Bad (?) Balance: USF4 Dee Jay 

The SF6 dev team did such a good job retooling DeeJay. Learning that Machine Gun Upper and Sobat Kick were charge moves is so baffling when they work so well as motion moves in 6. And the feints from his fireball, upkicks, sobat, and sway actually tie in the idea that he’s a tricky character that wants to learn the opponents rhythm to find openings. Coming back to this character before 6 might as well be an entirely different character.

As someone who doesn't even play Street Fighter games, I absolutely adore your analytical style of content. It's in-depth, well researched and structured, and extremely informative. Definitely deserving of more subscribers, for sure.

You know your character is well-balanced when you react to a jump-in and still lose the exchange

this is actually maybe my favorite video of yours so far. it so perfectly explains something i've been trying to articulate for years. dee jay is a fascinating character. he's like akuma in that very few situations are outside of his comfort zone, but somehow even when he's never really playing from the back foot, he can never get anything going. he is a rare character who has no way to capitalize on his own advantage situations

i had no idea the usf4 devs were a new team but now everything makes sense

I made the horrible decision to use Deejay over Guile because I wanted to "rush down" a bit more and not be so lame with Guile in a game already so defensive.... This video gave me a whole bunch of dreadful flashbacks :(

Bad Balance: Chun Li in 3rd Strike (Too good)

I will never understand what kind of drug fuelled idiocy made them make a character based on dancing a charge character

My biggest frustration is that D.J is strong as hell in the mobile version of Street Fighter 4 !!! Everything just work as it should and he can even use his ultra 1 after a ex machinegun upper with FULL DAMAGE AND ALL HITS.....

A low tier character that was treated strangely by the balance patches... I'd say the SF5 counterpart is Nash.

That's incredible. They can't just give him one true buff. I've never heard of a situation like that. A dev team in such denial that a character is low-tier, but aware enough to fix his glaring flaws for a price.

Dee Jay's greatest strength, is his incredible voice.

I think Deejay is a great example of a type of bad balance that isn't talked about as often. Devs having no real idea about what they actually want to do with a character. I think Keits said it best during his interview on the UltraChen show. Your characters should have a target audience. What he meant by that is that characters should have a strong character identity that allows players to play to their personal strengths with the character, and if you do that, balancing for 5-5 doesn't matter nearly as much as balancing so that player and character identity shines through and the game remains fun.

The 'make some characters OP or bad on purpose because it's more fun to watch' balance decisions of SF4 and MVC3 were infuriating

DeeJay does have one good quality; he has almost the same tools as Guile and M. Bison, but at the same time. It's always been wild to me though, Dictator can get full cinematic U1 vs Juri dive kick, but DeeJay can't even punish a Hadouken if the stars don't align for him.

Honestly doesnt feel like he should be a charge character lol

Don’t care, still main him because he is incredibly based

I feel like Dee-Jay has always been an odd duck since SF2. A quick wiki dive tells me that his music motif was an afterthought, rather than a core design, but for someone who is supposed to be all about rhythm he certainly feels very static to play. A part of me was holding out hope that we'd get him in SF5 with a completely re-imagined toolkit, like what they did with Poison, since I feel like he should just... move a lot more, rely less on fireballs to keep the opponent out and more on getting in himself.

It would be cool to see a response video where you go over SF6 DeeJay and how they changed him to suit all the problems he used to have. This has always been one of the most interesting Bad Balance videos to me cause DeeJay is just sort of mediocre and disfunctional. Capcom also did an amazing job at revamping DeeJay for SF6.

Deejay's upkicks are, to my knowledge, the only guaranteed answer to Gen's straight down Oga dive kick. No matter what side Gen comes down on, you just do EX-upkicks, hits every time. Gief can't lariat it, his head will get hit first, Bison can teleport, but that's just yielding space. Ryu can try to Tatsu out, but Ken, Sagat, Guile, they all have to gamble with their DPs. Sagat's light Tiger Uppercut has the best chance of hitting but your timing has to be PERFECT. With that said, Gen with ultra 2 nullifies Deejay's fireballs and sobats, which means he loses like half his move list. That is a HARD answer to Deejay, which is sad. I deeply respect Deejay specialists because they make a limited character work. He's the opposite of Seth, Seth has an answer to EVERYTHING on paper and thus, gotta nerf his HP, damage, etc, etc. Deejay is a solid C in almost every area, with a B and a random A for anti-airs. At least he has 1000HP and 1000 stun. Imagine if he had 950HP and 950 stun. That would be AWFUL.

