Tekken Tag Tournament 2/System/Combos Part-1

This series of lessons are aimed to introduce the offensive systems Tekken has, which include hit ranges, throws, crush system, frames and the combo system, in a way that the readers can take advantage of this system in a fight.

• Strikes and Hit Ranges
• Frames #1: Explanation
• Frames #2: CH-Hunting
• Frames #3: Block Punishing
• Crush System
• Hitboxes and Range
• Parries and Reversals
• Throws #1: Front, Side, Back
• Throws #2: Crouch, Ground, Air
• Throws #3: Shifts, Chains, Tackles
• Combos #1: Launchers and Bounds
• Combos #2: Stage Gimmicks
• The Art of Buffering

Combos

Objectives

• To introduce launchers and juggles
• To introduce bound
• To show the limiting factors in juggles

All of the things we learned comes down to this! Combos are a great part of this game, and knowing your combos are not only vital, it's fun too! In this lesson, we'll discuss the basic parts of the combos, so we can get familiar with them.

You Got a Launch?

Now after you learned how to get counters, punishes and crushes and made your opponent fly through the air, now what? Now we come to that part of the game where you will make noobs salty and send hatemail saying you need to stop hitting him in the air... :)

In any fighting game, there is always some combo mechanic that gives a player a guaranteed combo opportunity, because there are many times that it's hard to get guaranteed damage on a very good opponent. If a FG don't have any kind of combo system (or just having a source of high damage), there would be a lot of time outs since openings would be pretty rare to come up. And as you all know, Tekken's combo system revolves around juggles, and if you complain about not being able to get out of a combo, you're out of luck, since to be quite honest, the damage you would be getting is well deserved. Remember guys, if you got comboed, that either means you are a bit reckless or you got outsmarted.

(Just a tidbit, Juggles might look unrealistic for some but imagine, that launcher that you got hit, those things should knock anyone out cold, like the match is over, or in the streets, you are dead. So even if the combo system is a bit "arcadey", there is still a underlying basis for it in a real life fight just for the fact that you are taking huge amount of damage, and getting them in a fight can be mind-boggling hard like when looking for counters, punishes etc).

Parts of a Combo

Now, for you to do combos on your character, you need to look up and take notes of these moves that your character has.

• Launchers are the moves that start a combo. Most these moves put your opponent in the air but there are some that also put opponents crumpling in pain. Either way, it would be a free combo for you if you successfully connected these moves. But to balance it out, most launchers are either too slow (i.e. King FC df+1, db+2), only gives you a combo on counterhit (i.e. Steve b+1, Asuka/Jun cancans, Law magic 4s), got pretty short range (i.e. hopkicks) or just straight up punishable (DJ SS 2, Bryan df+4) so you can't really just use them all the time. Depending on your character and playstyle, you need to play with either trying to get these moves to hit, or trying to deny or punish your opponent to hit these.

• After these, there are some moves your character has that serves as combo fillers, which are suitable to do on a juggle due to it being fast and/or damaging. When choosing the right filler, your goal is to dish good damage on every hit and/or being able to do alot of hits, and depending what you are going for, you can choose what fillers you want to do on every situation.

• After these, you got bound moves. These moves put your opponent bouncing off the floor, giving you enough time and position for a chance to do a hard hitting juggle ender. As a consequence, you can only put your opponent on bound status once in each juggle. To maximize your damage output, it's imperative to use bound in the most efficient way possible. If you try to do another bound move after the first, your opponent will just get slammed on the ground, which is called spiking.

For starters, you can also reference your character's staple combos. These combos are made with the balance of damage, ease of use and reliability in mind, so you won't worry about dropping combos. Practice them and until they become second nature, you can vary them in each situation to maximize damage.

Marvel Infinite anyone?

Now comes the question, is it possible to just get a launch and kill your opponent's full lifebar? Is infinites possible? As much as combos are fun to do (Admit it, it is fun to do), having to be able to do death combos at will would be a bit too unfair in a videogame priding with balance. With this, there are limitations for combos to prevent this.

• First of all, there is a hit counter implemented in each combo, (and it's not related to counterhits). What it does is it counts how many hits you did in the combo and the larger the hit count, the larger the distance your opponent going farther away from you. So basically, you can only do as much hits until your fillers eventually don't reach your opponent.

• Second, there is damage scaling, which scales the damage down to a specific percentage for each hit you do. The more hits you do, the lower the damage percentage of your attack, which pretty much saying you're gonna do way less damage on each hit.

The hit counter and damage scaling is shown in the side of the screen in TTT2's practice mode. You can use this to check your damage for each juggles and check if your combos is maximized in terms of damage.