Spacing (Part 2): Projectiles 101

Without a doubt, the most useful tool a character can have in terms of controlling space is a projectile. After all, why bother getting in range to use a melee attack and risk getting damaged when you could let a separate entity do all the space control work for you instead? However, the rabbit hole goes deeper, as we’ll soon see.

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An important facet of all space control is the fact that your character can only perform one action at a time, including a fireball. Perhaps the most famous example of this concept is with a “shoto” character like Ryu. When Ryu is standing idle, he can perform any action he so desires: any standing or crouching normal or any special. Not all attacks are created equal, so what are the best set of tools Ryu has to control the greatest amount of space? His fireball and his dragon punch (or DP for short). His fireball is great at covering horizontal range, and his DP is great at covering vertical space. However, he can only do one move at a time, and each move has a whiff animation, so he must choose wisely based on what he anticipates his opponent will do. If Ryu does DP at the wrong time, the opponent can whiff punish him. If Ryu does fireball at the wrong time, the opponent could preemptively jump and hit him out of the recovery animation. To summarize, fireballs have the same intrinsic weakness that all other attacks have: they can be hit out of their animation.

Now that we understand that projectiles carry inherent risks, we must look at the rewards. In general, the reward of using a fireball is that it forces the opponent to stop his gameplan for the moment and deal with your obstacle. “How exactly can the opponent deal with this?” you may ask. Well, there are 2 different basic categories of what can happen with the fireball: either it touches you or it doesn’t.

Though it may surprise you, but sometimes it is best to let projectiles come into contact with you. Of course, getting hit is not exactly the smartest thing to do, so you’ll have to block instead. But, isn’t it best to just avoid being put into blockstun in the first place? Well, there is an advantage to doing this. As we established earlier, all projectiles have a whiff animation, so you can actually walk towards the opponent after being put into blockstun. This works even more courtesy of the fact that a character can only have one projectile on screen at a time, so there is always a gap between 2 fireballs. This technique is affectionately referred to as bulldogging, and, in a game like ST with extremely limited air mobility and defensive options, it is frequently the optimal way to stop a barrage of fireballs.

Depending on the circumstance, it is sometimes preferable to evade the projectile altogether. Obviously, every game allows you to jump over most projectiles, but, also obviously, this carries a huge risk. If you jump as a reaction to a fireball, the fireball will recover fast enough such that the opponent has time to perform an anti-air on you, thus giving him the advantage. However, you as the jumper will have the advantage if you jump in anticipation of the fireball and the opponent actually follows through, as now you are in a ripe position to punish the whiff animation of the throwing of the projectile.

Still, this is a rather simplistic view of the role projectiles play, as we haven’t even gone over the different types of projectiles and what wrinkles they introduce to the formula. Here’s a crash course on all of the basic variations of the Ryu-style fireball:

