So I've been messing around with Raiden's various ways to achieve good plus frames on hit, mainly with:
- f3 (+15) (-6)
- s2 (+17) (-4)
- f2 (+18) (-3)
but also:
- 24 (+8) (-8)
- b3 (+12) (-9)
- 12 (+17) (-6)
- j2 (+32) (+11/15)
Landing any of the first three allows a free attempt at basically anything Raiden wants.
- b3/b2/243/mid/throw are all possible after f3 naturally
- b2 and s2 require a micro dash to connect after an f2 and is uninterruptible.
- 12 also jails into f3 (b1 whiffs), and frame traps into micro dash b3 (if they jump it's an air hit)
- b3, in turn, jails into 12 (easiest), s4 (medium), and s2 (hardest)
- 24 jails easily into 12
Landing these moves is like getting hit with Terminator's amped shotgun and forces the opponent to guess. What's more is jailing into s2 or another f3 can repeat the process and give additional opportunities for the opponent to lose patience and make mistakes.
While many of us have believed for a while that Raiden is meant to frustrate the opponent I believe this is the real core of what he's meant to do; to always be jailing his opponent into oblivion until they get frame trapped into mega damage. It allows him to enforce his slower buttons and I think it overall makes a lot of sense with the big picture of this character. What is also great about this is all of his jailing options are available baseline and will work in any variation, and stray hits achieved from jailing are unscaled damage.
What this allows for Raiden is to basically loop into various jailing moves, for instance: d3, 24, 12, f3, throw is just one example. f2, b3, 12, f3 is another.
* I did manage to jail f3 into s3 (+6)(+3) after a micro dash and specific timing, but otherwise this button is still too short ranged to be of any real use to us.
* It's worth noting for any Raijin players that 12 and d4 are +3 when canceling into Quick Charge on hit, so these methods would further serve Raiden for applying Quick Charge during such pressure.
Also, I feel that f2 in particular is heavily under utilized in all of the Raiden footage I've watched. I'll give Reiko Takahashi credit for using it often in neutral, but he always taps them with a d3 instead of using the plus frames to further his advantage.
f2 (i21) is slower than f4 (i19) and hits high so it's understandable that most Raidens would rather just use f4, but the recovery times make a big difference on what Raiden is able to get away with by messing with the opponent's expectations.
f2 recovers 9 frames faster than f4 on whiff, allowing him to remain safer in situations where missing f4 is a full punish and is harder to jump over due to hitting high, upon which gives Raiden a 12 juggle conversion. If they start trying to duck f2 you can switch to f4.
Unfortunately, there's no way to jail into f2 other than j2, but it may still be worth doing since both moves separately will have no scaling (140) whereas j2~f2 combo does about 129.
Since their startups and recovery are essentially reversed I believe it's possible to mess with the opponent's expectation of our timing, for instance I have caught people at range after first whiffing an f2 and then immediately using f4 catching them responding to the f2, so as a general movement tactic I think there's merit here.
These moves also look almost identical when starting up and moving Raiden forward, so I don't believe anyone will be reacting to identify which one it is to make a fully informed response every time, and they're both -3 on block so if they block it doesn't matter anyways.
I encourage all the Raidens who still come here to try this stuff out and share your experiences. I'll have to eventually upload some of my own matches in the video thread on my next session of online once I've put more of this to muscle memory. I think it has potential.
Let me know what you guys think.
