Operation Shoryuken: Round 2

Last week I got reacquainted with the Street Fighter series via Super Street Fighter 4 on the Xbox 360. I managed to gauge my abilities and learn a little bit about the terminology and ideas behind serious play in this franchise. During the sessions in which I sat down to play since that last post, I had a few new goals in mind, including doing my first few special combos.

I’ve basically settled on Sakura for now because she’s a little bit faster than Ryu but her moveset is very similar, so there’s some familiarity there with the time I spent playing Ryu as a kid. I did drills on Sakura’s Hadoken and Shououken for a while, managing to land 25 of each in a row and only needing to restart once. I was pretty confident I could have done more than that if I needed to, so I was pretty happy.

Where I spent almost all of my time was back in the trials, determined to get those combos I couldn’t get before. It turns out the key to nailing them is what’s called a “cancel”. When you come out of a move there’s often an animation required for your character to return to their rest position. By immediately entering a special move after a normal attack that has this downtime, you can “cancel” out of the attack, skipping the return animation and going straight into the animation for the special move. By doing this you end up at a frame advantage, which is to say that you gain frames while your opponent is essentially stuck in the animation for being hit by your attack. If you can keep the frame advantage you can chain together attacks that they can’t really respond to. The combo I was stuck on with Sakura before was as follows:

Jumping Heavy Punch
Standing Medium Punch
Hadoken
EX Focus Attack

I couldn’t cancel into the Hadoken, resulting in two different outcomes: two punches, then a Hadoken which the computer would block (because I didn’t get the frame advantage) or a Hadoken never being fired at all (because in trying to rush to do the Hadoken I would mess it up). I tried this for probably half an hour before deciding to see if Ryu had a similar combo in his trials, since he’s a slightly slower character. His analogous combo was this:

Jumping High Kick
Crouching Heavy Punch
Hadouken
EX Focus Attack

The cancel for Ryu’s Hadouken came to me within a couple minutes of trying it. At first I thought it had to do with the practice I had been doing as Sakura or Ryu’s speed, but I think there’s something more to it: the command that precedes it is a crouching punch, so I’m pressing down after issuing that command. Since the Hadouken starts with a down and goes into a quarter circle forward, I could basically just press the following buttons:

Down + Punch
Down-Forward
Forward + Punch

And the middle two commands in the combo were perfectly chained. Sakura’s combo, though, goes from a standing punch to her Hadoken. This means:

Punch
Down
Down-Forward
Forward + Punch

I took a very careful look at what Sakura was doing when I tried again and noticed that I frequently did a crouching punch, not a standing punch, because I was getting started on the Hadoken too early. Keeping this in mind, I got back to work, and after another large number of tries, I actually managed to hit the whole combo. Adding the Focus Attack at the end was easy since all those require is pressing medium punch and medium kick at the same time, so canceling into them is really simple.

Determined to prove that it hadn’t been just a fluke, I went back to the same trial and tried again. It still took me many tries, but I got it. And again. I completed the same trial stage five times, and I’m not sure that it took significantly fewer tries on replays 3-5, but I still felt like I was starting to get the hang of what needs to happen. Armed with this knowledge of canceling and a few basic combos, I went into Arcade mode on Medium and made a lot more progress than I had made previously. I got up to my “rival battle” before having to quit, but in this case it was due to needing to go do something else in the real world rather than just pure frustration.

During the last couple play sessions, I’ve done a few different things, but I always start off by working my way through Sakura’s first 10 trials, then doing some drills in training mode. I need to get more reliable about pulling off the Ultra moves and the canceling where there’s no real way to simplify the number of inputs, but I’m confident that if I keep at it I’ll get better at both. The real problem to address this week? My only weapon from the old days of playing fighting games casually: button mashing.

—Casey

1. tehawesome liked this
2. warpskip posted this