Good question. I assume it was done just to add variety. If they were concerned with spamming an easily done move, they clearly overlooked o.Sagat. That’s why half the SF2 cast is charge-based, the other half have qcf, qcb, fdf motions. And a handful like Dee Jay and Chun are mixed.
TJ Combo in KI could. That way he could get in on the long-ass combo madness.
guile with no loads in his moves would mean inescapable block strings, lp, sb, walk forward lp, sb repeat till mofo is chipped. a good fighter should make it so that loads only take 1 sec bu retarded shit like what i metioned isnt possible. games like thisexist and future the most fun and offensive loaders seen in a fighter.
shit was basically needed to get rid of inescapable and unfair fametrapps/infinites. thats how it was in the oldschool.
If bison or balrog could move forward while doing their specials they would be very difficult to beat.
Generally speaking moves that moves you forward are charge and character that have back charge moves generally have down charge moves so they have more options.
It’s all about balance.
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Creates more opportunity for variety. If everyone had the same controls then it would actually make the differences between characters much less.
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Allows certain moves to be given advantages they wouldn’t be able to have otherwise. One of the most common benefits is recovery. Guile can follow up after his Sonic booms with basic attacks, if his Sonic Boom’s had such recovery and a fireball motion then you could just keep doing Sonic Booms over and over in a single combo. Balrog also has exceptional recovery after his rush punches that is only possible because of the charge time. Bison is another example, he can keep looping into Knee Presses if you block, but it requires some timing and skill and is escapable; if it was a non-charge move then he wouldn’t need the basic moves in the chain and could just loop Knee Presses inescapably and chip you away. As you can see, it allows some character designs and playstyles which wouldn’t be fair otherwise.
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Down-Up charge moves have an added bonus when used as anti-air moves. Because you do not need to press a forward or back direction, it cannot be broken by someone jumping over you.
they were originally designed to be defensive/turtle characters but have evolved a lot since then
but they’re still defensive/turtle characters lol
Surprised nobody else remembered, but yeah, this is pretty much the reason.
There was a thread here a few years back with old SF2 design documents posted (don’t recall by who) that basically explained that Guile and his easier charge specials were created to appeal to American players. If you dug around enough, you could probably still find the old thread either on srk or web archive.
have u ever seen gilley play guile??? hes a fucking wrecking machine son.
Very rare we get interesting discussions like these.
Continue.
Saki in Arcana Heart has charge motions for forward, back and up, down. On top of that she’s an offensive character in that game, so you don’t really need to hold back too often but defense helps. 
arent the input moves in general designed to mimic suposedly the moves of the char?
like you do the [4]6 with guile because he moves his arms frm back to the front when he does his sonic boom, or [2]8 because he crouchs before doing his flash kick
im pretty sure that i heard somewhere that it was one of the reasons of why the moves where like that
Yea, but a lot of the moves have a directional motion to them. Ryu could be a charge character with that speculation, down-up for shoryu.
of you look the animation of ryu, he does a little circular movement with his fist hence why the move is 623, contrary to guile wich his move is from down to up 
The Gamecube version is actually more balenced. Capcom modified some characters slightly,RC was removed, and Eo is an optional feature it has to be turned on in the options menu. Everyone bashes the GC version and never played it. You have to turn on the EO for it to be used in game its not a set feature of the game.
i played it, it sucked. partly to the shitty controllers. and only kids buy the N console.
You best be trollin’
Gamecube was the best console of that generation and had a large variety of games that “only kids” would definitely not buy. The superior version of RE4, Killer 7 and many others.
Not all charge are defensive characters. Bison and Urien are two prime examples of offensive charge characters.
Just like not all motion characters are offensive.
Jan 02 EGM had a mini interview with Akira Nishitani (creator of SF) and they asked him about the invention of special moves and he said, “Some people can’t do [button combos] right, so I came up with the idea of charging and tapping.”
Another tidbit from the interview is that blanka had a more natural colored skin but someone wanted him to be “butt-kicking” so they made him green. I’ll post the page once my camera is fulled charged (ran outta batteries).
ahahah this is sweet
so basically this interview answers the question
