Throw Loops Are Not Good

Everyone in this game is a grappler

Thrown for a Loop

If you’re familiar with Street Fighter 6, chances are you’ve heard of throw loops. It’s when you get thrown over and over again. A lot of people, myself included, hate the mechanic, others don’t care about it, and a select few defend it. That last group is what I like to call “completely incorrect”.

Today I’ll be going over why I don’t like throw loops, why I think they’re bad for the game in general and how I’d go about fixing them. I even think it’s detrimental to anyone who spectates the game. I’ll also respond to a few throw loop enjoyers who think this mechanic has a place in the game.

What is a throw loop?

A throw loop is just what it sounds like: Getting thrown over and over again. This happens in Street Fighter 6 when you’re in the corner. You throw your opponent and while they’re getting up, you walk or dash towards them and grab them again, re-starting the cycle. This goes on until someone, usually the defender, breaks it.

Here it is in a sped-up video:

There are several ways to stop a throw loop if you get caught in one. You can back-dash, which gives you invulnerability frames and lets you dodge the throw. You can input a throw yourself to break out of the opponent’s grab. You can also jump straight up or forwards to escape the situation. Like a lot of things in life, you can solve the issue by just leaving.

Now, you might be thinking that throw loops can’t be that powerful, if there are so many ways to deal with them. On the surface, it looks easy to solve, like the economy. Just give people more money. If you’re getting thrown, just stop getting thrown, right? The problem comes in when you consider the risk and reward of each action.

Back-dashing makes you invulnerable to a throw. If your opponent predicts you’re going to backdash, they can press a button and hit you, starting a nice combo, dealing tons of damage. You might try to tech the throw. In the best case scenario, this leads to your opponent getting pushed back a little and resetting the situation. You can stand and block now, and you can collect your thoughts. If you go for the throw tech and your opponent walks back a little, you’re cooked. Throws have an animation, and if they miss, they leave you wide open for an attack, which leads to a big combo and massive damage. You can try to jump over the throw. Thing is, if done correctly, a throw intended for a throw loop recovers fast enough so that they can hit you while you’re still in the air, so that’s not a real option. Any choice you make to escape the throw loop carries a lot of risk.

Everything in a fighting game carries risk, doesn’t it? Whenever your opponent goes for a throw loop, they’re risking getting caught by any of the aforementioned counter-play options. That much is true, but you have to consider what they stand to gain from their interaction: a combo that leads into massive damage, or a throw. Both of these options lead into a knockdown, which re-starts the guessing game.

The weight of each risk is offset by how much you can gain off a successful offense attempt, but if you look at it from the defender’s perspective, you’ll see that they have a lot more to lose. The best outcome a defender can hope to get in this scenario is to break a throw successfully. This just pushes the opponent back and gives them some breathing room, but the defender is still in the corner.

Quick Aside: The Corner is the tenth circle of Hell

Other than a corner in Detroit past midnight, Street Fighter 6’s corner is one of the most dangerous places ever. When you’re there your options are severely limited, your risks become bigger, your rewards for successful interactions shrinks to near zero and your only real course of action is to get the hell out of there as fast as possible before you get killed. Yes I’m still talking about the corner in the video game, not the one in Detroit.

The corner’s oppressive nature is one of the key points that lets the throw loop succeed. When you’re in the corner, there isn’t a lot you can do to there other than get out, but you have to worry about a hundred other things. You can get hit with a Drive Impact and sent to the wall, opening yourself up to massive damage. You can get thrown, which leads back into the situation. You can get poked to death. Since you can’t move back, your opponent can easily out-space any of your attacks, so if you throw something out to try to harass your opponent, you get whiff punished for massive damage and you’re back in the corner.

The safest and least blood-curdling thing that can happen to you is you get thrown. Getting thrown only does 1,200 damage. Just take the throw. You defend against the big threats and risk the throw as acceptable collateral damage, so you get chucked. Your opponent walks back towards you, you think of the ten horrible things that might happen, so you defend against them again, but you get thrown. The third time you decide to do something about the throw, so you go for a tech, only to get shimmied and blown up with a 4,000 damage combo. Should’ve taken the throw, bro.

