Movement: Walking, Jumping and Crouching

(Note: every notation is made in respect to the Player one side, that is you are on the left side and your opponent's on the right)

At last! I can start talking about some game stuff! ;P Well, since I explained the purpose of movement before, let's get started to the basics, shall we? If you are not yet familiar with the TZ notation, I suggest you to look at it now.

As you can see, there are four directional buttons in your d-pad, and you can hold them down to move your character into which direction you want them. There are three basic moves you can do in this fashion, walking, jumping and crouching.

Jumping
Holding "U" puts you to jump status. That's just a fancy word to make your character jump. Holding "UF" and "UB" respectively can make you jump forward and backward. Also, you can control how high you are jumping by how long you are gonna hold the buttons/stick. Holding "UF" long enough will make your character jump higher and tapping "uf" short will make your character do a little hop.

You can do some generic jumping attacks in jumping status and the attack properties will be determined by how high do you jump and what position in the air are you in. For example, Jin's "uf4" where he does the kick while jumping, only does a little damage and only launches on counterhit, but when he does the "4" kick when he's landing from a jump, it does more damage, launches on normal hit and even hits grounded. This kind of jumping attacks are overshadowed by other moves but it's always handy to have it on your toolbelt.

Jumping have a distinct properties to it. It makes your opponent's low attacks miss but you can't block while you're mid-air, making you vulnerable to high and mid attacks that will reach. Remember that you can get easily floated to a juggle when you are on jump status.

Crouching
Holding "D" puts you in "Full Crouch" (FC) status. This status is important because of its many distinct properties. In FC, all of your character's high attacks will miss and you can block your opponent's low attacks, making it pretty useful on defense. The thing that you need to be wary of is that you are defenseless in a mid attack. So crouching can be a double-edge sword if your opponent have a powerful mid attack.

You can do generic crouch jabs and low kicks while you're on FC and those generic attacks are fast enough to be used to attack opponents. There are some character-specific FC moves that are pretty useful, so you should check your character's movelist if your character has some.

Also, when you release D, your character will start to stand up. That act of standing is called "While Standing" (WS). There are many character specific attacks that you can do while you're on WS. Along with FC, WS used as attacks after you dodge a opponent high attack. Knowing how to crouch at the right time can make your opponent hesitate about doing careless high/low attacks, and it puts you to a place where you can retaliate and your opponent can do nothing about it.

Walking
Holding F makes your character walk forward (actually, I think walking is not really the right term for it... but screw that). When you are walking forward, you can't block ANY attacks, and moving this way is too slow for Tekken standards. This kind of movement is used when you are giving your opponent a "mercy round" (where you purposely lose a round to give your lesser skilled opponent a chance to practice combos).

Holding B makes your character walk backwards. This same input were used to block your opponent's High and Mid attacks. Use this often when you want to block, as many times, being too offensive doesn't quite cut it. Please keep in mind that you have this option to block. Somehow, many new players forget this, including myself when I started playing. There's nothing wrong about being aggresive and attacking, but there are also as same number of times when you need to block compared to the times you need to attack. Blocking attacks can give you a lot of benefits, but we can talk about this in a later time.

But even though blocking, crouching, and in other times, jumping, can help you with your defense, there are many times that your opponent gives you alot of pressure at close range, crouching becomes risky and blocking all of their attacks seems impossible. What to do on those times? You got to GET OUT from the pressure! But how? Sadly, you can't throw a fireball at your opponent to make them back away. What you can do though is to move away from the pressure. There are other types of movement that you can use to get out of pressure and take use of the 3D environment that you're in.

Next Lesson: Sidestepping and Backdashing