there's a few things i think you didn't touch on (i'm pretty stoned watching this so maybe i just missed it): -a lot of people erroneously believe knee shot was active til it hit the ground, but that isn't true--it's actually a frame less active than his j.LP. the small hitbox combined with an insufficient active period meant that a lot of scenarios where it connected on stand blocking opponents could actually just be ducked and punished with crouching normals--and, by my memory, it could whiff on some characters standing if done too early in his jump. it could also just be flat-out unsafe if blocked high enough by tall characters--they buffed the hitstun, but not the blockstun. -surprisingly, his forward walkspeed is actually tied fur second best in the game (only outclassed by yang,) but this comes alongside both forward and backward dashes with mediocre-to-long duration and a short distance covered. on top of this, iirc his throw range was the literal worst in the game, and he had no kara throw. his focus attack was also mediocre, and his weak dash cancel options made it even worse. -both far HP and far HK are -9 on block, -5 on hit. consider that these moves are more unsafe than his sweep, which is a slide and an anti-air. far HK is one of his longest-range buttons, a very important poke--and it's punished on block by 9f horizontal ultras, and even on HIT by some characters. -9 was just safe enough to avoid punishment from a lot of ultras, but it was a concern in specific matchups, and some characters could punish with supurr instead. i remember dudley being a pretty unhappy matchup--it already wasn't very good fur dee jay, and once he had enough revenge gauge to ultra, you had to completely stop using far HK *and* fireball bc neither was safe. -dee jay was a WIDEBOI--some characters did more damage vs him due to character-specific combos. iirc the specific issue was an extended hand in his reeling animation that had a hurtbox on it. his health and stun were 1000/1000, but depending on the matchup he was effectively a low-health character. he had a few weird good qualities though--in spite of his strange, floaty jump arc, almost all of his neutral and angled jumping normals were quite good. his crossup was one of the best in the game, and most of the others either had good speed, range, hitbox, active duration, damage, or some combination of those. he had multiple strong air-to-air options covering various angles, which made his terrible AA less of a totally damning weakness. the only ones i remember not being great were his jumping medium punches, which in theory had ridiculous disjointed and long hitboxes, but in practice often just couldn't connect as reactive air-to-airs due to their high angle and 7f startup.

I main him and i dont care about nothing, just love salty messages after zooning with him lol.

As an outsider, SF4 Dee Jay seems like a rekka character without a rekka

D.J was a beast before the street fighter 4 era.

"Jamaican me mad with these nerfs" lol

Forces stand.

I was screaming ''come on, do SOMETHING!'' watching this. It felt like there weren't really any plans for DJ even after so many patches.

I’ve heard that Omega Dee Jay is *way* better than his Ultra version because they made him a motion character. Do you think you could look at Omega Dee Jay like the other character overview videos you did?

Capcom nerfs bottom tier characters. Bandai Namco and ArcSys: Ahhh yes. So that's how we do balance patches.

This video is extra funny in hindsight with the glow up Dee Jay got in SF6, it's almost like they heard stuff like "His EX fireball is two hits for no reason, it only makes it worse" and went "Well, guess we better just make it a normal fireball then huh"

How about “Bad Balance: Mike Ross’s Character Picks in SF4?”

You gotta wonder, why was Capcom so scared of buffing him?

Shoutouts to Deejay's best moment: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oBOsaqFheQU.html&ab_channel=CanadaCupGaming

What if You were just a mediocre character and not terrible But the SF community said *FORCES STAND*

capcom mustve seen this when they made deejay the monster he is in 6

22:47 "If you don't wanna do 1f links, and who does...?" If years of hearing constant bitching about SFV have told me anything, everyone wants to do 1f links all the time and they were the greatest thing ever

i just started playing usf4 last week because of your primers and bad balance videos

Did you know that in the pre-release version of SSFIV Machine Gun Upper was a pure mash input instead of a charge? I feel like this change alone caused many of the issues with the character throughout the life of the game.

close fierce forcing stand is even funnier when you remember that was a buff, not something it had from the start.

People will swear up and down that all characters are viable in a fighting game, but dont play these bad characters

very funny to watch having been just looking for content on sf6 deejay who's really good despite lacking some common tools

Having watched this, it seems like a night and day difference from this to Dee Jay's Omega Mode version. Most every character feels better in Omega Mode anyway, I think, but for Dee Jay especially, he feels a lot more fluid and actually fits the rhythmic dancer theme a lot better. Amazing what difference going from charge to command specials makes.

