2

There’s two ways to combo moves into each other - cancels and links.

In a link, you let a move complete fully, it leaves the opponent in hitstun for, say, 5 frames more than it takes you to recover. So if you can connect another move within those five frames, there’s nothing the opponent can do about it. It’s a combo. Link combos tend to require a lot of precision in this game - oftentimes you only have a single frame of time to connect the move as a combo. One example is Ryu’s cr.mp, cr.hk combo - the punch leaves you at +5, the sweep’s first active frame is the fifth. Possible, but hard.

The second way to combo is the cancel. As the name implies, you start a move, and if that move hits or is blocked, you can cancel it midway to do another move. A standard Ryu example is the cr.mk xx fireball cancel. It combos because you cancel away the recovery part of the kick, so the fireball comes out much faster.
Typically, normals can be canceled into special moves and supers and special moves can be cancelled into a focus attack (which then can be canceled into a dash. FADC = Focus Attack Dash Cancel).

Some normals have the property of being able to be canceled by not only into special moves, but also into other normals. This is typically a property of light punches and kicks, and is called chaining. Spam cr.lp, you notice the punches coming out at lightning speed and comboing with ease. You’re canceling the jabs as soon as they become active. Chains are easy and effective, but have one downside: If I chain two jabs together, I cannot cancel the second jab into a special move. The last jab of the series has to be linked. So this does not work: cr.lp xx cr.lp xx cr.lp xx fireball. However, if you link the last jab: cr.lp xx cr.lp, cr.lp xx fireball, it works because the linked jab is special cancelable.

But yeah, if you are not stumbling onto the special cancelability issue, it’s just links being very strict.

3

Hmmm yeah I know a little bit about the cancel thing. That’s something I did in SF2 but didn’t know it had a name haha

It’s these simple little combos of normals attacks that are such a bitch to pull off. If I compared this to an instrument I would say at least the instrument comes with sheet music! There’s literally nothing for me to go off of other than trial and error y’know?

but hey! appreciate the info you’ve definitely helped

4

could you at least say that you too once had a very difficult time? That’d at least make me feel better haha : P

5

I don’t play Ryu but the only real way to get better is to play against people and learn as you go. Online or offline, doesn’t matter. You’ll figure out what needs to be done in due time.

The problem with the trials in this game is that they don’t tell you that certain timing on certain moves is required in order to complete them. When you get to the cr. MP in this combo, for example, you should already be inputting the quarter-circle forward on the stick/pad for the fireball.

At this point you shouldn’t be worried about doing longer combos. You need to just focus on starting to play people so you can learn fundamentals. There are other things that are considerably more imperative to learn, such as footsies and zoning.

6

Glad to hear it. I just want a little foundation outside of just knowing basic specials. My goal is to know a few good poking moves (like daigo seems to love cr.mk + hadouken), some basic easy enough to pull off combos, and at least one sure fire way to land a super (just saw daigo do it with a tatsumaki into EX hadouken and just tried it for myself and did it : D ) But you’re right I do need to get out of training mode relatively soon or else I’ll fall into the trap of getting discouraged before I even start playing : /

7

, denotes link
xx denotes cancel

cr.mk xx heavy hadouken (or ex hadouken) (<-do by pressing down-back + med kick, then hadouken to avoid accidental shoryukens)
cr.mk xx heavy tatsu
f.hp, heavy shoryuken
neutral j.mk, cr.mk xx special
j.hk, cr.hk
j.hk, cr.mk xx special
cr.mp, cr.mp, cr.hk (<-- hard link)

Those are simple things that will take you far. Apart from that, just focus on keeping proper spacing and pestering the opponent with light punches and kicks.

And yes, I struggle with combo execution all the time. Links are hard, little that can be done about it. In addition to sheet music, music has the advantage of being able to practice rhythm slowly and steadily, increasing pace as you become more confident. No such luxury here.

EDIT: overhead does not combo into sureyoucan. Notation corrected to Solar Plexus Strike.

8

You sir are the man! time to try these out ^^ I’ll let ya know how it goes : D

9

Ok for the most part no prob but!

just a few questions if I can ^^.

f.hp, heavy shoryuken
"f."hp f stands for far? any particular reason why far is preferred? cause i know for sure it works close up as well.

cr.mp, cr.mp, cr.hk (<-- hard link)
any advice for success in this? do you find yourself pausing for even the slightest moment at any specific point? or maybe you find success by having the quickest input ever?

neutral j.mk, cr.mk xx special
Im a little unsure when this would be used. its a neutral jump so would that mean it’s more so a defensive move? and when you say special do you mean any special like it doesn’t matter? hadouken? shoryuken? tatsumaki?

