Gief's Gym - Special Cancels - A Practical Lesson for Absolute Beginners

Welcome back friends! I hope you all arrived ready to improve. Today’s workout will cover canceling normals into specials. Get ready to build that muscle memory!

Note: Be sure that subreddit style is turned on in order to see input macros.

---

Canceling: Normals Into Specials - All Levels

The Workout – In training mode pick Ryu vs Ryu. Turn off stun and quick rise to not waste time. Turn on Input Display so you can see exactly how your inputs are being read by the game. For now we’re going to focus on canceling crouching hard punch (cr.hp, crouch fierce) into hard punch Shoryuken (hp DP). For the full combo perform the following inputs:

+xx+

Let’s break this down into its component parts. First perform a crouching hard punch far away from the Dummy and take notice of the length of the animation. Then perform the crouching hard punch so that it connects on the Dummy. This time pay attention to what changed in the animation. The act of hitting your opponent added hitstop to the animation giving you more time to cancel out of the recovery frames of the normal. Now take advantage of that extra time and perform the full combo. Don’t forget that you can apply the Shoryuken shortcut to make this combo easier. For the shortcut perform the following inputs:

+>>+

Now perform this combo 10 times in a row. If you fail to perform this combo start back at zero. Switch sides and perform another set without failing to punish. Video Here

The Purpose – Canceling normals into special moves is a crucial part of the Street Fighter Series. This is how you are going to get the most damage on your opponent. Crouching hard punch into hard punch Shoryuken is a simple cancel and combos can get a lot more complicated. Many characters in the cast have cancels similar to this, starting with a heavy normal and canceling into a heavy special making this workout applicable across many members of the cast. Variations Include:

Cancel Into and Out of Other Moves - Not all normals can be cancelled into special moves and not all special moves will connect if they are canceled from any particular normal. This is evident if you try to cancel a standing hard punch into a hard punch Shoryuken or trying to cancel a crouching light punch into a hard kick Tatsumaki Senpukyaku (hk tatsu) +. The first cancel doesn’t work because standing hard punch is not cancelable and the second cancel doesn’t combo because the light punch doesn’t have enough hitstun to account for the longer startup of hk Tatsu. Another popular Ryu combo is crouching mk into hard punch Hadoken (low forward fireball, cr.mk xx fireball) + xx +. If you don’t feel like playing Ryu mess around with the rest of the cast and, given their command list, play around with what works and what doesn’t. Take special note that some normals are not special cancellable but they are cancellable into Critical Art or V-Trigger. You may even find that some specials are cancelable into Critical Arts, again, this is something I encourage you to play around with to discover what works and what doesn’t even if the resources are available to tell you what combos into what.

Deal More Damage - Now we’re talking about full on combos. Try linking one normal into another normal and then cancel that normal into a special attack. With Ryu I suggest working on st.mp > cr.mp xx mk Tatsu:

>+>+

There are a great number of combo possibilities and as mentioned previously, you may find some more difficult than others. If you don’t want to train with Ryu, test other characters combo ability. See Here For Combo Ideas.

---

If you have any questions or need a spotter for this particular workout, leave a message in the comments.