The Secret Trick of Kazuya Amiibo

by Doc – Owner, Founder, Doesn’t Know How Barbers in the Tekken Universe Still Have Jobs

I’ve been messing around with Kazuya quite a bit, lately, particularly against other amiibo opponents. While we don’t have our hands on the official Kazuya amiibo yet (and probably won’t for a minimum of a year), I did notice something particularly interesting about how amiibo process a specific part of his moveset.

Kazuya’s Down Smash is a spike, and is designed to be used for offstage opponents. It’s slow, I don’t think it has super armor, and is clearly intended for a 2-frame spike at the ledge. If we’re lucky, the final amiibo will be able to use it as such as well.

However, it has other uses too. Amiibo, as we all know, are frame-perfect opponents when it comes to inputs and parries and such. This includes teching in place – they’ll do it perfectly every time, no matter how many times you make them do it.

When I was fighting my amiibo as Kazuya, I discovered that I could repeatedly spam Down Smash, and the amiibo would tech in place pretty often depending on how it was trained. And when it techs in place, you can then repeat Down Smash over and over, because the amiibo will keep teching in place and putting itself directly in the path of another Down Smash without being able to respond.

Of course, this all gets interrupted if it tech rolls, but Kazuya still has easy follow-up options if that happens. So it may be a viable training strategy to just have Kazuya spam Down Smash and then teach him other moves like Side Special to catch the ones that tech. Kinda like Musket Method, but with Down Smash instead.