Thanks a lot man you’ve been really helpful

10

st = far standing
cl = close standing
cr = crouching
nj = neutral jumping
j = diagonal jumping

f = forward
b = back
d = down
db = downback
df = downforward

Also, in the old days the buttons were named differently, so you can see:
low = crouching
jab = light punch
strong = medium punch
fierce = heavy punch
short = light kick
forward = medium kick (so cr.mk = low forward)
roundhouse = heavy kick
cr.hk = sweep (because most characters’ cr.hk sweeps the opponent off his feet)

So f.hp = forward heavy punch which means Ryu’s Solar Plexus Strike command normal. If it connects, you can easily mash out a shoryuken and have it combo. It’s an easy, foolproof 250 damage if you can just get the SPS to connect.

Ryu’s nj.mk is a good tool for space control. It’s a tad defensive, but really is just a big stop sign in the air and a way to turn a neutral jump that dodged something into decent, safe damage (hadouken) or good corner carry (heavy tatsu). One thing that can be experimented with is a light tatsu to smack the opponent away to create distance.

The low strong, low strong, sweep combo is just plain hard. The only advice I can give is to remember that it’s two links, so mashing doesn’t help, that you’ve got to let the punches complete and to keep a strong, pretty fast rhythm.

11

You’re the man dude what more can I say haha :smiley: Not sure if you play on XBL or PSN but you should school me some time it’d be fun :wink:

12

Hey man,
I just had a few quick thoughts for you as someone who really struggled with links myself. I am a Yun player but I am fairly certain this can apply to all links in the game. These are a few things that helped me.

  1. Are you musical at all? It seems like maybe you might be since you made a piano reference earlier. I find that when you are practicing your links in training mode, pick a very specific and distinct rhythm that you will use and test to see if this rhythm gives you your combo. Listen to the buttons. Once you find the rhythm for that combo it will become much easier to repeat as you are memorizing a specific 3 or 4 note timing which you do in music all the time. (note: some people I know use visual cues for their combos so this may not be as helpful to you as it was to me)

  2. This one really helped me. When you are trying to figure out if you are pressing the buttons too fast or too slow, do your link and if the second move does not come out at all this means you input it too fast, if the move comes out but does not combo that means it was not input fast enough. Use this as a way to tweak your timing to nail those tough 1-2 frame links.

Stick with it i’m sure you can do it, also sometimes taking a break and coming back to it I find my brain has been working on the timing subconsciously and magically I am able to do combos on the first try that took hours of maybe a few successful tries out of hundreds.

13

That’s some good advice! I’ll give it a shot :wink:

14

Just wanted to give you guys an update! Andy that is hands down the best advice I’ve ever gotten on this game haha! Really thanks again man it was always the links that off put me to this game but now I think I’m finally here to stay!

Komatik thanks bunches for the combo help it’s definitely a great introduction for me. I actually decided to go with evil ryu instead just cause he’s for whatever reason not played as much and he’s similar enough to ryu. He’s pretty badass and I saw justin wong lose to an evil ryu player so I know he’s got to be a legit character ^^ Anyways really thanks guys I’m pretty stoked right about now ; )

15

Hey, I’m also a very new player and having difficulties with very much the same things! I already knew about linking and canceling which is discussed in this thread, but my execution is pretty poor, even though it is getting much better. The basic combos I use which have actually helped me start winning a couple games online are:

c.hp xx HP shoryuken
this can be used to punish an opponent if he whiffed an attack with high recovery or you managed to block it.

focus attack (to crumple opponent) dash forward f.hp xx HP shoryuken
When I get a focus attack in, this is the basic way I use it.

fj.mk c.lp c.lp c.hp xx tatsumaki
I use c.hp because I believe it forces opponent to stand, which makes tatsumaki hit. I do the full combo with fj.mk in training mode, but I more often start with the c.lp in a real game to hit confirm into the c.hp, don’t want to just jump in on opponent all the time.

fj.mk c.lp c.lp c.mk xx hadouken OR super
I use this when c.hp won’t be in range since this is less damage, but it is safer to whiff incase u are still unsure of if u can execute u might preffer this over the c.hp xx tatsu. I also use this as my only way to get out a super. I’m trying to not just randomly throw them out like I feel a lot of people do, but sometimes I do. Maybe if I’m ryu vs ryu and we’re both fireballing and I feel he is going to just start a new animation for fireball, I believe there is a timing which makes super unable to block if u just started ur fireball and u are close enough.

fj.mk c.lp throw
I use this as a mix up if my opponent just blocks everything I have a very basic throw mix up to keep my opponent guessing.

