Recently streamed on the GODSGARDEN niconico channel, legendary VF players Ohsu Akira (now plays El Blaze) and Homestay Akira took part in some highly entertaining exhibition matches on console versions of VF5FS and VF2! Both players are mic'd up with the more vocal of the two being Ohsu Akira, and even if you can't understand Japanese you can certainly feel, and be entertained by, his struggle against the might of Homestay's Akira!



The action starts with VF5FS, then VF2 from the 56:00 mark.


Also, how to deal with gimmicks... like a boss!


The Senbon!
When the VF2 action started, I was pleasantly(!) surprised to see the senbon, aka the 1000 punch, used in their first match! If you jump to 1:01:40 after Jeffry misses a big down attack, Akira wakes up and depletes his near-full life bar with nothing but repeated standing punches. How was this possible? In version 2.0, the time to recover from the fastest -cancel was near instant and, importantly, recovered significantly faster than the opponent's hit stun. What this meant was that while the opponent was still in hit stun (and unable to guard), another standing P was guaranteed! Rinse and repeat, and you'd get a true "infinite combo". Thankfully, this bug was later removed in the 2.1 update, and you'll see Ohsu and Homestay quickly switch over to 2.1 by the second game.

Option Select Madness
Option Select was rife in VF2, and at high level competitive play it kind of "reduced" the gameplay. If you jump to 1:13:43 you'll see a very fast sequence of high punch followed by low punch. To the uninformed, this might just appear as spamming > on repeat, but what's actually happening is that Akira is repeating the following inputs:

• ; or
• 

Visually, it's just a sequence of high punch > low punch, but these inputs also happen to be Akira's high and low attack reversal commands, so if the opponent tries to gain some advantage with, say, a safe high or low punch, then they're likely to get reversed. And that's exactly what happens here.

You get the same with attack or throw Option Selects. For example, Sarah's Clothesline throw input was , and if the throw was unsuccessful you wouldn't get a throw miss animation (they didn't exist in VF2), but instead you'd get her Elbow because it shared an input. So if you were standing there guarding, you'd get thrown, but if you were crouching then Elbow would stagger you, allowing her to follow-up the elbow with the canned Knee attack (). Quite powerful, eh?

Option Select, particularly the throw/attack OS, was removed in VF3 and beyond due to the normalisation of throw inputs. That is, all standing throws now being a type of input, and a failed throw produced a throw miss animation.

VF2 Stuff Worth Checking Out
I highly recommend you watch all the VF2 footage. Ohsu Akira channels his inner BunBunMaru while playing Wolf to produce some really entertaining gameplay. But some particular stuff that you might like to check out are at the following timestamps:

• [1:02:14] Look at how fast the back dash was in VF2!
• [1:21:46] Oshu's Wolf goes on a bit of a streak!
• [1:44:18] After many attempts, Homestay finally nails the classic Reverse Body Check (RBC) combo: > > for massive life drainage.
• [1:49:53] Homestay messing with the CPU here finally lands the Kage TFT combo: > dash in > > > for huge damage and great ring carry.

Feel free to post a reply if you saw anything else in there that you thought was particular interesting, amusing or would like to ask about!

Video link tip: @jimi Claymore