[Reincarnate]

Originally Posted by korny

I don't think anything tops daigo vs justin wong. I can only parry that special 1/10 times at best when i know it's coming. The speed of that particular special requires you to parry beforehand which is ridiculous intuitive gameplay on his part.

Clearly I cannot speak for Daigo, but I suspect that the pre-timing/pre-intuition was not as risky a move as it seemed. Before the super attack, Daigo is directly mirroring/pacing back and forth against Justin for a couple seconds. In other words, he treats every other step *as if* Justin would launch into a special attack, so when it came, the parry would be ready. He probably made this decision around 2:39 in the video.

So it's not like he suddenly went, "Ok, NOW he'll launch the super" -- I think he was making that call continuously until it actually happened during those few couple of seconds. Since he had no life left, it was a safe bet that Justin would launch the super because only one hit needs to land for the match to end. In turn, Daigo chose to go for the full parry.

IMO it's amazing that he not only made that judgment call so elegantly, but he actually pulled off the timing of the parry itself with respect to each hit. It really does show how much strategy goes into these things at the top level despite the quickened nature of fighting games. Of course it's entirely possible that to expert players, landing a full parry is not all that hard (much like pulling off an 11-footer AAA is easy for us), but it's an amazing comeback either way.