Throw Loops are not Fun for either side

Now that you see how/why they happen, I will make my first point that they’re not fun for anyone. Sure, if you’re the one doing the throwing you might get some enjoyment out of it, because you’re winning and winning is fun, but it’s not rewarding. Whenever I get someone in a throw loop, I feel like I’m cheesing them out. I’m playing them for a fool. It’s not some cool technique I practiced, or a measured series of reads, it’s a bunch of ultra low-risk, medium-reward options I can do on autopilot. All conscious thought is offloaded onto the unfortunate sack of potatoes I once called an opponent. If I guess right, I throw and keep doing it. My head is empty and my hands are moving on their own, controlled by The Creature, who is also bored, all while my opponent is having a mental breakdown and cursing my bloodline, trying to escape from my devious trap of walking up and pressing two buttons.

I am willing to concede that this is a personal issue. The fact that I don’t have fun doing a throw loop could be some flaw in my thinking. Maybe I’m wrong and winning via throw loop is exhilarating. A win is a win, and winning feels good. Maybe you think throw loops are fun. I can’t take that away from you, but I can almost guarantee that, when you’re the one getting thrown, you’re not enjoying any of it.

They look awful

Capcom put a lot of effort into making Street Fighter 6 the most accessible, easy to play and spectator friendly game they’ve ever made. Every decision, from the excessive slow-down on everything, to the colorful splats to indicate every attack, to the constant offense in the game, all of it has been engineered to be easy to get into and easy to watch as a spectator. When someone gets a perfect parry, they get covered in blue like someone threw a Slurpee at them, the game practically freezes, the camera zooms in on the action for that brief moment. It’s all an indicator that at this is when you, as a spectator, should be yelling and cheering and going “YOOOOOOOOO THAT WAS SIIIIICK”. The push for e-sports, the official tournaments, all of that is due to the fact that Capcom wants people to look at the game, think it’s cool, and then go out and buy it.

Now, if they did all that, why would they leave throw loops in? It looks awful, and it happens in tournament matches all the time. These aren’t matches from some tournament in someone’s garage, or an online event. These are from the Capcom Cup, an official tournament, and you have players like Punk, who participate in Evo, getting thrown in the corner.

If you, as a spectator, heard about Street Fighter 6 and decided to watch it for the first time, would you be impressed by that kind of gameplay? You open up Twitch.tv and you have a cup of orange juice and a stick of celery, ready to watch some real gaming, and you tune in to see the supposed cream-of-the-crop of Street Fighter players getting thrown again and again. You’d think the game sucks. I enjoy Street Fighter 6, and whenever a throw loop happens on tournament I get upset. It looks like garbage. People who don’t play the game ask me if that happens a lot and I have to tell them “yeah that’s… a pretty integral part of the game right now”. It’s embarrassing.

It’s not fun for new players

Sticking with the theme of Street Fighter 6 being accessible, throw loops make the game suck for new players. They’re not some hidden technique that takes hours to master. All you have to do is grab someone then walk up to them and keep doing it. You can get it down with around 5 minutes of practice. It’s incredibly easy to do and horrendously oppressive. No one below Diamond rank knows how to deal with them.

In reality, who cares about new players? They can’t deal with hadoukens, basic zoning or jump-ins. If we go by that logic, we’d have to get rid of all those mechanics, too, to accommodate the tiny little babies who can’t do a command input.
To counter that admitted straw man, I’ll direct you to the videos above. Those are professional players getting caught in these throw loops that are supposedly easy to avoid. It’s a problem at low ranks, and it’s a problem at the highest levels of play.

Adressing Pro-throw loop arguments

I’ve tried to keep the article as easy to follow as possible, even for non-street fighter players, but here I’m going to have to get a little more technical and specific. I’ll do my best to explain the concepts here, but it might veer off into nerd territory.

