Hokuto no Ken/Raoh

Introduction

Raoh is slow, powerful, and more than anything else, a combo character. He can generally be characterized by long 100% combos and his horrible defense. Raoh is without a doubt one of the hardest characters to learn, on par with Juda, due to the large learning curve. His lack of a reliable reversal move without having a powerup stock means he has almost no way of escaping pressure. Getting locked down in the corner in the first round and subsequently losing the entire match without doing anything at all is a common losing patern for Raoh. All in all, he is a very strong character despite his weaknesses, but is not one that can be recommended to beginners.

That being said, let us start this section off by listing Raoh's main strengths and weaknesses.

Strengths:

• No gauge 100% combos from almost any hit
• Combos involving Traveling recover a large amount of boost while generally giving the opponent less than one bar, giving Raoh a big advantage in the next round
• Decent star reducing ability and easy 3 star combos
• Good matchups against the lowers tiers
• Has a large collection of gimmick combos you can use to mentally destroy your opponents

Weaknesses:

• Bad matchups against Toki and Rei
• No backdash (his KOF98-esque "fade" is mostly useless and will often be the cause of your demise when you accidentally use it trying to fuzzy Musou/agility guard)
• Switching guard from high to low/low to high takes 8 frames due to a hardware bug, making quick overheads extremely hard to block
• Can be crossed up in the corner
• Defense relies heavily on Musou or powerup stocks; has no way to get out of pressure without gauge
• Poor mixup

Before diving right into the combos be sure to familiarize yourself with Raoh's special/super moves and important normals.

Normal Moves

See Normal Moves section.

Special Moves

See Special Moves section.

Combos

See Combos section.

Matchups

Raoh

Probably the worst mirror match in the game next to Heart vs Heart. This match is all about who hits who first and thus wins the round. Raoh is extremely easy to combo, so you want to make any hit mean death to your opponent. As one hit will mean death for you as well, you need to play extremely tight and avoid anything too risky, especially when your opponent has Boost or Aura. Raoh's mixup is terrible and you should obviously be very familiar with it so there is nothing wrong with going on the defense and waiting for your opponent to make a mistake.

One thing to note is that Raoh's bread and butter string of ~2B > far D, which connects during a combo, is not a continuous string while blocking. This means that you can fit a counter hit chop to the head in and win the round if you get a read on your opponent(For example if they always do 2A > 2B > 2B > D~). In general luck is a big factor in Raoh mirror, but it is important to play safe and not rage too hard when you eat a random Insatsu and lose the round.

Jagi

Jagi sucks. Really bad. I mean he is cool and using him makes you awesome, but let's face the facts. Raoh outclasses Jagi in pretty much all areas, Jagi being the easiest character to combo along with Kenshiro. The match pretty much ends as soon as Raoh actives Musou Tensei, as this makes most of Jagi's moves and mixups unsafe.

If your opponent is capable of using Jagi's magical Basuke combo then you will want to avoid getting thrown or hit with his overhead near the corner when he has more than 2 boost.

When Jagi takes a hit while crouching he recovers extremely fast(think the opposite of Rei), and because of this 2B > far D will not combo. In the event you do hit him while he is crouching you will want to connect 2B to 2D and follow up with a (Boost) Grave Shoot or Instatsu.

Jagi has two combo enders that can be a pain if you don't know how to get out of them. "Gas Hame" which is done by ending a Banishing combo in the corner with a thrown match and then dashing in and dropping gas barrels over and over, causing the match to ignite and knocking you down forever. This can be escaped using Musou, a Guard Cancel, or any move with big invulnerability like Honretsu or powerup chop.

The other, know as 'Misora Shiki,' is likewise done by ending a banishing combo with a match, but then using his gas super with a slight delay so it goes off after you fall down. This results in the gas igniting in a huge fire when you get up, and will net Jagi a bit over a full bar of Boost if you guard it. This is generally followed up by a Heavy Strike or other mixup, which using the boost gained from the gas allows Jagi to reset into another Banishing combo. This however is extremely easy to counter. If you have Musou on, you can just Musou it, otherwise it is safe to simply not guard and take a small amount of damage from the fire. If you are low without Musou and can't afford to take the hit you can also guard cancel just before the Heavy hits, although the fire still hits sometimes anyways.

Also it should be noted that Jagi's Rakangeki super is guaranteed to counterhit after blocking any of Raoh's normals and most specials, taking two stars and a good amount of health.

Overall this is a really easy match and you should easily win most of the time.

Mr. Heart

While Raoh is generally considered to be at a 7:3 advantage, he is also the easiest character for heart to use his BD throw infinite on, making it a very easy matchup to lose. Heart can get a guaranteed Guard Cancel off on all of Raoh's normals, making it very difficult to approach him when he has half a bar of Aura or more. The one exception to this is an air dash C preformed near the end of the dash animation, as it has 0 recovery on landing and thus allows you to Agility Defend or Musou Heart's guard cancel.

Heart is very similar to Raoh in that his defense relies heavily on having meter, making the start of the first round the most important part of the match. You will want to go on the offensive right away, and try to score a hit before heart gets enough Aura to Guard Cancel. at the start of the match the worst heart can do is hit you with a Banishing Strike combo for ~50% or so, so it is quite acceptable to be a bit risky in your offense. Once he has Guard Cancel gauge the whole match changes. It becomes very risky to apply pressure, so at this point you should switch to high jumping around and throwing fireballs, powering up when you make Heart guard one. As long as you stay out of his anti-air throw range and avoid eating an Earthcrush, there is very little heart can do, and he will be forced to take some risks and go on the offensive. If your opponent doesn't do anything you can just sit there all day throwing fireballs until you win by time up. Otherwise you want to capitalize on any mistakes they make.

Whenever Heart stores up Super Armor with his air C, you want to remove it with air Goushouha before he gets close. Keep in mind that if he Aura Guards it he won't lose the armor, so just keep shooting until he either gives up or loses all his Aura.

It is good to remember that Tenshou Honretsu can be used to negate his Kempou Goroshi okizeme. You can also Boost backdash/Musou activate through it and then combo him, but this is much harder to pull off and mostly falls into the gimmick category.

Due to his poor mobility Heavy Strikes and max Banishing Strikes can be used quite effectively against Heart, although both come with risk. Also since you will often have lot of powerup stocks left over from throwing around fireballs, charge air C and even 2D can also be quite deadly.

All-in-all Raoh is at a definite advantage, but it is necessary to make significant changes to your strategy in comparison to how you would fight most characters, and failure to do so will likely result in a quick loss against any decent Heart user.