Questions on the properties of normals with respect to chains and links

i’m not really at this stage yet, but i’d kind of like to understand the logic behind when to cancel and when to link and what moves you can cancel into and what you can’t. are there any moves you can’t cancel out of?

i just hear people talk about a characters specific normal and it’s ability to be canceled into. i’m just wondering if that’s something you can tell just by looking at the frame data or something, like does it have a really short start-up, does your frame advantage matter when chaining moves at all?

and as for links, i just basically have the idea (but not sure if it’s right) that you can chain together two normals, and then you have to link into another attack before you can cancel into a special or chain another attack, and that this just kinda repeats.

and lastly. if you throw out a jab on a blocking opponent and it has a +2 advantage on block, does that mean you can chain that move (or link, or either?) into another move and it’s guarenteed to hit if you do it during those 2 frames where your opponent is still recovering?

sorry for all the questions, just messing around in training a lot and it’s confusing me a little.

normals that can be canceled from other normals regularly are generally part of a target combo, a set of gatlings using specific normals a character has. I’m pretty sure if your char has a target combo it would at least tell you in trials. either that or just limited to lights, which all chain into each other.

and yeah you’re mostly right about links. When you hit someone and a move has +frames, if you use a move that is the same/less number of frames in startup as the + on it, you’ll hit them before the hitstun ends, thus a link. In SF4 you can’t cancel chains into specials…with the exception of some target combos (hi dudley)., so you wanted to do 3x crouch jab then shoryu or something you have to link the last jab instead of chaining it.

thx, that cleared some stuff up.

so is that just a rule written into the game or is there a practical reason why you have to time your last hit so precisely as opposed to just mashing it out to be able to cancel it’s recovery into a special?

Huh? The timing of a cancel is not particularly precise, but nothing is so imprecise in SF where its a good idea to just mash it out.

Really though there are just varying windows of preciseness necessary. Cancels feel less precise than links, but thats not absolute. The window to cancel a move can vary, at times being so long it feels like a link if you do it late.