The Kirafi Archetype

Kirafi, which is short for the Japanese pronunciation of Killer Fields, is one of the two main team archetypes for Nomash, the other being Dash.

Traditionally, a Kirafi team comp uses Killer Fields as its point of offense, as the name suggests. In Vanilla, this would involve the use of the Killer Fields users Fudou and Kidou together. With Xtreme, however, this archetype has been extended to the use of other non-dashing powerful dribblers such as Baddap.

The main concept of a Kirafi team is using a powerful dribbler that wins most matchups, has an extremely wide radius, has lots of TP, but cannot dash. This is opposed to using a dashing dribbler that have poorer matchups. As such, it is a tradeoff between mobility and power.

For instance, A-Fudou in Vanilla beats almost every meta defender, and only ties for even his worst matchups. Similarly, in Xtreme, Baddap’s worst matchup is only a tie against Onizuka. These characters are balanced by their lack of mobility, which brings about its own consequences. The most important of them is the inability to perform dash nomash techniques such as the Single Rush. This forces Kirafi characters to either have to use other, less consistent and effective techniques to score, or to pass the ball to a dashing dribbler for them to score themselves.

As a result, their roles are typically not to score goals on their own as does a dashing dribbler, instead using their advantageous matchups to incapacitate the enemy defense and freeing the space for their dashing dribbler counterparts to dash to the goal.

**Shindou “kills” 3 defenders (Tenma, Torb and Kazemaru)**:

This is why multikills are incredibly important to using Kirafi teams properly. In short, multikills are when dribblers knock down two or more enemy characters with a single dribble move. In this case, the more defenders are knocked down, the freer your dashing dribbler is to dash straight to the goal uninterrupted. Furthermore,the more enemies are “killed”, the more of the dribbler’s gauge is refilled immediately, allowing them to continuously spam their powerful dribble moves. This is very important as the lack of dashes turns Kirafi dribblers into sitting ducks if they are uncharged.

Because positioning and patience is so important for getting good multikills, Kirafi teams are generally seen as more difficult to play properly, especially against high level players that know how to defend well. They are, however, also argued to be easier for newer players as they do not require good chain dashing to execute. Whether to choose Kirafi or Dash comps also depends on personal preference, with slow players like Infi being the epitomy of the playstyle, whereas hyperaggressive dashing players will almost always opt for Dash players instead.

As of Xtreme 2.0, typical examples of the Kirafi archetype include: A-Fudou, JPN Fudou (w/ body candy), Baddap, and Shindou (w/ body candy), among a few others. They are most commonly placed in the Attacking Midfield position, behind two dashing dribblers in order to effectively break open the defense and pass to them afterwards.