Thoughts on AE Sakura After 3 Days

I was more than excited for Arcade Edition to be released because Sakura was being buffed significantly, or so I initially thought. Indeed, she is buffed, but not to the extent myself and many other Sakura players had hoped-- even by modest standards. For reference, here is my post on the changes Capcom were to give her. Now I'm going to break down the harsh reality.

The biggest buff she would receive was undoubtedly a quicker recovery to her fireballs. Although Capcom made it sound like every version of her fireball (both charged and uncharged) would recover less, viewing the new frame data and playing the game reveals that only the charged versions have benefited. Although this makes the Uyro meaty fireball corner setup even safer, her zoning game (if you can even call it that) remains stagnant. Right off the bat, Sakura is still very much the same.

The other buff of note was the changes to cl.MP. Sakura can now combo from cl.MP into cr.MP or cr.MK. It is also a very good +3 on block now. I initially thought this move could be used very similarly to Cammy's cl.MP as a throw tech punish into an easy confirm. In practice, I have not had success with this usage. Even when I know they are option-selecting throw I could not land a clean hit. Further, unlike Cammy's cl.MP, Sakura does not have a lot of time to confirm. Although not a big deal, since any decent Sakura should be able to confirm from cr.MK (which would follow cl.MP), I would have liked to be able to confirm earlier. I'll continue to work with this, but as of right now, the best usage of cl.MP would be for frame traps.

The st.MK buff has proven useful. I haven't messed with it too much, but when I have I've had success. The other specific changes to her like air tatsu gaining more hits have been insignificant. St.MP being special cancelable is just a gimmick at this point. There is not much more to say than that.

As for what I can tell, she did not gain any buffs to her hitboxes (other than st.MK), as was also reported. Her ground normals are still pretty awful. Bison, Chun, and Rog are still tough matchups for this reason.

So what's the final verdict? She is better, but not amazingly so (see Makoto). However, she does move up the tier list significantly to a solid mid status, but mostly on the merits of nerfs coming to the other characters. Her damage is astronomical at this point relatively to the rest of the cast and she will still stun you with just a couple mixups. Overall, I am pretty disappointed. I have been mainly relying on my tried and true tactics in order to get my wins, so I can't say how much or at all the changes have benefited my gameplay. With that said, I can't complain. She was not nerfed (she even retains her runaway tatsu), and her gameplay remains generally untouched. Shoutouts to the Sakura mains out there.