Assasin from another world: A guide to Lars

I want to thank Cinik for the outline to this guide! Now I am in no way an expert on lars but I have enough knowledge to at least make a crappy guide for him (lol) At the moment I haven't had a chance to play the game in a few weeks so all this is based on my memory of his play style. Bare with me if you will as I try and give out some basic info on lars

A) Pros and Cons – Basic intro to Lars
B) Attacks – Analysis of Lars U1, U2, grab, and tilt
C) Awakening – Analysis of Lar's Awakening
D) Supports – An examination of how the 3 support types complement Lars
E) Final Thoughts - The conclusion


A) Pros and Cons

Pros:
- c.Kunai are have the ability to break through other characters c.Kunai and still land some hits
- Tilt has many options for canceling
- Has one of the fastest grabs in the game
- Possibly the best melee game in the game
- Has paper bombs!
- Awakening destroys guard very quickly
- U1 launches
- U1 kills c.Dash
- melee can be chained into a long SB juggle combo (a la teken6)

Cons:
- KnJ makes his melee game suffer
- U1 has short range
- His c.Kunai have long start up time
- Throw doesn’t cause SB
- His U2 is hard to hit off of SB
- Doesn’t have many moves that set up SB
- Has a hard time closing in to attack at time

B) Attacks

U1 –Lars gets struck by lightning and does a quick dash towards his opponent and launches them into the air with an uppercut. The cool thing with this is if your opponent is near you they will get stunned by the lightning that hits lars making the launch guaranteed. This is probably his best tool to kill c.Dash as its relatively quick and will hit right in front of him. The launch aspect can lead to some nice air combo damage or you can toss a paper tag at the enemy and set up some SB action. This move has its drawbacks though, it doesn’t have range so if your opponent baits it your lets wide open and ready to take some punishment. The tracking isn’t great for this move either seeing as he usually goes in a straight line for the attack. A plus is it knocks chakra orbs loss if it hit and have your opponent with less chakra is always a plus.Edit: from the time i was able to play though short it was I tried out what sniper worm said about the U1>U2 and found that it does work if they don't tech after they get hit by the U1.

U2 – Lar’s U2 has him doing the same set up as his U1 minus the lightning but with a longer dash, if it hits it will launch the opponent and he will begin hitting them with lightning based punches till he smashes them back onto the earth where they belong. It’s a quick move for the fact that it can close the distance between you and your opponent but the actual hit take a little while to hit. One thing that may bother people is the timing for landing his U2 after a SB, not saying it isn’t possible but its harder to do than most characters. Even off of assists (sakura, tsunade, kabuto) you may have some trouble landing it with the range and the actual hit taking some time. Hidan may be one of the better options to set up your U2 than most other supports.

Grab –Lars has one of the fastest grabs in the game! The animation for it is pretty hard to notice if your positioned right to as he just reaches out with his left arm. His grab doesn’t cause SB but leaves them grounded giving you time to recover chakra or think of your next move. It’s a great punisher after Knj but the range isn’t all that great.

Tilt –His Tilt is a quick 2 hit move that can be cancelled after the first hit. For this part I’m going to just paste from Fearios Tilt cancel thread, since it basically says all of his options. “can dash, c.kunai, grab and jutsu after first hit of tilt, also you can go into a combo after the second hit...just like hinata and minato
-dash and kunais are probably best since his jutsu has long start up and theyll recover from hitstun before you can hit them”


C) Awakening

His awakening is pretty much like the average character he gets his stats boosted and his Guard Crush becomes awesome.

Attacks (Attack/Grab/Tilt)
- His melee game gets a boost in attack power and guard crush power, his combos pretty much stay the same
- His grab stays the same
- Hit Tilt stays the same just gets a boost in attack

Projectiles (Kunai/Chakra Load + Kunai)
- Not much to say here. Awakening projectiles are basically unchanged from their standard counterparts besides a damage increase.

