arcades became less and less in vogue, even bowling alleys and movie theater game selections started shrinking. Even in the 2000s you'd see the occasional tekken tag or SF2 championship edition, maybe MvC2 if the location was particularly based, but that's it.
@@virtuazoso Depends on the arcades. All the arcades I went to growing up were great.
I think the reason you "power up" when you play a character that jives with you because you go from trying to force situations in which said character is good and instead are naturally looking for those situations in the neutral and are taking less risks and more safe opportunities to get there.
I'm from the future and Blanka just won SF 6s first major tourney... fake low tier on everyone's tier lists
Blanka as a character archetype is miserable to play against when he's top tier. The strength of a lot of his moves depends on whether the opponent is able to punish them(often to polarizing effect) and when they can't punish a lot of what Blanka does it makes the matchup feel awful for the other character
Some people STILL say "raiyuu" pants off Ryu and it annoys the shit out of me
Jmcrofts: is there any kids that are like "I wish I could be around the arcade days"
Me: (intense stare) m e
🌸😹I find it to be of oddity that any ever referred to Guile as “Gillie”.😹🌸
16:47 Scorpion in Injustice 1
The worst part is when you listed Blanka's strengths in CVS2... He's got 90% of that in SF5. Electricity is plus and he's got strong neutral buttons... but the problem is that he really struggles to transition from "strong neutral buttons" to "in your opponent's face so you can electricity them". He's always had this element of "That character that has to try to get away with bullshit to succeed", and while that can steal wins at high level you'll struggle to have a consistent layer one to fall back on to get your opponent to fall for your tricks. Ultimately I think he's one non-metered, hitconfirmable knockdown away from being a mid-tier character in sf5.
(Edit) There are also a lot of artificial failsafes on some of his moves that I don't really think are necessary. For example: You can't knock someone down and then use blanka ball for an ambiguous meaty crossup... sure, that's powerful but you don't *really* get anything from landing blanka ball other than a little damage and another knockdown, and it doesn't loop on itself, not even mentioning what the opponent can do to you if they guess right.
In CVS2 he can roll cancel electricity, which gives him a plus on block, high chip, invul to everything bar throws reversal at the highest level making him absolutely absurd to deal with at all, roll cancel electricity is most of why blanka is truly messed up in this game from what I know and he's never had anything close to that again.
Yeah but he don’t have RC electricity or K-Groove install in SFV.
@@zhaf Yeah, pretty much that. Rather than being an intentional buff to his kit it's just the unexpected way that his kit played with the system mechanics that made him really strong.
If you have never played someone who can consistently roll cancel, comparing him in cvs2 to SFV is laughable
@@zhaf k-groove is garbage compared to a-groove for many reasons
Oh shit. I was totally a "Gully" kid...
That sickens me.
Judging from first lines, I assumed we talking Vega. He's been paying for his sins in Super Turbo ever since.
Claw or Dictator? Did you know claw is soft banned in Japan
SF6 MenaRD entered the chat*
Because the community will complain about it like they do with grapplers!
Blanka is considered chosen ratio+1 in Capcom vs SNK. That's saying something
I got talked out of picking up Billy at lunar phase this week via about forty five seconds of heckling when I picked him lol. It felt like a weight was lifted from my shoulders and I went back to Mai.
They probably didn't mean for Blanka to be top tier in cvs2 either, it was probably an accident...
He's actually pretty good in Hyper Fighting.
He’s top tier in HF.
I recomend you Akatsuki Blitzkampf for your next tournament. It's a very sick and beginner friendly game and the universal parry mechanic make the whole thing very hype.
Vanilla SFIV Blanka was top tier. They just nerfed him up the wazoo in Super.
I hope Blanka is high-tier in CvS3 when it finally does get made. Like, don't make him THIS ridiculous, but keep the tradition going.
it kind of keeps me up at night I called Ryu "roo" and Guile "Glooey." To be fair I was only about 7 or 8 when SF2 came out but it was still pretty silly. I knew a kid who called "M. Bison" "Mr. Bison" and that always bothered me, too
5:50 I’m a zoomed that plays fighting games and EVERY SINGLE TIME I set foot into a modern arcade like dave and busters or something like that I always say to myself. “Damn these kids are missing out on the real games instead of cheap cash grab machines.” And it’s sad. Luckily I know that there is still arcade machines out there for old arcades so I’ll be hunting!
