Most Common Fighting Game Motions – Part 1, Circular Motions

This will be the first part in a series on fighting games. In this series I will talk about the most common motions used in fighting games for a player to activate specials.

A Fighting Game motion is when a player in a fighting game, inputs a sequence of directional inputs, followed by a button that activates an attack that is unlike most attacks that are activated at the press of a button. These would be attacks like Ryu’s Fireball, Hurricane Kick, and Dragon Punch.

Before we discuss what these motions are, I will briefly mention how motions are notated in writing. If you look at the directional buttons of a controller there are four buttons, Up, Down, Left, and Right. With these four buttons, we get 8 directions, the extra 4 being diagonal combinations. To write these directions, we use the style of a number pad on an extended keyboard like so:

789
456
123

This is where 5 is no direction held, 8 is up, and 2 is down. All inputs are assuming the player is on the left side of the screen facing right, so 6 is forward and 4 is backward. Inputs that are executed in succession are written as one number, such as 236.

The most common of motions used by fighting games are circle based motions. Each of these are based on a circle. The first is the Quarter Circle. There are two quarter circle motions, one that goes forward and one that goes backward. They are both respectively 236 and 214.

236 is most well known for Ryu’s Fireball, also known as a Hadoken. It is most commonly used for projectile moves like the fireball.

214 is most well known for Ryu’s Hurricane Kick, also known as Tatsumaki Senpukyaku.

The next motion is the half circle, once again they can go forward or backward. They are both 63214 and 41236 respectively. These two have no well known moves, however they are usually special throws on character who don’t specialize in throws.

The last is the full circle. Full circles can go either way, but most games only accept counter clockwise circles, such as 63214789. These are most well known as a throwing character’s ultimate throw.

That is all for circular moves. There are some variants, such as two circle moves where you just spin two circles, but they are all made of these lesser moves. This part is concluded, however look forward to the next part about Directional Moves.