Spacing (Part 1): When and Where to Attack

When you perform an attack in any fighting game, the most obvious aspect of the move is the space it takes up in the game (i.e. what the character’s sprite or 3D model is doing and where it’s positioned). However, things are not always what they seem, as the sprites are only rough guides for the placement of passive and active hitboxes. To make a long story short, a passive hitbox is where you can be hit, while an active hitbox is where your attack can hit a passive hitbox. If you look up hitbox display for a given fighting game, they will give the exact area of your passive hitbox (your character’s body) and your active hitbox (your character’s attack), and this can deepen your understanding of how much space your move controls.

So we’ve talked a bit about the space of attacks, but we must remember that all attacks take up a given length of time. They are also hard commitments, meaning that you completely lose all control of your character, thus making them carry an inherent risk. The longer it takes for an attack to finish, the greater the risk. You can infer from this that the best attacks in a character’s arsenal not only cover a large amount of area but also are active for a relatively short length of time.

Having established the importance of considering both space and time when analyzing the utility of attacks, game designers and developers frequently create attacks with an established mindset of how to balance these two. In other words, they adhere very strongly to the philosophy that faster attacks should have less range and longer range attacks should have longer recovery. Let’s look at some examples in ST:

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Example 1: Fei-Long

Fei-Long’s attacks are incredibly fast, but they are sorely limited in range. He has very fast walk speed, but he struggles to maneuver around projectiles, so he should be right next to his opponents and constantly rushing them down in order to have a chance. Just take a look at his close Strong; it’s practically made for controlling point-blank space.

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Example 2: Dhalsim

Dhalsim has stretchy limbs, and he takes full advantage of this benefit no other fighter in the game has. Many of his normals have absurd horizontal range, but this is balanced out by their poor recovery combined with his slow walk speed. The further away his moves are spaced, the harder it is for the opponent to punish them after blocking. Thus, he should stand at the opposite end of the screen relative to the opponent so that he can keep his foes “in the zone” and not ever let them close the distance. As you can see in the picture below, Dhalsim’s standing Fierce covers a great amount of space, but also has a large passive hitbox, making it (theoretically) easy to whiff punish.

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Example 3: Chun-Li

There’s a reason why Chun calls herself the strongest woman in the world: her kicks are swift and cover a decent amount of space in front of her. In general, she’s a nice middle ground between the fast, short-range normals of Fei and the slow, long-range normals of Dhalsim. She has above-average walk speed, which allows her to easily weave into and out of the range of most of her opponents’ best pokes, thus making her excel at the footsie range. Her low Forward, pictured below, is one of the best footsies tools in the game, as it can easily hit other attacks’ passive hitbox when used at maximum range.

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Based on the above examples, you can see just how useful it is to understand the proper spacing for attacks. Just looking at the hitboxes is usually enough to get a good idea of how a matchup between character X and character Y will play out. Moving to the position where your attacks work best is perhaps the most important thing to do when you don’t have the advantage, as staying there will allow you to beat many of your opponent’s tools. In other words, the opponent has to ‘respect’ your best tools and has to work hard to find a way around them. In many cases, being in that position may even give you a slight advantage without a knockdown or the corner.

I can already hear your concern, “But, what about projectiles like Ryu’s fireball? Aren’t they the best at controlling space?” Well, in some sense, you’re correct. I’m definitely going to discuss the utility of projectiles, but this article is long enough already that I’ll save that for Part 2. In the meantime, I hope this 1st part clarifies some of the basics of spacing standard melee attacks.

Supplemental: Controlling Space in ST