He was the first character I was decent at, so I'll always like him. I miss the hyperfight days though - he was a badass in that version, very dangerous.
Same like Lei in tekken, he has most moves of all the casts but he never ever above B tier across franchise...
but thats what made him unique.
I think they had a tough time putting out balance patches back in the day, and Lei wulong and xing xaioyou were probably the two characters with some of the highest potential to be absolutely overpowered just through the sheer volume of move sets they had due to their stances.
I can see myself theoretically being able to balance street fighter, but just start drinking on the job if someone told me to balance tekken
Lei was actually considered around S or A tier in Tekken 3
@@Halaa_ Lei tier S? Tekken 3... what world are you in?
I love the block sound effect in CvS. It sounds so powerful.
5:49
Yeah, I'm an early 2000's kid, I often wish I was around in the 90's. It would be so cool to play MvC or 3rd strike in an actual arcade.
The MvC2 era was the golden age.. i was 9 when sf2 came out but still remember it being like most ppl would recall a space shuttle taking off
I'm not going to lie, playing games in arcades was very fun. You might get lucky and find a retro arcade in your area, or you could travel to Japan where the arcade scene is still alive.
so, this aged like milk didnt it lmao
People know how to say Blanka and Guile now, some still doesn't know how to Ryu and nobody says Zangief right
You said Justin could have just used doom and his team would be better but he needs storm for the team super for her OTG from hailstorm. And he needs Akuma for the wolverine layered guard break incoming, and covers berserker slash super well and gives him 2 chances to open. Akuma also gives storm much better pressure and extensions. You can argue to drop storm for magneto since his super otgs for team super, but storm having float has gotten sooooo much mileage for Justin with his runaway style. I think the team is perfect for Justin honestly. There are maybe some upgrades he could have like strider maybe but I like X-Men Akuma for him lol
I'm still salty
but you played so clean
You deserve to be. Like Foreman after his fight with Ali.
“I was robbed!”
I played Blanka in USFIV and literally forced world-class tournament players switch from their mains to win. He tends to have rather unbalanced matchups, struggling in some and absolutely crushing others. Blanka vs T Hawk in IV is an example of a matchup he dominates. In contrast, he struggles against Cammy.
Hey bro I absolutely love your videos, they are great. I'm a huge fan of fighting games and your channel is really just a plethora of awesomeness. That being said I just learned about the new feature in Street fighter 6 where they have the real time commentators I totally think you should be included Capcom needs to reach out to you and make you one of those commentators! Your commentating is the absolute best I've heard hands down you are totally the king of fighting game commentary! who else is with me?
wanna state that if you intend to play a grrappler in this game....don't
They are all trash, and can only be made to be passable by roll canceling
this game absolutely despises command grabs.
Yeah the whole "alpha speed" type of games made really annoying to even attempt being a grappler. Specials windows too short/strict, block stun and walk speeds extremely fast, rush down game quite strong in most games. The whole "Imma walk and grab you" mentality is near impossible to apply in these games ;c
Here's a backstory for Blanka that I just made up: they call him "Blanka" because the first thing he said to his rescuers was "Eu sou branco!" (Pt. "I am white!") when they called him "Green Kid."
Yamazaki owns all. That is all.
Raiden looks so much cooler in this game than he did in KOF13, hope that if he makes a return in 15 they'll use this design
Brazil FGC is pretty much a whole country of wrong generation players, since they kept selling the Sega Genesis into the late 00's a lot of young players today grew up with Super Turbo instead of SFIV.
its not that i feel i should have been around arcade days
but man i sure wish i could have experienced it
Mained Blanka in 4 and just restarted playing 5 after a few years. Blanka feels so floaty and his crazy crossup balls don't seem to work anymore and feels terrible generally.
Yeah, they specifically added a tag that blanka ball can't land cross-up. I admit it's super dirty but I don't see why they didn't let him keep it. The risk/reward is in the right place for it since if the opponent guesses right they can still blow you up... and the reward for hitting it is a little damage and a knockdown that you can't loop another cross-up ball into. I don't see the problem.
This aged like milk innit?
