Next up for the Character Loyalty stories, I'd like to tacke Xian first and his Gen because I have been on the Street Fighter binge recently and me and a friend have been trying out Gen just for kicks.
As always, let's breakdown Gen:
My Personal Opinion: Gen is a rather difficult character to use because you need to keep switching between his two stances to bring out his full potential. When you can get the hang of that, you can now take advantage of how effective his normal moves are. The ability to pick the right normal for the right situation is key to a Gen player's success. Pair that with his above average movement speed , you can know start applying his strong crossup game (one of the best in the game).
What makes Gen bad is his low stamina and stun, his damage is not really amazing outside of FADC combos and he only has one really dependable reversable (EX Up Kicks)
On paper, Gen is one of those characters that will get you wins if you can take advantage of his huge movelist. Knowing what normal cancels to what special, what pokes can be kara cancelled, which moves are the most effective are all essential to securing your win with Gen.
At this point, you can start to understand that in order to win with Gen, you have to PRACTICE and LEARN all his shit. Not only that, you have to start getting creative with the applications of his crossups and mixups because opponents may start catching on. That's where Xian comes in.
If I remember correctly, Xian was maining Yun in the Arcade Edition of Street Fighter 4. To the unfamiliar, Yun (along with his twin Yang) was crazy godlike in this iteration of SF4 and crowd's worldwide would hate and taunt the player whenever either of these two characters were used. Xian was getting affected by the crowd's reactions whenever he played so he chose another character. This is where he started to pick up Gen.
Xian practiced with Gen tirelessly and when he started to bring Gen out to tourneys locally and worldwide, the results were...just a little short. Sure he could beat Singapore's best (Leslie, Gackt, etc.) and as well as international players (Daigo, Riceata, Dieminion, etc.) in a few long sets and finish in the top 10 of most tourneys, it was rather hard to keep consistent when combos kept dropping at the most important times, when setups would weirdly not work anymore and worse, people were start to see your tactics. So Xian went back to the lab...and My God, the results are amazing. Xian not only knows Xian's moves inside out, his inputs are always on point and he has made his own despicably confusing setups and crossups as well.
Which is my point for this whole article.
Early in the AEver2012 build, Gen was assumed to be a low tier character. This was because it was seen that Gen had a hard time with divekick and grappler characters and his low stun and stamina always posed as a major problem. As Xian came along, Gen is somewhere in mid tier nowadays (theory and paper wise).
Let me point something out here: Remember the fact that you have to keep switching Gen's stances and have good memory of which and what move to use so that he can be truly effective? Xian was one of the few Gen players to be consistent with this requirement and because of this, people began to see (and acknowledge) that if you knew what to do, Gen always has an answer to what the opponent could do. With regards to setups and crossups, it was assumed that in order to get an effective mixup, Gen had to jump. Xian introduced that you can get mixups (as well as resets) from FADC combos and from counter focus tactics. If you can make a significant positive change to a character with your performance alone, that's truly amazing. Xian not only learned everything there it is to learn about Gen, he even took the time to create his own tech. That's just amazing dedication.
I'm not entirely sure of how many major tourneys he's been in but for the first half of 2013, Xian has won a majority of the tourneys he has been in...including EVO 2013. Just goes to show much Character loyalty can take you.
Although Xian has already said that he's gonna drop Gen when Ultra Street Fighter 4
News here
it's still amazing how much effort and sacrifice he put into the character to win a lot of tourneys.
-Chady
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