4/30/2007 - Evo moment #37

Anybody who has played a Street Fighter game for a lengthy period of time (and if you're in the same demographic as I am, then that means pretty much your entire adolescence), you've had to have experienced some amazing comeback in an intense match. Either you had a glorious victory after being down a match, or you let your guard down and blew a significant lead. In any case, I can tell you right now that you have never had a comeback like this one.

A little background... in the Street Fighter games, if you are on the other end of a special move (such as a fireball), your health will be depleted even if you block. There is one exception in Street Fighter III: when you "parry" a special move, you effectively block that move while not taking damage. A parry also allows you to immediately counterattack the opponent. The exception to this is a Super move that can produce multiple hits (or a Super Combo). In order to parry a Super Combo, you would have to anticipate how many hits that combo would produce and parry them all consecutively. Also, a parry in Street Fighter III is sort of a non-intuitive defensive move. You have to tap the control stick FORWARD into an attack to effectively parry. This goes against the natural instinct of blocking an attack by holding the control stick BACK.

And now to the video... you can see that Daigo has only a sliver of health left. All Justin has to do then is launch Chun-Li's Super Combo (one that normally produces 16-hits), and Daigo should be down for the count, right? Wrong...



All I could do after watching that was let out an expletive. Two more things that make this all the more amazing: first, you have to "air-parry" the last hit of Chun-Li's combo, and second, this was part of a national tournament. And now you know why the crowd goes wild.