What's wild is that this video might have very well been what informed the Dev team to make DJ how he is in 6. Exceptional work.

Oh my god…. I can’t believe i used to Main this Deejay. After 6 there’s no going back to this lower level, no demon rush having Deejay.

Rewatching this after sf6 drops and god damn dee jay got a glow up

I never lost wit playing Deejay so ur point is 🤷🏾‍♂️

what a glow up

Every time I watch this I immediately go and watch the Omega Deejay vid after

"Your victories will be more rewarding" Famous last words.

After seeing this video Capcom will launch another patch nerfing Dee Jay further.

Maybe my standards are too high, but I feel like your definition of a mediocre character is, to me, just straight up bad. He has a functional fireball and a good anti-air? That's basically the bare minimum. The only way he could be worse is literally having a completely nonfunctional moveset and I can barely think of characters who actually suffer from that in games people actually play except for 3S Sean where it was done on purpose as a joke, not to mention thag you demonstrated how machine gun upper basically IS useless except for highly specifc combo routes. Not having an FADC reversal is like not having access to a core mechanic, that leaves you playing SF2 inside of SF4. Machine gun upper is more useless than ever and it was a move with one real use case in ST and that use case was exceptionally rare. Only really having 1f links for lots of combo routes makes the character unnecessarily difficult, and that's not really made better by having easier links into worse combo enders. This annoys me with Guile and it's even more annoying here. Doesn't being reliant on links into sweep also inherently nerf his meter gain since you don't get the meter from using a special? (You get meter for whiffing most specials and then more meter by hitting them.) The game being pretty well balanced only points out DJ's comparative weakness since having a significant amount of 4-6 matchups is not something that the actually good characters have to deal with, and the best characters even have a number of 6-4 matchups if I remember your Elena video correctly. To some degree I guess a character like this is inevitable since if they gave Deejay pure buffs, theoretically that weakens other characters in relation to Deejay on the matchup chart, but it's also really apparent the degree to which he could've been a character with only 5-5 matchups without having to nerf anybody else, which on paper seems like a win/win for everybody. He may not be """bad""", but the philosophy behind how he was built is completely bass-ackwards and infuriating. At the end of the day, Deejay is literally just a worse Guile, and Guile has been extremely nerfy since Super. Justin Wong lists Guile at C-tier, and Deejay as trash, and it's really not hard to see why. If there were no Guile, Deejay would make more sense, but with Guile, Deejay is a completely redundant character slot, and that to me is not just bad balance, it's really bad balance because it should be *completely* avoidable. In theory, if they made another SFIV patch, they should start by buffing Guile and then seeing how to make Deejay comparable. Fascinating video.

Legit I hope you make a video about Dee Jay for SF6, comparing how different/better he is in 6 than he was in USF4. Maybe an “SF6 At a Glance” or something This video and the Omega video got me so strangely fascinated by this character’s history of mediocrity and seeing him get both a massive glowup and a real gameplay identity makes me want to play him. Thanks Baf!

Holy shit this video is half an hour. I love it

Hey at least he's always grinning and never has tooth decay.

I just watched through the whole thing as a Deejay main from AE onward, it was really a fantastic watch. I felt like a bobble head a bit from how much nodding I was doing. But I think one of the best way to describe Deejay is a character with Gimmicks. Bad Gimmicks. Look at Dan, who is supposed to be bad, has bad normals, terrible fireball, but really good Dan Kicks. Those two are the only characters who can cancel Super to Ultra to my knowledge. Another one on top of the pile of Gimmicks is EX Machine Gun stops fireballs, though not multi-hitting. That being said, this series is amazing, keep up the fantastic work Bafael.

Looking back at this video in 2023 and seeing Deejay as a candidate for top tier in sf6 is so cool, what a glow up from sf4

the way the opponent instantly falls over seemingly the wrong direction when hit by cr mk gets me every time

