Fist of the North Star (arcade)/Combos

Hokuto No Ken / Fist Of The North Star is well known in the fighting game community worldwide as being a game with a high comboability level and for its bugged gravity combos. Here are three types of bugged combos you will often meet at mid/high gaming level, and of course in video clips on YouTube from Japan / Taiwan / Hong Kong / France ...

Hyakuretsu (Bounce Bug)
"Hyakuretsu" means "100 tearing hits" in Japanese. It refers to Kenshiro's Hokuto Hyakuretsuken move which is his Fatal K.O blow in the game and the most seen move in the series as well.

In the game, performing a hyakuretsu combo is actually performing a bounce glitch combo. The classic scheme for Hyakuretsu is to start with a long combo involving gravity (must be superior to 25 hits), then enter a series of crouching weak punches/kicks to make the opponent bounce on ground. When the hit counter reaches 60/70 hits, you can make your opponent fly in the air as the bounce glitch gravity addition becomes too heavy for the game engine.

The main advantages of Hyakuretsu combos :

– Various setups to confuse your opponent (throw, high/low mind game, boost pokes ...)

– Doesn't usually require lots of boost/aura stocks (at least, the latest combos found by various gamers worldwide tend to confirm that)

– Kills your opponent easily while increasing your own boost & aura bars.

Both Japanese & Mamuuuut Combo free DVDs (rips can be found on YouTube) show lots of various hyakuretsu combos, among other bugged combos.

Dribble (Bounce Bug v.2)
The word "Dribble" used here is directly inspired from basketball.

This type of combo is quite close to the hyakuretsu one in its whole setup, except that the part where the player has to enter a sequence of weak boosted attacks is modified by a weak attack combined with a dash forward.

The main advantage of that type of combo is that you only need very few boost stock to make use of it.

Depending of the character, dribble combos will be more efficient but harder to pull out as the input of the dashed weak attack must be accurate to keep a good bounce height. Sometimes, only that type of combo can work against a certain character (example : Kenshiro VS Raoh. Kenshiro has a dribble setup which only works against Raoh - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ibhvIhFUY)

Also, few characters are less subject to get hit by that kind of combos due to their unorthodox collision boxes (Thouther, Mamiya & Toki are good examples).

Characters like Rei & Juda have lots of dribble setups starting with 0.4/0.5 boost stock and are using most of the time a combo against a cornered opponent, thus making them very dangerous to play against when they start filling their gauges.

Mamuuuut has published lots of dribble setups of almost every character on his YouTube account : http://www.youtube.com/mamuuuut

Travelling (RAOH only)
The third type of bugged combo only concerns Raoh as he is the only one who can make efficient use of it (other characters need infinite boost which is impossible to have in the arcade version of the game).

The travelling combo is basically a huge 65/70 hit combo ending with a Banishing Strike. After the Banishing Strike, you can either auto-boost and perform crouching weak kick then spam crouching weak punch, of just wait a bit, run and enter the crouching weak kick to crouching weak punch spam combo.

During the weak punches sequence :

– opponent is stuck in mid-air and only shakes a bit horizontally without bouncing.

– corner pushback for Raoh is very weak

– Raoh can use standing weak punch instead of crouching weak punchs when counter reaches 90+ hits

This is a flawless & easy combo against most of the cast except Toki who has a weird air collision box and requires a specific combo set-up.

Latest tournament matches show Raoh entering his Reversed Sai combo in order to increase the hit counter then performing Travelling at ~ 70 hits.