• Some characters can throw high and low variations of a fireball to more precisely choose which type of space they want to control. High fireballs miss crouching opponents but can be used effectively as anti-airs since they usually get in the way of most characters’ jump arcs. On the other hand, low fireballs are relatively easy to jump over, but they must be blocked low, making them effective pressure tools to keep grounded opponents crouch blocking. Good examples of this include Sagat from Street Fighter and Bulleta from Vampire Savior.
• In KOF, some characters can only throw ground-hugging low fireballs, commonly known as shockwaves. This is an especially important distinction in the case of KOF because every character can short hop over shockwaves quite easily, but shockwaves can still be used for basic pressure on ground opponents as discussed in the previous bullet point, even though they can be blocked high and low. Some of the most famous examples of shockwave characters in KOF include Iori, Terry, Geese, and Rock.
• Mostly unique to Street Fighter, some characters have fireballs that require a charge motion on the joystick to perform. To throw this fireball, the player must hold backwards on the joystick for at least one second and then tap towards the opponent and press the required button. Charge fireballs often recover faster than a regular one, but this is balanced by there being a longer gap between two consecutive fireballs, thus making them a more defensive tool rather than a zoning tool. In other words, their charge motion makes it so that these fireballs can’t be used as frequently as others would. Classic examples of charge characters from Street Fighter include Guile and Deejay.
• In contrast to charge fireballs, other characters have slow fireballs. As the name would suggest, these travel across the screen very slowly, so they control the same amount of space that standard fireballs do but in a much longer period of time. This more traditional style of a slow fireball is used by Dhalsim and Chun-Li from Street Fighter. In some cases, like Athena from KOF or I-No from Guilty Gear, these slow fireballs can recover quickly enough that the user of said fireball can follow them up for a strong pressure game.
• A more extreme style of projectile, lasers cover the full horizontal range of the screen in an instant, forcing ground opponents to stop for that instant regardless of where they stand relative to the user. Still, lasers frequently have longer-than-average recovery, so position and time must be very precise in order for them to work. Lasers are quite common in the Marvel vs. Capcom series, most notably used by Cable, Sentinel, and Cyclops.
• Cut from the same cloth as lasers, bullets are a spray of smaller projectiles that spread across a large chunk of the screen, typically forcing the opponent into blockstun regardless of where he is at the moment. Bullets are most famously used by Doctor Doom in Marvel vs. Capcom and the entire cast of Immaterial and Missing Power.
• Usually found in airdash fighters, puppets are additional combatants controlled by a given “main” character. Puppets can be used very effectively to cover blind spots in the main character’s offense, but they often cannot be used once the main character is at a disadvantage. Textbook examples of puppet characters include Eddie from Guilty Gear and Carl from Samurai Shodown.
• An item toss is a much more limited projectile than the other types. Item tosses often have slow startup, poor damage output, and limited horizontal range. Thus, their only purpose is to provide cover for the attacker by putting the opponent into blockstun, particularly after a knockdown. Johnny from Guilty Gear and Leona from KOF are perhaps the best examples of this restricted but still useful attack.
• Though it may surprise you, some games have grounded projectiles that are angled upward, making them viable anti-airs while retaining similar frame data to traditional fireballs. These are most famously employed by Urien and Gouken from the Street Fighter Other characters, such as Goenitz from KOF and Blackheart from Marvel, use grounded projectiles that are completely vertical, thus making them more potent tools for space control.
• Thus, what flows logically from the previous type of projectile are aerial projectiles that are angled downward. These are quite useful for protecting advancing jumps from any potential anti-airs or for protecting retreating jumps from the opponent dashing towards. Akuma from Street Fighter and Baiken from Guilty Gear are good examples of this in action.
• Some characters can use stationary projectiles to control specific areas in an instant rather than a given attack vector like most other projectiles. From a far distance away, these can be used to quickly place the opponent in blockstun to limit their options for that moment or at the very least discourage them from going to a specific area on screen. Spacing must be precise in order for these moves to connect and/or be safe in a zoning situation. Prominent examples of stationary projectiles are Kasumi from KOF and Parasoul from Skullgirls.
• Traps are similar to stationary projectiles but they stay active in that given area until the opponent runs into them, at which point they’ll take damage and be susceptible to a full combo. Much like the aforementioned stationary projectiles, they require an acute understanding of where the opponent wants to go in order to succeed. Traps are used almost exclusively by characters in anime fighters, such as Testament from Guilty Gear and Aoko from Melty Blood.
• Though more of a footsies tool than anything else, fireball feints are incredibly useful, as they trick the opponent into jumping or performing some other risky maneuver. These feints recover much more quickly than actual fireballs, thus making it easier to punish the opponent’s mistakes. Feints aren’t very common in fighting games, but some of their more memorable users include Haohmaru from Samurai Shodown and Sol from Guilty Gear.
• Characters that don’t have projectiles are sometimes given anti-projectile tools. In games like KOF, characters can roll or dodge to pass through fireballs. Other games give certain characters moves that reflect fireballs, like Rose from Street Fighter or Potemkin from Guilty Gear. There are even some characters that have moves that destroy fireballs, like Zangief or Hugo from Street Fighter.

Obviously, this is a huge, encyclopedic amount of information to digest, but don’t lose sleep over worrying about all the variations. The important item to take away from all this is that some characters don’t actually have to directly attack with melee attacks to press the advantage.

As a fun visual aid, here’s “Super Fireball Battle”, a gameplay exhibition compiled by Majestro of sonichurricane.com for Evo 2010:

Image source: SRK Wiki