Arcade

Ourobøros

I see a lot of people talking about how hard it is to fight Serpent, and also a lot saying Arcade is a terrible champ, yet I find it easier fighting Serpent than Arcade. All month long, the sq was super easy, but this one for the last week, with Arcade as boss is driving nuts, how do I fight him? I brought CGR and Hercules, and I'm having my ass beaten

Squidopus

Vox and Gorr are the absolute best options since they can ignore his autoblock via undermine and have counters to his poison debuffs. In more general contexts:

• Turtle up and bait heavies. If he doesn’t have arcade tokens he won’t autoblock. Punish his heavy before the last hit occurs and it won’t trigger the poisonous cloud. Block heavily to push Arcade to sp2, since sp1 will unavoidably trigger the poisonous cloud. If you have a poison immune, the poisonous cloud isn’t a gameender but you still don’t want to trigger it since it feeds him arcade tokens regardless.
• If he does have arcade tokens, heavy. Arcade can’t autoblock heavies and he loses 5 arcade tokens on knockdown. Even if he somehow manages to get to his max of 10, two heavies will remove all of them. Note if he uses heavy with 2+ arcade tokens he’ll autoblock any attempts to hit him, but you can hit him mid-heavy with your own heavy safely to still prevent the poisonous cloud.
• Make sure you learn to dex the last hit of sp2. You can eat the other hits into block, but the last sawblade will grant three arcade tokens on contact and instantly ready his autoblock.

You shouldn’t be relying on traditional autoblock counters like CGR’s unblockable or Herc’s true sense because he shuts those down. Play his game and make liberal use of knockdowns and blocking to keep him in control instead.