Honda's starting to catch fire here...my goodness, even Ryu has difficulties with him, due to the fact that the projectile game is nerfed, allowing Honda better options of getting in. The lp. shoryuken almost always loses out to Sumo splash unless you do it late, both at the sametime and you'll get stuffed automatically, yet somehow c.fp will beat that out. What annoys me the most is the regular AA of Ryu, the priority annoys me completely which gets stuffed out by Honda quite a lot. The worse case for me is the c.fk sweep of Ryu, that used to be a huge bread and butter in SFII for stuffing Honda jump ins...however it loses out almost all the time due to it's lack of range and again priority.
All these together accumulate this match up to actually now be fairly close to even. Ryu still has the slight edge, due to a few a other options Ryu has, and the ability to land the threat of his Metsu-Hadouken for an Ultra. However, it's definitely a more annoying match up now, maybe not as bad as the Ryu vs Honda in CvS2 (RC ='s Pain for Ryu against Honda in here).
I'm starting to see why people are saying Honda is as solid as he is, the dude just straight up has strong options now. His Ultra may not be combo-friendly like Ryu's however I simply put my projectiles on hold whenever I see that light up. Honda doesn't entirely rely upon shenanigans anymore, and actually has good setups and moves, making him very good. I contest he's definitely up in the top now, imo, the more he obtains his potential, he'll be no less then Upper-Tier at the absolute worse.
Btw, Blanka has lost alot of fire, the dude, like I said earlier, he's a strong character only if you don't know how to deal with his shenanegans, however once you can pick those up...he gets hurt very badly. It's no different then ST. Blanka...if you can't fight his mixups and what not, you'll flat out get destroyed. However if you know his options and know it accordingly, you'll spank him very badly. SF:IV Blanka is much like this, for during the early parts of this games life, nobody can really deal with Blanka's options and simply saw him dominate far more, however it's alot more harder now, and you have to play really solidly to make him a serious threat.
Either or, this games sweet, I now have it on my pc, however I need to upgrade my pc, because I'm lowering the qualities quite a bit, lol, just to play it without any problems, hahahaha. I will say this, playing on the PC controller is complete and utter garbage, because I have trouble even doing FADCxxUltra with Ryu on that blasted annoying D-Pad...I need to find and buy that cord to where I can put my PS3 controller on there or something.