Why Zangief? My evolution as a player.

It doesn´t matter how many years I have been playing games or how many of them I took seriously, as a competitive player there is always something I´ve had clear: I play to win.

In fact, I always played top tier characters with the only purpose of winning , it didn´t really mattered to me what the design or playstyle was as long as I could get wins. And don´t get me wrong, there is nothing bad or coward with choosing only top tiers as long as you know why you are doing it, but that wasn´t my case. I just picked up those characters because I knew they were good, I didn´t bother to explore further than that or understand WHY they were really good: I was just being lazy.

Why go to training mode and explore my character further when I was doing pretty well with basic stuff? Why improve my ground game when I could just spam that really good move and get away with it? The competition wasn´t as fierce as it is now, so I could do just fine. My mindset was totally wrong and I just didn´t knew that I was a terrible player.

The 3S scene was kinda dying, but then something amazing happened, Street Fighter IV was announced. What a surprise it was! We couldn´t believe a new game of the series was coming out and the hype was soooo high. Of course I was going to play it and, of course, I was going to pick a top tier to win.

So, the game came out and of course the good characters were already known and  since I really prefer rushdown chars I picked up Rufus. And again, I was a lazy player but could get away with it because people didn´t know the anti dive kick technology that we know these days. I pretty much could dive kick people nonstop for the 6 first months and sooner or later I would get my ultra/snake/whatever. On top of that Rufus stamina was retardedly high so my margin of error was pretty high.

I complained about Sagat, but did I really went to training mode to try to beat him? No. Did I try to maximize my damage and get better as a player? No, why would I do it when I was getting my wins? Did I really bother to improve my lacking defensive game? Nah, I just EX messiah that shit for 160 damage. And, my results improved, but I was still a bad player.

Rumors started about a new edition of the game, and soon enought Super was announced. I always loved Dudley character design, and I was mad hyped when he was announced for the game, I was going to play him of course! I couldn´t imagine that my decision of playing Dudley was going to make me 100 times better player.

So, Super came out and we managed to get an early beta of the game (you may remember the super early makoto videos, since I played a bit of her back then), things were looking very good for dudley as everyone including ourselves claimed the character was going to be ridiculous. I was very happy about it, and started to main him and play A LOT.

I was shocked. I didn´t had my free combos anymore. I didn´t had my free rounds with FADC ultra. I didn´t had my free offense with dive kicks/rush punchs/whatever. I didn´t had abusable pokes from midscreen. Playing Dudley is the best decission I could have ever made, and since I lost all the tools that were making up for my mistakes the past years I started to actually become a much, much better player. It´s not that I didn´t want to get into training, it´s that I NEEDED it to win with that character. I needed to land that 1f links 100%, to whiff punish properly, to be very patient and to improve a lot.

I had a lot of dedication to the character, and I became pretty good with him as the knowledge was in my head and I just needed to put it to work. I completely dropped Rufus for Dudley, but 5-6 months or so after the release I started to play him again. And, even if my rufus was rusty I was 10 times better than in vanilla. Why? Playing a low tier character made me realize how valuable tools, damage and reversals are. I also became an extremely patient player, I analized situations a lot better, and I bothered to know matchups, ranges, moves that gave me problems, etc…

I always watched top players videos on my free time and I become a big fan of CANTONA and Itabashi. Now that I understood the game a lot better I was so impressed by their footsie game so I thought that playing a bit of Zangief could improve my footsie game. I started training him, learning combos, spacing, etc… And to my surprise, the character was amazingly fun, I started to enjoy the footsie game more and more as well as the fear that I could put into my opponent when I was close, I was just having soooo much fun that, to my surprise, I didn´t really care of his tier or my results.

I started to have even more dedication to Gief than any other character in this game or any other one, I don´t know how to explain this feeling but just felt that he was made for me, I instantly dropped all my other characters and focused on learning him at 100%. There was a lot of tournaments/ranbats in Spain at that time and for the first time in my life I was playing there to improve my character, not to win. I knew that if I trained and played Rufus I had a good chance of doing well or even winning but that didn´t matter that much to me anymore. All my friends were surprised of my attitude (as I was myself tbh) but I just wanted to play Zangief no matter what.

Zangief changed me. No other character made me so comfortable in my life, I don´t really feel any other could possibly make me enjoy this game anymore. Many people asked me if I did change my mind or if I no longer play to win. Of course I do! I play to win, but my mindset is very different now. I know is very hard for me to win tournaments being an only zangief player because of his hard matchups, but can I say I play him at the 100% of his potential to complain about it? Absolutely not.

I know this is an attitude some people will not understand, and trust me, I respect that because I was like that not very long ago. But I want to take this challenge further and prove myself that I can do well with him and win tournaments.

I just want to quote something that inspired me to keep trying from the interview to Kusumundo (E.Honda ST player)

“In real life, everything will not be easy, there are always difficult times.You have to overcome them one by one, in order to move on.It’s like you stick with a character to win, to overcome the bad matchup.Like in vanilla Street Fighter 4 people will pick sagat and in AE they will switch to Yun, I think they are trying to avoid the challenges.If you have the same mentality in life or in your career, you will not be able to overcome the obstacles.”

I love my character, I have fun with him and I´m going to prove sooner or later the power of PAPITO!