Blanka is top tier in SF2 Hyper Fighting
"I always said Gai-oh, Im not one of the Gi-le kids"
Tfw we still pronounce Gi-le in Brasil
Dude I love videos like this one!
Justin used that team because the team super otg'd and did massive damage.
I like the concept of playing Balrog + Vega + Bison, or should I say Bison + Balrog + Vega
I said Rye-you as a kid, as an adult I've since learned Japanese but Rye-you still sounds right to me so I say it.
I like how they paid homage to the Nebuta Festival in the back graphics of the game.
Blanka looks shell shocked in his artwork
21:29 “Gimme that DICKtator!”
Man i totally agree. I love blanka but i do not understand why we have to literally, LITERALLY jump through every hoop and barrel to be on par with my main
Just bought an authentic ps2 copy and had it delivered last year. I love CVS2 so much
17:07
I remember when Kirby was broken in 64 and then he was straight up garbage in melee. Good times
Whoa, whoa, whoa... wait... Blanka considered low tier in Alpha 3??? That was my game, and aside from Evil Ryu and Shin Akuma, he was the only character we banned from using.
I always said Ryu the way it's supposed to be said. My dad pronounced it as Raiyu because he played Streetfighter back when arcades were big. He was also almost 30 when arcades were big.
The one thing I probably pronounced wrong was Dahlsim. Never got how to pronounce his name.
Doll-sim
I almost cleared all survival mode with Bison, then I played Blanka and realized he was almost the same character but better in every way.
Those Arc Sys jokes were on point lmao
This didn’t age well. :)
Mained Blanka for years, and I'd stick with him regardless
So.... Top 10 Over-nerfs list when? I remember them doing the same to Sentinel from MvC to UMvC, but that She-Hulk nerf was MASSIVE for no damn reason. I would be interested in see others that got hit that badly.
If I remember correctly, the issue with she-hulk was that Justin, Ricki and at least one other top US player picked her up and won a bunch of tournaments with her. Mostly they just picked her because she was fun, easy to use and "good enough".
CAPCOM saw a list of tournament wins and assumed that meant she was S tier when the community consensus was she was mid-high.
I love Blanka and I will hate to not see him in future games, same with the rest of the SF2 roster, with the exception of Ken, I never had a place in my heart for Ken unlike the others because his presence always felt most unnatural imo
Unnatural? He is one of 2 characters that has been in sf since the first game. Only him and ryu were playable ffs
I always thought Capcom vs SNK games were made by SNK so it's not like, in my opinion, Capcom exactly LET Blanka be high tier. SNK may have wanted to make him high tier and Capcom always kind of saw Blanka as a joke, part of why his back stories have always been kind of wishy washy, kind of ridiculous, not to mention he gets paired with Dan a lot, which should tell you just about everything you need to know.
Love your presentation on this video brother!
You won with Zangief with 666 left on the timer
Blanka has been top their for me SF2 arcade. First character I played
Blanka is also very good in SF2 HF. So that's 2 games where Blanka is actually good.
If you decide to do another JMpardy, you should invite Smug and Punk.
The original supernatural character has always struggled, hasn't he?
His level 2 is broken in SF6
Roll cancelling completely warped the meta of CvS2. Characters like Blanka and Sakura were gods in tha game, because their specials abused the invincibility frames, and were impossible to throw out of them.
I feel Blanka was top tier in the World Warrior: his basic attacks had great range, hit hard, and seemed to beat everyone else's. He also had the best jumping and could out strike just about anyone in the air. Bison and Vega were his air rivals, maybe Chun-Li too. Simpler times.
at 18:50 does vega''s super auto corrects when he was inputting the motion? or is it some weird technique to pull it off?
I was one of the Geel kids.
The Rye-oo people really piss me off because they cannot be corrected.
CvS2 was such an awesome game! It got as much play with my group of friends as MvC2! We preferred to not play Ratio Match in this game. Too bad SvC Chaos totally sucked compared to this game.
What are you talking about? SvC Chaos is the best fighting game
This video is cursed! Couldn't stop seeing jmcrofts reflection with Chang Koeham right behind him. Like if you want to jmcrofts as Chang on Halloween!
hopefully street fight 6 will end the low tier streak and bring our boy to the TOP