More advanced things I’m working on which I never do in real games.

fj.mk c.mp c.mp c.hk
Very difficult as other people have said, I only land it maybe 1/3 times so I don’t use this in real games, even though sweeps would be nice.

cr.mk xx shoryuken fadc ultra
Basic way to combo into ultra, but seeing as I land this maybe 1/10 or so I don’t do it in games. Everything except timing the ultra is pretty easy though with the shortcut for shoryuken imo, so I might try and start using this but ending with an EX fireball or something, not sure.

Other than these it’s just practicing fireball spacing and jump ins. Practice option selecting c.mk xx hadouken since it is used so often. What that means is that in training mode u stand away from ur dummy and do c.mk xx hodouken and if u succeeded u should only get the c.mk part. But if u instead do it and hit ur opponent, the hadouken should come out. I use this all the time in online play and it seems very good to do. Being very comfortable doing a shoryuken is also great since u should do it on reaction if some1 jumps in on u, or u can use s.hp, s.hk, s.lp, s.lk, c.hp etc for other anti air options even though they do less damage. Setting a training dummy to perform basic footsies against u and then u trying to punish that is also very good practice.

I have personally watched, enjoyed, and learned from the following videos which I strongly recommend u take a look at if u haven’t already:

[media=youtube]tcMVI-7cn04[/media]
[media=youtube]lz81hMjiwTQ[/media]
[media=youtube]v3cOd2doRqg[/media]
[media=youtube]jIsHUaFroJE[/media]

I hope that helps!

16

haha yeah well other then that for the most part a lot of what you’ve mentioned I’ve been working on :slight_smile:

“focus attack (to crumple opponent) dash forward f.hp xx HP shoryuken
When I get a focus attack in, this is the basic way I use it.”

I think there’s quite a few more things we could do with this : D I’m not sure if this works with regular ryu but if you did get a full focus attack off (which isn’t the most reliable thing in the world right? Not sure how I could bait my opponent into something like that… Unless wait nvm maybe on a stun I could do it) But yeah focus attack, HP,tatsumaki,shouryuuken + FADC cancel, ultra 1 : D Not good enough to do this yet but we can at least do it part way until we can fully nail it.

But yeah what platform do you play on? Seems like we’d both benefit from having a newbie sparring partner ^^

17

Another thing that I’ve been doing that I think is going to help a lot in the long run. No matter what special I do I will FADC (well other then tatsumaki ^^ ). I think this is just a really good idea as it will train your muscle memory. Cause as we both know FADC is soo key to being able to combo up some huge damage

Oh one other thing! Since I only really plan on using evil ryu it’s not a bad idea to totally customize your button configuration specific to whichever character you play. Certain combos were requiring some really goofy hand positioning so I just reworked the whole thing to make it work for me. If someone saw my layout they might think it’s odd cause I got the top row of buttons HP,MP,LP and then the bottom row LK,MK,HK, and then the 2 extra buttons as LP+MP+HP and Focus Attack.

just thought id throw my findings your way. feel free to bounce some more ideas off of me as they come to you :wink:

EDIT: LMAO! wow I’m an idiot! well live and learn right? Since I practice with all my bars at infinite I didn’t realize until now that FADC costs 2 bars!! holy christ lolz ^^ kinda wish it didn’t cost anything but then again I guess that would be a bit ridiculous the more I think about it. : P

18

Yeah like u said too much fadc might not be such a good thing :wink: and I think I will stick to that basic focus attack punish just because it’s something pretty easy to do, and I want to actually learn when and how I should time my focus attacks better before I go out and try and learn some insanely difficult combo to do after I get it in.

And I play on PC. I would be more than happy to actually have a sparring partner since no1 I know IRL plays any fighting games at all.

19

Oh perfect dude! Yeah I have the PC version too ; )

add me on skype – my name on there is "frank_desu"
and my windows live name is “ClickDecision”

EDIT: Turns out windows live is a piece of shit… I can’t seem to get the game to work. so fucking lame… downloads something after i login then it just gets an error and won’t work even after re-installing… fuck it… back to xbox… : /

20

Too bad about ur pc version. I sent u a friend request on windows live. If u get it working again just answer that and I’ll add u on skype aswell and we can start trying to improve together :wink:

EDIT: I’ve changed my practice in training mode a bit, trying to force myself to get good enough execution on things I actually need in real games. Atm I am also trying to look through match up threads to find when and how I should use focus attack mainly, since I basically never use this except occasionally when I am against a fireballer.

I made a thread asking if ppl thought my new practice was any good, here’s a link to it:

21

“• Crouching Light Punch 3x, Crouching Medium Kick, Cancel into Fireball •”

its a 1 frame link
looks easy but isnt at all … unless you plink it you wont be able to do it constantly
first practice plinking then 1 frame combos