SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy/System

Gameplay Overview

• Your buttons are L(Light/Weak), H(Heavy/Strong), S(Special), Throw, Guard, Dream Finish (Will be referred to as D for ease), and Tag.

• Unlike other SNK games, you can air dash here. Air dashing is very important for mobility, since air dashes are very quick. Instant air dashing -- hereafter referred to as IAD -- is especially important if you want to increase your overall damage output.

• Guarding is relegated to a button in SNK Heroines, as opposed to holding away from the opponent. Holding the Guard button puts up a shield that will block everything that’s not a normal throw. You can roll by pressing left or right while guarding, and you can air dodge by pressing Guard while airborne. Air dodging stops any forward momentum you might have had as you sway away, but you give up any aerial offense you may have planned to do. This WILL, however, let you avoid anything, even throws. Be cautious, though, as you can be punished if you land in their face afterward. Rolling takes you past an opponent or their attacks, but you can be thrown during the latter end of a roll, as well as hit as you’re coming out of one, so that’s something to look out for.

• Speaking of guarding, your shield has a limit to what it can take. If it takes one too many hits, it’ll shatter, and your character will be left stunned. It should be noted that guarding against supers doesn’t deteriorate your shield at all. Other ways your shield can deteriorate, though, are with Guard Cancel rolls, done by pressing left or right while blocking an attack. Guard Cancel evasions take away some of your SP to do, but unlike standard rolls, they’re totally invincible all the way through. In the event that your Spirit Gauge, or SP, is too low, however, your shield will deteriorate faster every time you do a Guard Cancel roll. Be very careful so you don’t waste all your resources!

• One last point about guarding is that while you’re holding up your shield, your SP won’t regenerate, so be mindful about balancing your SP.

• Your Spirit Gauge (SP) is directly tied to your health gauge. The less health you have, the more SP you have. Special moves typically take slightly more than one bar of SP, tag cancels take about two and a half bars of SP (neutral tags don’t incur a cost), and supers take 4 bars of SP. Your SP will slowly replenish on its own, and will replenish faster as you fight. If a character isn’t currently active, their SP will replenish faster still.

• The majority of your normals can only be hit once during a combo without a reset in the juggle state. SP items (technically assists based on your partner) will reset the juggle state when they hit the opponent, while other items will give you room for raw tags, which will reset the juggle state as well. Thief Arthur is the only exception to this rule.

• Dash attacks are an exception to the above rule. If you can hit a dash attack during a juggle, it will connect. It will wallsplat and crumple the opponent, regardless of height. If you do another dash attack after, it will knock the opponent down, but they can still be juggled, since you can tag when it hits. Another dash attack from your tagged character will wallsplat and crumple them again.

• If you start a combo with a jumping normal on a standing opponent, this normal can be hit a 2nd time to continue your juggle, but no more after without resetting. Thief Arthur, as with other certain cases, is an exception to this rule.

• Almost every character can pop the opponent into the air with a close Heavy attack that can be jump cancelled to follow it up. The exceptions to this are Kula, Luong, and Mian, all of which will be detailed later.

• Speaking of being airborne, jumping is important in this game. Air dashes are fast, and are a great way to close the distance in a hurry. However, it does bear mentioning that doing so can and will get you hurt severely by anyone that’s on the ball. Heavy attacks and jumping attacks put people into a juggle state, while standing Light attacks let the opponent flip out and land on their feet. If you wonder why jumping attacks aren’t usually noted in the character sections later on, it’s because most characters have pretty decent jumping Light attacks (for some, it’s their jumping Heavy attacks) that can be used as an air-to-air, and by and large, those aren’t too hard to suss out. The main point, though, is that you should be careful about how and when you should take to the air. Keep air dodging in mind, as well as your spacing, so you don’t eat a hard punish for trying to leave your feet.

• Like in a standard KOF game, certain special moves can be used multiple times in a combo, provided you can actually hit them.

