The following is a post I published to Cohost on November 3rd of 2022. Some of what I say here might not be entirely true, but it was based on my understanding of the game at the time!
I’ve played a lot of characters in Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code.
I played some seriously (H-Arc and F-Roa), and many just for the sake
of mashing with friends (too many to list!), but one stands out to me as
my absolute favorite: Full Moon Ciel.
As usual: reasonably big post ahead. You’ve been warned.
The Ciel Family tree is a little weird, and so is F-Ciel’s moveset
Enter flipper. F-Ciel’s 236X series, rather than being a demon flip, is a mid-range flicker punch that’s plus on block and jump-cancellable on hit. It’s a straightforward but very powerful move, with tons of combo potential and obvious applications in neutral and offense.
And not content with big red boxes alone, F-Ciel also got herself some mysterious yellow boxes. These “clash boxes” appear during the startup of a handful of her moves, 5[C], 4[B], and her A command throw included. Any enemy attacks that make contact with these boxes will clash instead of hitting Ciel, letting her blow through with a counter hit or a command grab, or even cancel into another move entirely.
These clash boxes are my favorite thing about her. Nothing feels better than intercepting a deep jump-in with 4[B]’s startup and letting go of the button to instantly connect with a counter hit, or option selecting shield counters and almost every reversal in the game with 5[C]. It gives the character a wholly unique approach to defensive play in neutral, giving her multiple robust ground-to-air tools in a game where few exist in the first place.
These are covered nicely by her j.2C, a shallow dive that lets her go over the moves which would beat her (largely upper-body) clash boxes. All of this combines to make for the most fun neutral I think MBAACC has to offer — and I haven’t even touched on things like her array of “footsies” normals, 214B~C black key toss, or her dash that lets you go almost all the way across the screen while blocking and low profiling at the same time.
It can still be tough not to get overwhelmed by your opponent — this is Melty Blood — but when you learn your tools, keep it together, and hold your ground, you feel untouchable.
I rejected “Dust Loops” to ask her sister “Flipper Loops” to prom
If you know me, you know I love combos in fighting games, and that I especially love combos in MBAACC. A character just isn’t cool if their combos suck, and it’s hard for a character to suck if their combos are cool. (If I don’t like a fighting game, it’s probably because I think the combos are lame. Sorry, Strive gamers!)
Aesthetics are half of the cool combo equation, but mechanics are equally important; and combo structure in Melty Blood is just fascinating. There’s no hard combo limit, and no hitstun scaling — instead, the two things that directly restrict combo length are bounce limit and gravity scaling. And, though almost everyone can do a generic “launcher > air string > airthrow” combo, unique and weird combo tools abound. (More on that in the comments!)
The game’s combos are also demanding — there’s no normal buffer and many characters, to do anything beyond the absolute basics, need to make character-specific adjustments to make sure they don’t drop — and meter economy is especially important here, forcing players to learn varied routes that build and spend meter efficiently, ensuring that neither you nor the opponent go into MAX at an inopportune time. As in any anime fighter, choices have to be made about corner carry, damage, and okizeme as well. It’s a lot to keep track of.
F-Ciel is no different. Her combos, for the most part, follow a common Melty Blood formula: you start with the day 1 combo into airthrow, and then you add more and more stuff to it until you’ve got a Combo of Theseus.
j22B > AT is the first port of call. Common to all three Ciels is the ability to link her air somersault into airthrow, adding a stylish extra hit to basic confirms. There’s not much to say about it — it’s stable and easy — but it looks really cool and adds a little flair to an otherwise standard combo part. That said, harder “double somer” combos exist — and doing it twice is doing it nice. Her airthrow is no slouch, either: it gives her EX Black Key oki in the corner, letting her burn meter at her own convenience while bolstering her offense.
Beyond that are tons more options, and this is where flipper finds a new way to shine. Ciel is able to use 236B’s jump cancel to confirm with IAD from shockingly far away, either raw or mid-combo, letting her reland into a full jump string.
And while 236B > IAD is an extremely important part of Ciel’s combo game, it’s not the only way that flipper finds applications in combos. F-Ciel can use and abuse 236A’s hitbox and long untech time to deal tons of damage and extend combos to an almost ridiculous degree, but there’s a caveat: to get more than one rep, she needs height.
This height problem is a fun challenge. If you know how to set things up right, and provided you’re comfortable with the character-specific juggle hitboxes, you’re suddenly able to turn a short, moderately damaging combo into a long, highly damaging one. This, really, is the core of what makes F-Ciel’s combos fun for me: at this middle level of optimization, height management is the name of the game, and you’re heavily rewarded for eyeballing weird juggle starters or knowing how high each of your moves bounces any given opponent. Other characters with combos I love, like Sol Badguy in Guilty Gear Xrd, have this in common with her!
It doesn’t end there, either. F-Ciel players who want to master their combos are looking at all sorts of cool little optimizations, including but certainly not limited to: cheeky airdashes for extra corner carry, TK black key DP punishes, or 2B > 5[C] juggles that net you even bigger combos from various launchers air hits, provided you can connect the 2B just right. Like any character worth playing, there’s an endless list of improvements to make, and any hit has the potential to be wildly optimized if you’re on point.
This isn’t especially unique within, or even to, Melty Blood, …but 5[C] clash frames into flipper loops are. If you’re interested in something different and a little challenging, try her out and send me your sickest clips.
[The following is a comment I left beneath the above post.]
I got overexcited and wrote too much about some other characters’ combos I really like, so I’ll put them in this comment.
F-Pciel has her infamous rock loop and a unique air throw that extends combos while locking the opponent out of burst. Though she is derided as only having “one combo“, C-Seifuku uses an air-ok OTG-ing double jump cancellable pillar projectile and a downwards-spiking charged air normal to do it.
H-Ryougi throws her knife and picks it up again mid-combo — she has a reputation for it; people pick up the game because of knife loops, and drop it because they’re so damn hard. C-Ryougi is no slouch either, with cool TK Moon combos and a 150-meter rekka super with six followups that can be performed repeatedly and in any sequence she likes.
All three Arcueid moons have sick combos – C-Arc has a full screen homing jump, just one of many ways she can route into her blistering corner loops with wallbounce 5C and TK Sonic, H-Arc has fullscreen carrying character-specific j2[C] loops and whatever the fuck this is, and F-Arc has a ton of cool special > normal links that demand extremely tight execution. There’s a video out there of a super hard one with a ton of one-frame links and tight manual delays, but I don’t have it to hand right now.
This isn’t even to mention C-Mech’s weird loops which have to be seen to be believed, F-Akiha’s frankly terrifying pit loops, C-Hisui’s air ladle combos, or the many other cool routes that I haven’t been able to list here. Melty blood really is awesome.
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