I have been playing Dee Jay in SF since he came out in Super, glad to see this video! I do think his fireball + anti-air game is pretty solid, his normals do really well, but are spacing dependent, cl.strong if they're jumping over you, far strong if they're far out, not to mention it can cancel into fireball to force the opponent to block on landing. Naturally all of this is situational and using the right button depending on the situation. Neutral jump fierce is just for show to be honest, as it can be punished if hit early due to not being a hard knockdown. I'm pretty conservative with my meter usage, as you have shown it's not really with it to use other than the occasional wake ex up kicks, or ex sobat, most people playing should have known better than to try to jump in on Dee Jay by the time Ultra released. Still I'd rather do medium up kicks and juggle into the corner than use my meter. I normally used my meter for Super xx Ultra for the damage, optimal setup this did a ton of damage, or for the insane 200 Chip to close out rounds where I couldn't land a solid hit. Notably, the chip setup didn't work on Elena due to her hurtbox letting her DP in the middle of the super xx ultra blockstring. Using Super xxUltra at the end of the round didn't feel terrible either considering Dee Jay didn't have the reduced meter gain compared to Guile when he got nerfed Last thing I'd like to mention is Dee Jay's hurtbox on hit, it extends pretty far, granting some characters like Sakura or Abel extended more damaging combos. As a bonus there's that little trick of Ryu dashing through Dee Jay in the middle of his wakeup animation, Infiltration hit me with this in an actual match in casuals years ago lol

I really think that this is the best fighting game channel on RU-vid. I wish you could do this full time. The content is A+ // 100%

And our protagonist returned from his training arc, missing all of SFV, but with a burning new vigor in SF6!

DeeJay, in my opinion, was an afterthought character that Capcom didn't want ro see in competitive play because they had no idea what to do with him. That's why they never gave him any unequivocal buffs. They would have even gotten rid of his most unique strength if there wasn't backlash.

I always assumed it was because Japan devs were very uninterested in making an American dev made character good. They held zero attachment to the character, and he's not japanese, so let him toil in mediocrity.

The only flaw in this video is skipping that Machine Gun Ultra animation

Never played SF except for when I found Super in a bargain bin and putzed around with my friends, I remember looking at Dee Jay's inputs and was immediately like "Nope, not gonna bother" lol. I love analysis videos like this even if I'm not too familiar with the source material. You're really articulated and while I don't have any character suggestions I'd love to see more of this in the future.

That 1 dislike is a Deejay main who hates being told the truth

Can't wait to see how Street Fighter 6 Dee Jay is. I hope he's better, I'd love to main him.

Nerfing a character that is already low tier? No dev would do that righ- Oh wait GBVS removed a lot of Narmaya's mist finer pushback on block meaning she has no more special close range safe blockstring enders... Well damn...

There's only one mr Deejay maximum, the combo master

I'm still gonna play deejay for the sole reason being that he, a classy Jamaican guy who smokes weed, says "Time to die!" in his ultra 1. It's so out of character it's hilarious

I think part of the reason people were asking about it was due to you making a video years ago saying that Deejay was trash. That was 6 years ago, yes, but considering it's the 2nd result you get when searching up "usf4 Deejay" it makes sense that people would think he's terrible. I'm not saying it is the only reason, but it didn't help the perception of him being a trash character (oh, and here's the link to said video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-yyNTnKYH_l0.html )

Jamaican me mad with these nerfs, that comment made me laugh lol.

"Amusingly, while they did give Sobat it's low invuln back, they also made it -4 again..." Good LORD, this guy just couldn't win anything, could he?

"He's not that bad" "He loses every match up" What?

He was, I thought he looked great so I'd use him and it always felt Shaq-Fu-ish and meh.

SF4 balance team had this twisted vision that if a move was buffed it HAD to be nerfed some other random way. this caused so many inconsistencies and issues for no reason. Like Deejay needed a lot of buffs to be a good character, but they kept adding 2-3 nerfs every patch and the character instead of increasing in strength from let's say 5 to 6 it went from 5 to 5.2. Unironically dee jay in 2021 would be still garbage lmao

God, I used to LOVE playing this character though.. His stuff is just good enough that you want to find those moments where his kit -does- work

it feels like he'd be a pretty decent characters if he was a motion character

3rd Strike Chun / Twelve?

Take a look at sf6 DJ

Dee Jay and Guile were my mains and I loved using them.

Bafael how did you feel about Omega Dee Jay? In a vacuum it already seems like the removal of his charge reliance would instantly make his combo routes better, and I really hope if he shows up in the next game, he becomes a full motion input character.

I hope you remember to mention that Dee Jay in the hot teal Parrot costume is always OP.

23:50 I reckon it’d be possible

SFIII Twelve is awful with all most no moves with good frames or damage.

My favorite thing about Dee Jay is that for Omega SFIV all they really did to fix/buff him was make him a motion/shoto character by removing all need for charge.

