Kakeru Executed 32 Perfect Parries In Grand Finals Against AngryBird!

Kakeru was the winner of the Gamers8 Street Fighter 6 Invitational after a pulsating Grand Final where he forced a reset against Evo 2023 Champion, AngryBird, and then won the second set 3-0. 

There were many aspects of his performance that were incredible to watch and see play out. However, the most impressive feat was just how many perfect parries he was able to pull off against AngryBird. 

Kakeru pulled off a whopping 32 perfect parries in his Grand Final sets against AngryBird, which is an astonishing stat and could even be meta-defining. 

A Japanese V-Tuber, @uranus_vt, who is also a member of IBUSHIGIN, which is Kakeru's team, put together a short video that showed every perfect parry that Kakeru pulled off and seeing them all in sequence made the feat even more impressive.

Perfect parry is one of the more underutilized features in Street Fighter 6 and is generally thought to be a tool that you use by chance. So, a player will go into the parry stance and, if they are lucky, could get a perfect parry and a free combo. There were even some who called for the damage scaling from perfect parry combos to be removed, but after seeing Kakeru's performance, all such calls have ceased.

With Kakeru's usage of perfect parry so essential to his winning the Gamers8 tournament, it could cause people to start rethinking how they use the mechanic and maybe lay more emphasis on it and how it could benefit their game. It also shows that perhaps this is how the developers envisaged that the mechanic would be used. This gives strength to a point Daigo made on stream, where he explained that fighting games are now reaching a point where the developers know more than the players and can manipulate players into playing how they want. This is different from how fighting games used to be, whereby developers will create a game, players will find loopholes and shortcuts, exploit the game and define how the meta plays out. 

Kakeru's rise in Street Fighter 6 has been meteoric, especially when compared to his performances in Street Fighter V, where he was decent, but perhaps not at the very top. However, in Street Fighter 6, he has come into his own and is now one of the best, if not the best player in Japan right now. 

Interestingly, big moments aren't new to Kakeru as he had an incident at Evo 2022 where he was involved in a legendary match against Caba where he was short on time and dared to do a dash into Dragon Punch at the last available second, ending the set with a win. Then he was a Ryu player and was called Uzura.

We look forward to even more from the Japanese powerhouse, but once again, congratulation to the Gamers8 Champion.