This section will be focused on Sajam’s arguments in favor of throw loops. He makes a point to say that he doesn’t necessarily like or dislike throw loops, he says he’s just explaining why they’re there, so I won’t present him as a throw loop enjoyer. He’s just one of the few people I could find who were defending throw loops and giving an actual argument. There were some on Reddit, but that site is horrendous. Nine out of ten posts on Reddit have been deleted, either by a power hungry moderator who doesn’t shower, or by the user because they’re cowards who can’t stand to have their opinion challenged, or because their account was banned for some unknown slight against the aforementioned unbathed moderators. I know this is the anti-throw loop article and not the anti-Reddit article, but here at Load Last Save we never pass up a chance to hurl vitriol at Reddit and openly wish for its downfall.

Sajam’s argument is that throw loops exist because Street Fighter 6 lacks mix-ups due to parry being so strong. When you press parry you can counter a hit, regardless of its direction or height. In fighting games, you usually press back to block. I say usually because there are some games like Virtua Fighter or Mortal Kombat where you block by pressing a button. When you block by pressing a direction, if an attack comes at you from the opposite direction, you can’t block it automatically. High and low attacks also make you shift your block high or low to match. If you block at the wrong height, you get hit. The parry in Street Fighter 6 works as a super block button that, when pressed, defends against every attack from every direction.

I agree with his point that Street Fighter 6 is light on mix-ups. I’ve heard other players, such as iDom, say that it’s very hard to open people up in the game due to the lack of good high-low mixups and plus frames. The game is designed around the drive rush system and the plus frames you get on that, so everything else is balanced with that in mind. I personally have my problems with these systems, but I’ll get to that if I ever review the game. I just don’t think throw loops are the way to go.

Parry is too strong, therefore throw loops. It makes sense on paper, but it’s a very simple band-aid solution on a complicated issue. It’s like if you didn’t have any clean underpants to wear so you go commando. Sure, it’s a solution, but the real problem is your refusal to do laundry. The problem here is the lack of mix-ups and that parry is too strong. My simple fix would be to make parry block only high or low, like it does in Street Fighter 3, but I think this is also another case of going commando.

In another video, Sajam explains his stance on parries and how it would be too strong without throw loops. If you’re in the corner and can parry anything and not get grabbed, you have the advantage.

While it’s true that removing throw loops would shift the balance of power more towards the defender, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. While in the corner, you’re screwed. The defender is in a horrible position. The current set of tools in the game favor the attacker way more than they favor the defender. A shift in power in favor of the defender is like giving them a 25% chance of survival instead of a 10% chance. It’s an increase, but you’re still in danger.

I understand that getting put in the corner should be a bad thing. You failed at some point and your punishment is that you lost your position and have to regain it. That leads to another problems with Street Fighter 6’s offense, where it’s too easy to get someone into the corner. You lose one interaction at the center of the stage and you’re suddenly in the corner fighting for your life. Giving the defender a slight advantage isn’t the end of the world.

Sajam states that, without throw loops, you can parry and cover multiple situations, leaving the offender with no real recourse but to lose their turn. First, this is already the case now, but in the offender’s favor. Throw loops can cover multiple defensive options with very little risk. The player initiating the throw loops can do the low-risk option over and over again and only risks getting their throw teched, which just pushes them back. It doesn’t reverse the position, it doesn’t do any damage, it doesn’t give the defender any advantages. While engaged in a throw loop, the absolute worst thing that could happen to the offender is that he eats a wake-up reversal. In that situation, the defender had to use a resource to get out of the corner, while the offender only risked minimal damage. Some characters, like Kimberly, don’t have invincible reversals outside of their super moves, making them even worse against throw loops.

