How to Fight in Gakuran

Most “combat is broken” reports in Gakuran are the same problem: you never entered the combat stance. It is not shown in game, it is not in any tutorial, and until you press it your punches do not exist.

Step one: turn combat on

Press T (D-Pad Up on controller). That is the whole fix. From there:

The full list, including the skateboard and rhythm binds, is on the controls page.

Light attacks are a four-hit string

M1 chains up to 4 hits, and holding the button is more reliable than tapping it. The combo resets after a short gap with no attacks. The fourth hit is a finisher with extra knockback — and on styles with a Final Blow perk, such as WingChun, that fourth hit lands for 1.5x.

Both damage and hitbox size scale with your height, so the same string does different things on a tall and a short character.

The heavy attack is the whole style

M2 sits on a universal cooldown that does not change with height, and it deals 1.7x a single light attack — about +70%. Critically, it cannot be blocked. You either parry it, dodge it, or land your own attack before theirs connects.

What the heavy actually does depends entirely on which style you rolled: ragdolls on Muay Thai and Karate, invincibility frames on Boxing, a 1.5x slam on Wrestling and Kure, a 25% burst on Hakari.

Posture is stamina, and it runs two systems

Posture powers both sprinting and blocking. Sprinting drains it, and so does every hit you block.

• Run out of posture and you are vulnerable to anything — attempting to block at low posture just guardbreaks you on impact.
• Light attacks can break your guard once your posture drops below roughly 10.
• Heavy attacks break a guard always, regardless of posture.
• A guardbreak stuns you for around 2 seconds and deals full guardbreak damage. You do not take block chip damage on a guardbreak — it is worse than chip, not additional to it.

Posture perks are why Karate survives long trades: +15% passive regen, another +15% for 3 seconds after a parry, and 25% of your posture refunded on a landed heavy.

Parrying beats blocking, and costs nothing

A parry is a block timed to land right as the attack does, while facing the attacker. Get it right and you take no damage, no chip and no posture loss, and the attacker is stunned for 0.15 seconds — a small window, but enough to start your own string.

Posture is not required to parry. Even at zero posture a correctly timed parry still works, which is the single most useful thing to know when you are being pressured.

Several styles pay you for parrying: Boxing cuts 1 second off its heavy’s remaining cooldown, Basic and Ali get +5% on the next hit, Karate gets the posture regen buff.

Block chip: why blocking still hurts

Every style carries a Guard Pierce rating, which is the percentage of damage that bleeds through a block. Guard Pierce I is 10%, so a 5 damage attack that gets blocked still does 0.5. At Guard Pierce V — Slugger and Muay Thai — it is 30%.

Parrying negates chip entirely. Blocking never does.

Grapples decide even trades

When two players swing the same tier of attack at nearly the same moment (M1 into M1, M2 into M2), they can clash into a grapple. Both are locked in a clinch, and the player who swung first wins it and shoves the other back for 50% reduced damage. Both players are immune to third-party damage during the animation, which makes clashing a genuine tool when you are outnumbered.

Your chance to clash is the Resilience perk: 15% at rank I, 25% at II, 45% at III, 55% at V. Wrestling and Muay Thai sit at 55%; Boxing has no Resilience at all and can only be pulled into a grapple by an opponent who has it.

Dodging is nearly free

The evasive dash has a very short cooldown and grants a small window of i-frames. It currently costs no posture at all, which the board flags as something that may change. Capoeira’s Ginga perk cuts its cooldown by a further 25%; Ali’s counter fires automatically off a successful dodge.

A practical order to learn this in

1. Press T, then spend a fight only landing four-hit strings.
2. Add the dash — it costs nothing, so there is no reason not to be moving.
3. Practise parry timing on someone’s heavy. The 0.15 second stun is your opening.
4. Learn your own style’s heavy: look up what it does before you rely on it.
5. Watch your posture bar while blocking. Below 10 you are one light attack from a two-second stun.

The Nishikata Fitness Center is the accepted place to practise PvP without the crowd, and Dante’s Yakiniku Restaurant is a green zone where fighting is disabled entirely if you need to get away from it.