Tekken Tag Tournament 2/System/Jumps and Hops

Movement and Defense

This series of lessons is aimed to introduce all possible commands you can do with the directional pad/stick, show practical and creative uses of such commands, and introduce fundamental aspects of movement and defense.

• Walking, Crouching and Blocking
• Jumps and Hops
• Forward Dash and Running
• Sidestepping and Sidewalking
• Backdash Cancelling
• Crouch Dashes and Sways
• Backflips and Wall Jumps
• The Idea of Spacing

Jumps and Hops

Lesson Objectives

• To introduce jump status.
• To emphasize the differences of tapping and holding a directional input.
• To show practical uses to each kind of jump, particularly cross-ups and delayed hopkicks.

Following the previous lesson, we go on to the next lesson on jumping. Unlike Street Fighter (or any 2D fighter out there), jumping in Tekken doesn't make you leap three stories high, and jumping is riskier than usual, so if you're coming off as a 2D game player, you should look a bit different about jumping in Tekken.

Jumping

Like "standing" and "full crouch", jump status has one unique property, in which it can make lows miss (the same way crouching will make high attacks miss). But unlike standing and crouching, you can't block AT ALL. That means any high or mid attacks will hit you, and what's worse is, you can actually get juggled for that. Jumping in front of an opponent is riskier in this game, and unless you have a plan in mind (like baiting your opponent or looking for a low), it's not advisable to just jump in front of your opponent.

But even if it's risky, jumping is very useful in some situations, and can be a powerful tool in a right character and player. One of those situations is when you want to do a cross-up. A cross-up is when you try to jump over your opponent when he's crouching or lying on the ground, exposing his back to you. For this, you need to do a regular jump, which is just holding U, UF or UB, depending on the direction you want to jump (for doing cross-ups, it's UF, as you want to jump forward over your opponent, rather than jump backward).

The second one is using a delayed hopkick to dodge or punish low attacks. Delayed hopkicks are a great tool for some characters who don't have a regular hopkick, or some characters who do have a hopkick but will often miss because of range (e.g. King) or doesn't give a launch on hit (e.g. Jin). You can only do delayed hopkicks out of a "bunny hop", which tapping uf~n (inputting uf then going back to neutral really quick). Right kicks out of a regular jump won't launch, so it's important to get the hang of tapping the buttons.

Also, one handy thing about jumping is, when you land, you go to "while standing" status. It can be handy, mixing up regular jump attacks along with your character's WS attacks. To check out your character's attack's properties, you could go to your respective character's wiki page.

Holding and Tapping

I need to emphasize that tapping can give you different movements compared to holding the direction. That's why practicing how to tap directions (especially for stick players) is really important, as you don't want to make a wrong move by mistake. Many movements and command attacks require tapping directions instead of holding, and other moves will come out if you failed to do so. Practicing regular jumps and bunny hops will help you get the timing down, while also refining your accuracy for doing diagonal directions. I encourage you to practice doing delayed hopkicks (Bunny Hop 4) to get the hang of tapping directions. You know you did it right when the delayed hopkick made your opponent fly in the air.