Surviving the Character Crisis – Week 2: Marisa

Several weeks ago, I wrote about how I’m currently attempting to resolve a character crisis in Street Fighter 6. I decided to try out other characters hoping that one of them will click for me since I’m finding Manon too frustrating to play. Alternatively, I might decide the grass isn’t actually greener, and I’ll just stick it out with Manon albeit with some much needed perspective. Either way, I come out ahead.

The first steps of this journey involved spending a week playing Ryu. I documented my experience here, but the short version is that Ryu was missing that X factor. He feels like a strong character, but there wasn’t anything that made me go, “Damn. I want to play more of this guy.” As such, I’ve moved onto the next character I was looking to try out: Marisa.

Marisa is one of the few big body characters in Street Fighter 6. Though, I have to imagine that much was obvious from just looking at her. This larger frame comes with 2 sizable advantages that commonly define characters with this body type: big normals, and increased health. The former provides Marisa with tools that let her lock down her opponent’s movement, while the latter gives her more opportunities to make mistakes. This combination can allow Marisa to feel fairly suffocating to fight against, especially when she corners her opponent.

It’s not all good being a big body character though, as there are also common pitfalls that accompany this archetype’s strengths. Namely, Marisa’s movement is notably slower. She’s absolutely glacial compared to the rest of the cast, which impedes her ability to weave around her opponent. There’s also a lot more of her to hit when compared against the shorter members of Street Fighter 6’s cast.

When you combine these strengths, and weaknesses you end up with a character who feels like an indomitable wall. Marisa’s at her best when she can slowly walk down her opponent, corner them, and then start beating the daylight out of them. In a lot of ways, she reminds me of Zangief, albeit with a completely different set of tools to facilitate her gameplan.

The other noteworthy aspect of Marisa that I have yet to mention is how many of her special attacks feature armor, or armor breaking properties. This allows her to absorb a hit before laying into the opponent, or prevent an opponent’s armored move from ending her offense. These characteristics allow Marisa to act fairly brazenly while attacking the opponent, which is a big reason for why she feels so suffocating to fight against once she has you in the corner.

That concludes the overview of Marisa, so let’s get into what my week playing her actually looked like.

As with Ryu, I decided to start off by popping into training mode with Marisa. However, on the way to training mode, I noticed a menu option for character guides. I feel incredibly foolish admitting this, but I’d completely forgotten that these were a thing that existed. I wish I’d noticed them earlier, but I guess it’s better late than never, right?

Regardless, I took a detour on the way to the training room, and watched the entirety of Marisa’s character guide. This gave me a quick primer on the specifics of her different special moves, and the unique properties of each special moves OverDrive (OD) version. Those additional properties aren’t always immediately apparent when mucking around in training mode, so having them outlined in a clear, and concise fashion was a huge help. Both for giving me an idea of how I should use each special move in combat, and also for giving me some ideas for places I could use them in combos.

Thankfully, Marisa’s OD special attacks are all fairly straightforward. I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty details here, so the short version is that she gains additional armor, or armor breaking properties on the majority of her OD attacks. This allows Marisa to use her Drive Gauge to extend her time on offense in a way that doesn’t simply involve using Drive Rush Cancels to set up a 50/50. It also gives Marisa a few different combo routes that are very cool looking even though they’re very simple to actually perform, which is always a positive in my books.

After completing Marisa’s character tutorial, I popped into training mode to figure out what the rest of her attacks looked like. Unlike Ryu, Marisa isn’t quite as popular of a character, so I have way less experience fighting her, and am a lot less familiar with what she can do as a result. Additionally, I find her offense so overwhelming to deal with while playing as Manon that I only really know a handful of Marisa’s common attacks that Manon can punish. That might prove to be useful information when I’m fighting against a Manon player as Marisa, but that doesn’t give me enough to actually get started playing Marisa.

As luck would have it, I wouldn’t need to learn much to get started with Marisa. She’s actually 1 of 2 characters in the cast listed as being easy, and I can see why: her basic tools are very strong. In my last post I joked about how I could only do 2 punches, and a kick with Ryu, but that’s quite literally all you need to get started with Marisa. This primarily stems from the strength of her special move Gladius. Upon use, Gladius pushes Marisa so far away from her opponent that she’s (almost) always safe from being counter attacked. This lets the Marisa player continue to attack their opponent with reckless abandon, which is a big part of why she’s so overwhelming once she gets in your face.

The other major strength of Gladius is the amount of damage that it does. In fact, every one of Marisa’s attacks does a lot of damage. I don’t think any other character in the game gets as much damage as Marisa does off a stray hit in neutral. What’s even more criminal is that none of her combo routing is particularly complicated, and that also leads to enormous damage. For example, I was able to mash out a combo on-the-fly for over 5k damage while playing against human players.

Speaking of, yes – I once again queued up for some games against human players. The difference this time being that I was actually able to do combos with Marisa, so I began terrorizing just about everyone I ran into in casual sets. Then I continued my reign of terror while playing in ranked. This will probably come across as a bit of a humble brag, but I was able to land in Diamond 1 with Marisa despite having less than a week of experience playing her. That was especially mind-boggling because I only managed a Platinum 2 placement with Ryu after playing him for a week. For context, I play Manon in Diamond 3 and 4, so, according to the matchmaker, there isn’t a very big gap between my ability to pilot Marisa, and Manon.

It was at that point that it became abundantly obvious to me just how similar Marisa feels to May from Guilty Gear Strive. I know that comparison isn’t 1 to 1, but the way I would position May, and run my offense as May wasn’t too different from how I was playing Marisa. As a result of this, Marisa felt very familiar right out the gate, which might be why I was able to play her so effectively so quickly.

Having said all of that, we once again arrive at the question of this whole fiasco: have I found a new character to pour all my time into?

Yes. Yes I have.

I had a lot of fun playing Marisa during my week-long trial of her. So much fun, in fact, that I missed my original deadline for this article because I kept getting distracted playing more Street Fighter 6. I can not stress enough the amount of joy I felt when I was able to intuitively play Marisa, and win simply by pretending she was May. It’s like wearing your favourite hoodie. It fits right, and is extremely comfy. That, to me, is the sign that you’ve found the right character to play as, provided you’re looking for something familiar.

The other major factor for me with Marisa is how simple she is to play. A lot of her basic combo routes do a ton of damage, so that’s provided a really solid foundation for me to branch out from with the character. I’m not the biggest lab monster, nor do I enjoy repeatedly performing combos in training mode every single time I play until rote memorization finally embeds said combo in my long-term memory. Being able to do a couple of simple routes right out the gate with Marisa gives me something to play with both online, and at locals while I’m working on learning those more optimized, and situational routes.

Unfortunately, deciding to move forward with Marisa does mean that this will be the final block in this series of posts. I know some of you were looking forward to the Honda, and Cammy weeks, and for that I am sorry. I’ve found what I was looking for, so there isn’t really a reason for me to try out the other 2 characters.

I’m not sure if I’ll continue to cover how things are going with Marisa, but this whole experience has given me some additional perspective on another subject that I’ve wanted to write about for a while now. I have no idea when I’ll actually get around to penning that article though.

Regardless, thank you for reading!