Well, they shouldn’t ‘do the same thing’. I mean, on some characters, A and B might look the same, but MOST a/b/c attacks (standing, dashing, crouching) should look unique, with a FEW cases of duplicated sprites/frames.
There ARE exceptions, but most chains in the game (many of which basically follow Magic Series behaviors) are in stand-ON mode for characters with stand.
Most stand-OFF mode chars (and some characters without a stand) often don’t have any chains at all, though most chars have a jab or crouching jab that can rapid fire into itself.
Example exception: mariah’s cr.a will chain into a 3 hit chain if you keep pressing it.
So barring any other exceptions for chaining that I can’t think of off the top of my head (I’m at work, can’t spend too long replying) you have two options:
- Cancels. Like mvc2, you can cancel almost all normals into specials, even on whiff - during startup or recovery or hit). Same with most supers.
- Links. For better or worse, the game has a lot of links. How bad you have it depends on your character. I’m bad with links in general, so that somewhat influences the characters I play. My main, Young Joseph, only really needs one main link: cr.A, cr.A, <link> standing B xx (Special of choice).
One thing that I will always happily point out to new players is that there’s a shortcut to turn on stand AND do an attack in stand mode, useful if you have an active stand/weapon stand. While stand is off, when an opponent leaves themselves open, press the desired attack AND the stand button at the same time, ie, S+A. That’ll instantly do the stand-on attack. So for example, even with stand off, you can run around, zone and space as you like, and as soon as an opponent is open, you can let loose with you character’s desired response, like S+A, B, C xx QCF+whatever.
I dunno anything about what kinds of characters you like, but characters with relatively (easier) execution requirements when you’re learning are probably Anubis Polnareff (for sure) and maybe S. Dio (he has an easy loop, though there’s a link in it). Mariah is ‘easy’ to understand, but she’s low tier and more dependent on you knowing the game and matchups than her movelist. She’s also a ‘weirder’ character in how different she plays than most of the cast, so might not translate to general proficiency at the game. Y. Joseph is ‘easy’ to get basic combos down, but I think he has the same attributes for new players as Mariah.
You can see combos for the characters @ standcrash, but also in videos linked there and in the new player resources I mentioned in my last post.
