« BLAZBLUE - HAKUMEN MATCHUP ANALYSIS »

Now that BlazBlue has been out for just over a year now, it's safe to say that the current tier lists and matchup statistics are representative of the game's roster balance. While there's no doubting that the top 3 in BlazBlue do have a significant advantage over most of the cast (they essentially make the bottom 3), that's not to say it's impossible to win (most of) those matchups.

Today we'll be looking at two of Hakumen's matchups with videos from the latest Ko-hatsu tournament.

First we'll tackle Nu- a very hard match for Hakumen to win, but if he can stay patient and play a good defense, he has a fairly high chance of winning. Here's Tenchi, a very strong Hakumen player, fighting a Nu.

Although the final outcome of this match was all but expected, both players exemplify what this matchup is all about from both sides. Hakumen needs to primarily stay on defense by carefully advancing towards Nu by double/super jumping and instant blocking as much as he can (not just so he can build meter, but so he can punish anything Nu might throw out that will become unsafe with the added frame advantage from instant blocking). For Nu, although Hakumen is relatively easy to keep away, once he does get in it's hard to escape. Not to mention he'll almost always have enough meter to optimize his damage, so you have to be quick in deciding when to burst. Overall, both players played extrodanarily well, and had Tenchi not dropped the combo in the last round he probably could have won if he had kept up his defense.

Next up is Tager, with Tenchi playing Hakumen again and Galileo playing Tager. This is a very peculiar matchup because Hakumen and Tager are often trying to get within a similiar range to land their hits and both of them spend lots of time turtling to build meter (for Tager, this is referring to his Spark Volt meter). What this often leads to is a sort of tug of war, with the player having the meter needed to mount an offense at an advantage.

Again, Tenchi loses, but still shows how this matchup should be played. Very bold use of Hotaru (j.214B, basically an aerial uppercut) to punish Tager's Collider attempts while magnetized and very good mixups as well show just how tricky Hakumen can be. Note how at 2:20, Hakumen dashes to avoid getting hit by Tager's 720. This is not due to any throw invincibility (or any kind of invincibility) on Hakumen's dash, but because his dash makes him momentarily airborne, effectively making him unthrowable (though just for the duration of his airborne state). And although not pertaining to Hakumen, the 720 setup at 3:14 was pretty baller.

I'll try to keep these video analyses a regular thing around here (doubly so when BBCS drops). If you have any questions about these matchvids or BB in general, leave them in the comments and I'll do my best to address them.