a question about stance

i've been perusing the literature on this site and occasionally i come across talk regarding stance (i.e. open and closed stance & stance specific combos rather than sarah's flamingo or kage's jumanji). i'm curious...are these questions of stance important because of simply where your feet are vis a vis your opponent or do moves come out faster/hit with more power etc. depending on which stance you use...specifically i am interested in this insofar as jacky is concerned (clearly his normal pk is stance specific) but information on this topic generally or regarding lau & akira would be fantastic. please don't kill me if this is idiotic and i could have found it elsewhere...i play videogames all day & my brain don't work too well...thanks.

 

This is a pretty good question, don't worry, no killing /versus/images/icons/tongue.gif

Stance when it's said by itself is usually referring to the opponent's foot position in relation to yours. Imagine you're viewing the opponent's bodies from above. The ends of the slashes are supposed to represent where your feet are positioned, and where the opponent's are.

\ \ ....this is closed stance. Your front foot is facing the opponent's back foot.

\ / ....this is open stace. Your front foot is facing your opponent's front foot.

Advantages to closed stance:

Since your body is roughly parallel to the opponent's, you can dash forward until you practically bump chests with the enemy. You can get very close and as a result throws are more likely to connect. This used to be more true in VF2 or 3 than it is now.

Since every round starts off in closed stance, this is the stance that you're probably most familiar with in terms of performing combos, etc.

Open stance advantages:

Again, it's less true now, but if you have crappy throws and your opponent has good throws, you might want to stay in open stance so that throws miss. In this stance you can dash up to the enemy, but only up to point... you can't get chest-to-chest with them because your front foot bumps into their front foot.

Some moves tend to miss more frequently when you're in open stance. It's rare but it happens.

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General stance stuff:
Moves do the same damage etc regardless of stance, but combos are majorly affected by stance. If you want to get the most damage possible from a combo, you have to be aware of stance. Otherwise you might try a combo and find that the last hit (or hits) miss because you were in the wrong stance. Many strong combos will only work in one stance or the other. A simple example: After lau's b,f+P the most damaging combo vs. a fairly heavy opponent is P,b+P,P. But it only works in closed stance. If you're in open stance the last two hits miss and you wasted the chance for a lot of damage. If you're in open stance, the next best thing you could do is d+P, DF+P,df+P+K. That's only 3 points less damage, but if you try to use that all the time, you'll see that it misses in closed stance.
Probably the only decent combo that works in either stance is P, d+K,K.

I've been compiling a list of max damage combos and in almost every case, for anyone vs anyone else, you can only get the best damage by doing one combo for open stance and a different one for closed stance. Generally they're pretty close in terms of damage. The difference between a perfect combo for open stance and a perfect combo for closed stance is only about 5 points at the most (2 or 3 percent of your life). The difference between a stance-dependent combo and a combo that works for either stance is often much larger though.

If you're just picking up the game, don't worry about stance too much. You should make a point of finding and using combos that work regardless of stance, so you can always dish out some damage. When you get pretty consistent at that, worry about stance when you're doing combos like the lau b,f+P stuff. Then when you get good at VF in general, you can worry about stance for all the other reasons.

 

CreeD--thanks for the rapid response...actually i've been playing vf for years but only recently have i been exposed to any kind of forum on it's theory...i actually was starting to worry there that sega had been spending all of this time making a game impossibly deep...imagine my relief to find it only improbably deep...thanks again.