Input Styles in Street Fighter

What is an input?

An input in a fighting game (and generally most video games in general) are what allow you to influence what your character or something else on the screen is doing. In our case for describing input styles, we'll be talking about the motion of a joystick in order to perform special moves.

Some examples of inputs

What Makes a Charge Character?

As mentioned previously, a charge character is a characer who has to use charge motions to use certain special moves. Some charge characters can be exclusively charge characters and others can have them mixed in with normal motion inputs. Charge characters typically have the following aspects to them (but some aren't always true):

• A special move that can only be used by charging.
• A more defensive playstyle.
• The moves accessed through charging tends to have lower startup and/or recovery to make up for the time charging.

Again, these aren't always the case. For example, characters like M. Bison breaks the second rule as he is a very offense/pressure-heavy character. Rule three also varies between games, characters, and move strength.

Pure Charge Characters

A charge move is a special move that can only be performed by "charging" an input. This means that you'll have to hold the stick in one direction for a set amount of time before flicking it quickly in the opposite direction and pressing an attack button.

Some characters in fighting games are entirely based around charge moves, meaning that they won't have any motion specials associated with them. Depending on the character, this typically leads to a small amount of special moves while providing a lot more directional normals. In Street Fighter V, Guile is the only character to have exclusively charge specials. As it stands, there are only two ways to do charge specials in Street Fighter V, and those are holding backwards and then flicking forward after a short period, and holding downward and flicking upward after a short period. Both of which will require either a punch or kick button during the flick forward depending on the move for the character.

Please note, my definition of a charge character only applies to special moves, not a super move. If a character only has charge specials but has a motion super, I would consider them to be a pure charge character.

Pure Motion Characters

A "pure motion character" is one that has no charge moves. For the sake of simplicity, mashed and stored inputs are included in this category. These inputs can vary in complexity depending on the character and even the fighting game itself. In Street Fighter V, these are the types of motion specials in the game (while facing right, abreviations and numpad notation included):

Hybrid Characters

Some characters are what I would call "Hybrid" characters, meaning that they have both motion and charge moves. Some characters have multiple charge moves while only having one non-super motion inputs (such as M. Bison, Balrog, or F.A.N.G.), others have the opposite, where they'll have all motion inputs with only a single charge move (such as Necalli or Vega*).

*Vega technically has two charge specials, however one is stage specific and the stage is banned in competetive play for this reason. Good thing the move is a waste of meter.

What Input Style is Each Street Fighter V Character?