On what should I rely to time links in the Street Fighter 4 Series?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

Street Fighter 4 Series has different kind of links, depending of the frames to perform the following action. The hardest ones being 1-frame links. There are different techniques to stretch this frame window (e.g. plinking, double tapping etc.) but still you need to know when to push the buttons.

A link depends on the recovery frames of the 1st move and the startup frames of the 2nd move. You have to execute the 2nd move when the 1st recovery frame starts.

But how do I know when a character (e.g. Ryu) stops performing a move and starts the recovery phase?

I know several approaches but somehow they are all not that reliable.

• Listening to the sound, and getting a feeling (not accurate)
• Looking at animations (does not work that good, because of different delays of TVs / monitors)
• Looking at recovery highlighting of opponent on his health bar
• Disregard any kind of timing approaches and keep trying until muscle memory remembers the timing

So my question is: Is there some kind of reliable trigger to know when to start linking or does it just boil down to experience and muscle memory?