Second, the options presented by wake-up parry aren’t that strong, either. A parry has recovery, so if the player does one on wake-up, they risk getting counter hit. Sajam says in the video that if a wake-up parry happens, the offender has to sit there and do nothing waiting for it, and risk losing his turn. A walk-back shimmy covers the parry attempt and also a tech throw, as it does now. The offender can cover two options, one being a supposedly overpowered parry, with just one choice, and their reward for correctly guessing and walking back is that they avoid a tech or bait a parry, and they can get a massive combo which leads back into a knockdown.

Without throw loops, the corner is still the tenth circle of hell, the offender has the advantage and there are still a lot of strong options the offender can take to make the defender’s life miserable, but there is at least a little bit more interaction. The defender has a chance to do something, and they don’t have to get stuck in a vortex flipping a coin.

Some… lesser arguments

Someone on Reddit said:

I agree it’s fucked on certain characters but if you’re a Guile player, you’re kind of on the upside of the meta.

How is a Ryu player or a Jamie player going to beat Guile without throw loops? Zoner players complaining about throw loops is like grapplers complaining about fireballs. You’ve got your advantages. lol

How is a Ryu player or Jamie player going to beat Guile without Throw loops? Does Guile take more damage from throws or something? Is Guile particularly bad against Ryu and Jamie, who both have moves that go through projectiles? There are ways of beating Guile without throw loops. Guile has the same number of tools everyone else does to deal with throw loops: Very little. He has an invincible reversal, at least.

Admittedly, this is a cherry-picked argument from Reddit. Others have been against throw loops as well, and I’ve agreed with them. I just felt I needed another argument besides Sajams’. I apologize, I won’t make you read anything from Reddit again.

How would I deal with throw loops?

Throw protection on wake up. Make is so you can’t grab someone while they’re still in their recovery animation. That would be the most simple, band-aid solution. You would still have the same oppressive gameplay, the defender would still have the advantage, and you could still pressure with strikes, but the defender would have a little bit more breathing room to deal with things.

A more complicated solution would be to rework parry so that you can’t just use it on wakeup and get a free pass out of the corner. Make it only work against high or low attacks, but not both at the same time. This would introduce more mix-ups into the game, making it more interesting.

Removing throw loops would make defense a bit stronger, but it would be by a small and acceptable amount. It wouldn’t sacrifice Street Fighter 6’s insistence on offense. You can still go forward and punch at all times. Other ultra-agressive games like Blazblue don’t have throw loops and they can still be big, gorilla games.

Conclusion

I don’t recommend throw loops. They’re boring to play against. They make the defender guess the same quick little situation over and over again with no real variance. Their risk/reward is completely skewed against the defender. It’s a low-risk option that can only be escaped by taking large risks that lead into huge damage and getting knocked down again into the corner. They’re boring to watch, since they’re visually uninteresting. It’s just one guy throwing the other again and again. It makes pro players look bad, and it makes the game look bad. It looks dumb and low-skilled. It doesn’t have sauce, as the kids say.

The biggest problem is the tangled web of interacting systems the game has. As I said with Sajam’s argument, throw loops are there because parry is strong, and parry is strong because of drive rush, which is there to give situational plus frames, and without that there’s no mix, which is why you need throw loops. Fixing one means messing with other mechanics, and it risks throwing the whole thing out of balance. I can sit here and armchair quarterback the whole thing and say throw loops should be removed, but there are still problems with the other systems. Even then, I think I would take the risk of having the game be ruined by removing throw loops. There are more interesting ways to break the game and make it suck instead of making it boring to play and watch.

The change they’re teasing for Season 3 where you gain some drive meter by breaking throws shows that the developers are aware of the problem, but that’s not how you fix it. It’s a very small change that might have some repercussions in high level play, but it doesn’t fix nor remedy throw loops.

I’m not a game designer, nor am I an expert, but I’ve seen enough throw loops to know that I don’t like them. I don’t like doing them, I don’t like getting caught in them, and the general consensus seems to be that they stink. Making the game too defensive would suck, but I think that shifting things in favor of the defender a little wouldn’t be that bad. It would be better than what we have now. Just endless throws forever. I warned you about throws, bro. I keeps happening. It keeps happening.