Jutsu (Chakra Load + Attack)
- Some say his U1 has more hits in awakened mode I personally haven’t noticed, but it breaks guards really well and still sets up his launch


D) Supports

All of the information listed refers to when one has their Drive Gauge filled to Level 1 or more. The Drive gauge is filled by one’s supports being used.

Attack – Attack supports assist in combos and perform the almighty strike-back. As with most characters if not all its always good to have at least one attack support. If you don’t have the timing for his SB>U2 you can always SB>Paper Tag or go for air combos.

Guard – Guard supports will block c.Dashes and guard you when you charge chakra. If your playing lars than most of the time you have to be in close to mid range of your opponent and be wary of your chakra at all times. Having a Guard support is always great when your low on chakra but it really depends on how your play style is.

Balance – Balance supports will appear and throw c.Kunai when you throw your own c.Kunai. They will also negate the damage from an opponent’s U2 at the cost of the support being rendered unusable for some time. Be warned, you cannot use your U3 if a support is unusable. A balance is always great for their c.Kunai and with lars your going to be moving around a lot so having some c.Kunai around is always a plus

.E) Final Thoughts

The way I see it lars has a lot of potential as a character he just needs some love shown to him. Hopefully this guide can help out with getting lars more attention and we can find out how to make him a real threat to other characters. I shall continue to look into lars and try to make more post about him in the future and if possible I will put up game play footage so you can get an idea of what lars can do.

Once again I want to thank Cinik for the guide and I hope you guys enjoyed the read.

great guide. i wonder if lars can U1 > grab or U1 > U2 or something of the sort.

Awesome guide, very well written, just a few things you might want to add. Lars can hit his U2 off SB if he runs backward and then initiates it, but the timing can be tricky, it's best to just use his explosive tag up close and then cancel right into the U2 right when it connects. His U2 can also be done right after a chakra dash if your quick enough. To answer Cinik, yeah you can do Lars U1 and combo it right into his U2 if your opponent doesn't jump out, I would imagine you could grab them as they fall if they didn't tech the U1 also. Like Pain I think Lars has some nice combos, and canceling into your U1 can be an effective way to avoid grabs and U1 punishes.

teching things like lars's U1 or Sakura/Kabuto support is actually a weakness of mine. I'm sure there are other people like me out there who just forget to mash jump lol. if teching hits like that becomes more common i fear it gonna be even harder to do damage with lars...

Lately, the lars players I've seen are heavy on turtling. I'm not sure why, possibly because his best attribute is melee and its easy to knj. Probably also because he can easily punish and has little lag time after moves. Its interesting to see a character who seems meant to be aggressive be used more effectively defensively.

cinik wrote:

great guide. i wonder if lars can U1 > grab or U1 > U2 or something of the sort.

To answer your question, Lars can cancel his tilt into his U2. He can also combo into it, but I'm not sure which one it is. Once I find the video with him using it I'll post so you can see what I mean. Basically, Lars knocks you into the air and then you cancel that into his U2.

He can cancel from his tilt as listed in the tilt part of the guide, the only combo I can think of where he can U2 is his Down-melee combo string since it leaves the enemy in the air.

Lars can U2 after his U1 or his up combo if the opponent does not air tech.

He has a guaranteed U2 after his down combo via speed down tag chakra canceled into U2 (you must still hit with the tag or U2 won't hit).

I wish I could experiment with lars and his items but i'm stuck with going by memory. If lars can U1>U2 then his anti-c.Dash is really something to fear.

Juece wrote:

- U1 kills c.Dash

lol this is not really a pro nor a con because any and every U1 has more priority than a c. dash.

You seem to misunderstand, i'm talking about how easily it is to punish C.dash with his U1. Some characters have a hard time hitting people who don't dash in a straight line. Lars can hit his u1 a lot easier than most characters at mid to close range. Hell they can just about bump into you and your u1 will hit, unlike Itachi or garaa.

Oh ok, I see what you mean. Thanks for clearing that up for me.

Double post, laggy cpu :/