• Ground throws can be broken. Air throws and command throws can't be broken. Standard Throws deplete 1 and ½ bars of your opponent’s Spirit Energy (SP) as well as doing damage to them. Throws make you invulnerable to items until the throw is done, as do certain super animations.

• Unlike with some throws in KOF, you can't Fall Break a throw once it's happened, regardless of the throw. It is possible to OTG the opponent after a throw.

• Speaking of, you can break your fall in quite a few situations by pressing Guard as you’re about to hit the floor. You can press left or right and Guard to roll in the desired direction as you tech the fall. You can’t do this to throws or certain moves that cause a hard knockdown state, however.

• Counter hits deplete SP as well as health. The stronger the counter hit, the more SP you lose, with supers depleting 1 and ½ bars.

• If your SP hits 0, and you do a special move, it will be suuuper weak and won't produce any knockdown.

• Your partner's SP gauge is separate from yours; you can see it underneath your main character's SP/Health gauge.

• Raw tags have invul, so you can use them to evade attacks.

Combo System

You might be thinking to yourself by this point that the game's system doesn't really lend itself well to lengthy combos, since people can get items pretty frequently, and those combos can be interrupted by said items. While that's true, part of the draw in doing them is the dynamic itself. Since the items received are almost always random (save for the SP item you get when in "Finish Chance" status), you have to gauge whether or not continuing the beatdown is the smart thing to do in a situation. They may get something that doesn't help them get you off of them, only giving them back a bit of health or SP, or something that's easily dealt with, or they might even opt to keep whatever they get to use it at what they feel is a more crucial point in time, so being able to do combos is still just as important here as it can be anywhere else. For this, we'll only cover solo combos for characters. There are quite a few team combinations between all the characters, and part of the fun is in finding your own tag based combos. We WILL, however, cover the basics behind the tag system in regards to combos, so here we go~

L > L > H = basic blowback combo 66 (Dash) > H = also causes blowback L>L>L>S>D = Basic/Common combo

Tag Combo Basics: [First Chara] dH / S > TAG cancel > dH

Also, this should be generally common knowledge, but universally, L,L,H as a chain finishes with a Dash Attack that wallbounces. This will be seen quite a bit.

Tag System Stuff

• You can do a quick switch to your ally as any physical attack is connecting, whether it's blocked or not, and as any projectile is being thrown. These quick tags take roughly 2.5 SP bars from the incoming character to do them.

• You do NOT have a large invul window after a quick switch, but you have JUST enough to act immediately from one, allowing you to block or dodge something that's happening, or even to invul through it, if you know you can.

• Once you've tagged in during a combo, doing so again isn't possible. You CAN, however, set up situations to do raw tags in the middle of combos using certain items, which won't use up your quick tag opportunity. If you've already done one, though, it won't reset it.

• Tagging in during a combo resets the juggle and wallsplat properties. Whether it's a raw tag or a quick one during a combo, you can use all normals and special moves with the incoming character to do entire combos again, making knowing your positioning and character specific combos important.

Using Leona and a Mine item as an example, you can hit a close Heavy (both hits), then a Dash Attack to wallsplat them. Set a Mine under them as they crumple. If you try to do another close Heavy with Leona, it will whiff, but if you tag before the Mine explodes, the incoming character can use another close Heavy, and continue from there.

• Last, the most common points you'll likely see raw tags happening during combos is during the usage of certain items, such as the Mine, Springboard, or Hurricane, with certain SP items, such as Kula's or Leona's, to name a couple. The most common points to quick tag usually depend on what exactly you want to go for during a combo, but without items in play, they're typicially best used when you can launch someone, during moves that give lengthy windows, like Leona's Baltic Launcher or Mai's Ryuuenbu, or in some cases, JUST after a tossed projectile. Just remember that you can't tag out while you're airborne.

With the basics behind the tag stuff out of the way, we'll touch on solo combos from different positions and health values (SP values should be max), to give an idea of what you can do to lead in to more stuff. This won't take items into account.