JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future/Rubber Soul/Strategy

Overview

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General Strategy

Overview

For all intents and purposes, Rubber Soul plays like a grappler character okizeme-oriented with a variety of medium and long range tools to help him at longer distances.

He compensates his awful mobility with some meterless defensive options that are unmatched among the cast that can instantly turn the flow of the fight to his favour such as 214+S and his Guard Cancel. These two options alone grant Rubber the ability to nullify most kinds of pressure on him as well as make the opponent hesitant to throw out moves in neutral and give up completely on a rushdown or agressive playstyle against Rubbber. Grabs are extremely powerful options in this game and Rubber happens to have the best of them all. It works as Rubber's primary way of getting okizeme, which means the opponent will avoid fighting at close quarters for too long.

Ultimately, Rubber's gameplan revolves around a very specific situation, his Okizeme/Vortex. Rubber has different ways of starting his Okizeme, as a matter of fact, he is the character with most ways of getting a hard knockdown in the game. The moves are:

-Grab -j.S (against airborne Stand OFF/Passive Stand opponents) -5S (5th hit in a combo onwards) -4S (7th hit in a combo onwards) -2C -214+A/B/C -214+S -Guard Cancel -Backbreaker… sometimes.

Neutral / Footsies

Rubber's gameplan is fairly simple; get a hard knockdown by any means possible. You have such a wide variety of ways of getting one that there's a lot of freedom in the way you decide to go about it.

One of the thing Rubber excels at is Space Control. Disjointed pokes like 5B and 4S are very hard to contest and 236+A serves as cover for different kinds of approaches or to catch the opponent whiffing buttons.

You'll want to use your large hitboxes to control space and become a wall the opponent can't cross, but that doesn't mean that's all you should be doing. Your goal is to condition the opponent into pressing less buttons so you can approach them more easily. Playing keepaway as Rubber is NOT a sustainable strategy. You'll want to switch to the offense eventually. Moves like 4S, 236+A, Counter and GC work great as punishes for bad approaches that you can covert off to and lead to the Vortex in the blink of an eye. Don't miss your chances to convert into big damage by being too focused on zoning.

List of characters who get hit by Rubber's 6S while crouching:

-Shadow DIO
-Polnareff
-DIO
-Old Joseph
-Young Joseph
-All Stand ON characters (except Alessi and Devo)

Additionally, some characters' crouching hurtbox (Jotaro's, Black Polnareff's and Midler's) become tall enough for 6S to hit them when they enter preblock state, meaning 6S can still be used for pressure when they're blocking low. However, keep in mind that 6S will whiff if they're just crouching without blocking, and these 3 characters just happen to have extremely powerful reversal moves, so use it at your own risk.