Rolento spent all the money he made off his hit movie "ROLENTO 2012" on knives and jump cancels.
Debuting in the Final Fight series as a boss character, Rolento is a runaway mixup character who prioritizes being annoying above just about everything else. With a combination of strong air normals and his walljump, he enjoys intercepting the opponent's approach with a combination of careful spacing and his Patriot Knife, a strange move that requires prior setup to unlock its full potential. Both ground and air-OK, Patriot Knife is a seemingly weak special move that evolves into its true form once you interact with Rolento's unique mechanic, his rolls, stocking your knives and turning the move into a rekka series. Both competent as a combo tool and a long-range projectile, Rolento's primary plan in neutral when he's not boxing out with normals is to keep knives stocked and toss them to keep the opponent away. To aid with his efforts, he has a nearly fullscreen command grab super in Take No Prisoners, snatching the opponent's ankles for good damage as a whiff punish tool.
Unfortunately, "being annoying" is about all Rolento does well. He's in a league of his own when it comes to low damage, unless you spend the time to learn his intricate combo theory, which is character-specific and finicky at that. Patriot Knife, while a decent projectile in its air form and on the ground while knives are stocked, is the worst special move in the game without knives stocked, doing very little damage and leaving you punishable on block and hit - although, even stocked Patriot Knife leaves you negative on hit at the end of the series. The rest of Rolento's special moves are comically bad - having knives stocked is both a necessity for the character to function, and simultaneously extremely difficult to do if you're not fullscreen, due to the fast-paced nature of Remix's neutral. Due to his weaknesses, Rolento is forced to build his game around tossing air knives, being passive to build stocks, and hoping he gets a stray hit with one of his normals - and he's not too good at doing any of the above.
| Strengths |
Weaknesses
|
- Good Normals: Rolento has a strong anti-air normal in st.HP and his command normals are generally quite good, specifically Pogo Stick (j.2MK) and Spin Stick (j.2MP), as all hits of both are overheads.
- Air Knife Toss: A strong projectile that Rolento can input an unlimited amount of times before landing, it's occasionally difficult for some characters to work their way around this move in neutral.
|
- Nonfunctional without Knife Stocks: Put simply, Rolento does not work if you don't get opportunities to reload your knives. While he's still a bad character with knives loaded, he's at least able to compete in the damage department in some respects and make the opponent irritated, even if they're not afraid of him. A Rolento with no knives is by far, the worst character in the entire game, and completely nonthreatening to the opponent - and considering you don't usually have an easy way to reload knives if you're being pressured, you're going to end up in this state more often than you think. Without knives, you have no damage, no zoning, no sustained pressure and no offense.
- Terrible Defense: No meterless reversals of any kind, and although his supers and EX Patriot Knife are invulnerable, it's not only that Rolento can't wake up with many invincible options - in general, Rolento gets suffocated on offense extremely easily if he can't anti-air approaches with his 1-2 good options for doing so. j.2MP is an all-risk option for air-to-airing an aggressive target, but in the case of failure, Rolento is going to take a full combo every time. Being forced to rely on alpha counter is especially bad for him, considering he's already being forced into passivity by the knives mechanic, and must balance charging CC or obtaining his knife stocks.
- Awful Supers: With the exception of Take No Prisoners, which is at least decent, Rolento's other two supers serve exclusively as wakeup tools and ways to dump damage, with no utility that could improve his situation.
- Sustainability: It is extremely difficult for Rolento to keep any kind of consistent gameplan going from round to round other than to pray he gets opportunities to get stocks. When half of your toolkit is a knowledge check, and the other half is an incomplete character, Rolento finds himself in a strange limbo where he doesn't really have a real "win condition", besides literally depleting all of the opponent's health.
|