Great video and I actually didn't know about Capcom adding the lower body invincibility back in a later Ultra patch. Honestly, by that point I was beyond checked out on Street Fighter. lol One thing that felt like it was missing was his ability to combo into a level 2 charge focus. It's kind of one of the systemic nerfs DeeJay took in Ultra as red focus just made combos to lvl2 focus crumples something anyone could do. But DeeJay has always been able to cancel to it. I believe it's the first hit of medium or heavy sobat to a lvl2 focus charge attack. It actually makes for some pretty cool combos as well and plays to what I always thought his biggest strength was, corner carry. This was exaggerated by said combo to lvl2 focus charge creating the ONLY time I'm aware of where you could reasonably be expected to use crouch heavy as a cancel into up kicks as the focus crumple just did weird things to hurt boxes that made it work. It required a weird delay, but you could do medium sobat, focus cancel the first hit, let it charge right to when the lvl2 flash happens, release, dash cancel on hit, then pause for a second, hit with that first bullshit hitbox of his crouch heavy, then cancel to regular up kicks. It was the insanely circumstantial and/or outright unreliable nature of DeeJay that made him so miserable to play at times. And the lack of support from the devs with the balance patches just ended up being salt in the wound. He's hardly the weakest character out there in fighting games as there's plenty of characters that are intentionally much weaker than him. But I don't think I've ever seen another character whose flaws were more common knowledge, yet nothing was done to fix them over such a long time. And it's really a shame because at his core, there's something genuinely joyful and fun about playing him and it was my time playing him that I look back on most fondly of my SFIV days. When I think of the most fun anti-airs to do, I think of his up kick juggles. When I think of my wildest moments, I think of baiting people with short hop tactics that you're just not used to seeing in SF. I love a good fireball meta and his was decent. But for each one of these there were things that just outright didn't work. Upkicks whiffing all crouching opponents, his hop knee attack whiffing crouching, his heavy punch key being broken and none of its normals being usable in a set, everything being 1f links, multiple normals whiffing crouching. I used to joke that the best way to beat DeeJay was just hold down-back as he had nothing he could do that you couldn't react to. Outside of a very ambiguous cross-up, DeeJay had nothing to threaten with and combined with how difficult it was just to make a combo work, even if you were hit, there was a good chance your opponent was either going to play it safe and go for a combo that did no real damage or risk a difficult combo they chanced dropping. He was such a strange blip in time in fighting games.

i hope in sf6 they make DeeJay’s air slashers into upward-launching homing-projectiles like Doctor Doom’s HIDDEN MISSILES, so he can set up his own offensive pressure. also, he should be a Ska-enthusiast now

If Dee Jay is so bad why i keep loosing to random Dee Jays in Online?

Been waiting for this one!! Deejay was so much fun too...

Excellent video! I think that this may be an excellent idea to look at Ultras/Supers/Critical Arts/V-Triggers/etc. that appear to be either "useless", or completely overshadowed by an alternative option.

Charge characters are stupid anyway It’s harder to play them for no reason since they still have to be balanced enough to not be op

you know i would kind of like a re-release of sf4 on modern consoles instead of backwards comp but that's just me

This is extremely detailed and thought out but you definitely missed an opportunity to show off the single coolest thing he has with his massive chip damage setups using Super x Ultra 1.

I just find it odd to make a character that's a hyperactive party animal be a charge character. Figured he'd be a character with a lot of mash moves - rewarding for those who can pull off the maximum effect, overall fast on the draw, but horrible on block.

30:34 *"Jamaican me mad with these nerfs."* God-tier comment, trololol.

This is the best SF content on YT

I would love to see you compare this vid to sf6s deejay

Super SF4 Makoto would be prime for this analysis. She seems to have the exact same fundamental design flaw Vanilla Claw had, that being that she nominally had incredible top tier tools to exploit that were offset by a few crippling weaknesses, except none of those tools actually let you DO anything so the risk reward balance for your opponents was completely out of whack. Would be nice to get a more in-depth analysis for this.

As someone who mods Ultra, the technical explanation for why you can't do Sobat while Air Slasher is on screen isn't what you guessed. For some reason, Sobat(as a move, not the hitbox) is counted as a Projectile. Moves counted as projectiles can't be done if another one is on screen. So someone at Capcom deliberately made it so he couldn't Sobat if Air Slasher was on screen for balance reasons i guess?? I took out the projectile property from sobat and it works fine when air slash is on screen so

"He's not actually all that bad" "He's probably been bottom 5 for every version since he debuted" Spends basically the entire video showing that his moves and options are absolutely terrible in almost all situations