User:Zendo/sandbox

General

Movement

As a 3D fighting game, movement in soulcalibur occurs on 3 axes. The three axes are towards and away from your opponent, stepping to the right and left, foreground ( ) and background ( ), and vertical movement (jumping and crouching).

8-way Run

Not only is movement important for establishing your spacing and creating whiffs, movement itself allows access to a different set of attacks than if your character were standing still. Performing 2A while 8 way running in any direction will result in performing the 8-way Run attack 22A instead of 2A.

Crouching

Crouching is performed by pressing while guarding. Crouching will evade all high attacks, while mid attacks cannot be blocked while crouching. Lows can only be blocked while crouching.

Stances

Most characters in SOULCALIBUR 6 have 1 or more stances. Stances have unique moves not accessible outside of the stance. Stances are entered either with attacks that transition into the stance (indicated with ) or an input that puts you directly into the stance. Stances often restrict the users ability to block and move.

Attack Properties

Attacks can be categorized in many different ways. Attacks can have the following properties: horizontal vs. vertical, attack height, move level, weapon vs body attacks, guard crush, and throw attacks.

Attack Data

In soulcalibur, the total animations for nearly all moves remain unchanged for whether an attack whiffs, makes contact with a defending opponent, or hits the opponent. For this reason, move data on this site (taken from Frame Calibur, who have a mobile App!) will display information for attack height, Impact (startup frames), damage, frame advantage on guard, normal hit, and counter hit, and guard burst. Notes for a move will frequently mention Tech Crouch/Tech Jump frames or anything else unique about an attack or string. It is important how fast a move (breakdown of the frame data seen on each move list)

Horizontals vs Verticals

Horizontal attacks are attacks which track the opponent’s sidestep. Vertical attacks can be sidestepped.

IT IS NOT ALWAYS POSSIBLE TO STEP VERTICALS. There are situations the attacker is plus enough for a followup vertical to reliably track step. This situation is commonly referred to as a “forceblock” because the defender cannot step the followup a vertical attack. The defender may be able to GI, making it not truly a forceblock but that terminology is commonly used.

Verticals used in oki are frequently unsteppable. This is because it takes time for a character to get off the ground, so they may not have the time to sidestep away from the vertical in time.

Attack Heights

There are 5 attack heights: high , mid , low , special mid ,and special low . High attacks will hit standing opponents, but can be crouched under. Mid attacks will hit standing and crouching opponents, and cannot be blocked while crouching. Low attacks will hit standing and crouching opponents, can only be blocked while crouching, and can be jumped over. Special mid attacks will hit standing and crouching opponents, and can be blocked either standing or crouching. Special lows are identical to special mids but can be jumped over, while special mids cannot be jumped. Special mids and special lows are very uncommon, with the exception of standard 2As being special lows.

Throws

All characters have access to two basic throws and . There are 2 throw heights, standard throws are considered highs and will whiff on crouching opponents. Crouch throws will hit crouching opponents, but will whiff straight through standing opponents even if they are in range. All basic throws are light attacks. Only Astaroth’s command throws are heavy attacks.

Strings

Like many other 3D fighters SOULCALIBUR 6 has sequences of

Move Levels

Every attack has a property known as “move level”. Move levels are categorized as either weak, medium or strong. Move levels determine many different properties of moves. These properties are: the result of a successful Guard Impact and some Auto Guard Impacts, Clashes when moves strike on exactly the same frame, How much meter is generated by the move on hit (not on whiff), Some moves lethal hit conditions are tied to move level. As a rule of thumb, move levels generally exist within certain damage ranges. Lights 0-21 mediums 22-34 heavies 35 and greater. These rules are often broken.

Move levels and Guard Impacts Move Levels affect the result of a successful guard impact: When weak attacks are GIed, the GIer is +28 When medium attacks are GIed, the GIer is +16 When strong attacks are GIed, the GIer is +8

Clashes

Each light, medium, and heavy weapon attack is assigned an arbitrary integer which we will call the clash value. Light, medium and heavy horizontal attacks have a respective clash value of 1, 2, and 3. Verticals are given +1 to this value.

When two weapon attacks impact at the same time, the comparison of integers determine the result of the clash.If either move is a non-weapon attack, both players will be hit by their opponent’s move regardless of move level When both attacks share the same clash value, the two opponents stagger backwards and result in neutral frames.

When there is a difference of 1 clash value between the opponents, the player using the higher clash value move will complete their animation uninterrupted without dealing damage to the opponent, and their opponent will experience the same clash recoil animation that happens when the clash values are tied. This usually leaves the player with the higher clash value move at a significant frame advantage, depending on the recovery of the higher clash value move.

For example, a common clash setup occurs when player 1 is +2 and wants to beat a standard 2A. Player 1 attacks instantly with an i14 5B (light attack, vertical, clash value of 2). Player 2 attacks with a standard i12 2A (light attack, horizontal, clash value of 1). Both attacks impact at the same frame. Player 1 will “win” the clash and only player 2 will recoil. For standard 5Bs, this will result in the opportunity for player 1 to get a guaranteed attack.

When there is a difference of 2 or greater clash value between the opponents, the player that uses the higher clash value move will get a counter hit. No visible clash will occur.

Supplemental Offense

Counter Hits

Counter Hits happen when a player is hit during the startup of an attack or during the vulnerable period of sidestep or backstep. Many moves have different properties on counter hit, such as stunning the opponent or launching them higher.

Lethal Hits

Lethal hits (LH for short) are a new mechanic to the Soulcalibur series, making its first appearance in Soulcalibur VI. Lethal hits are enhanced properties granted to specific moves upon satisfying certain conditions. The game goes into a slowdown animation allowing the attacker to confirm into a damaging combo. The most common lethal hit condition is using an A+B break attack to counter an opponent’s GI or RE, called an impact counter. The only way to satisfy this LH condition is hitting the opponent during the startup, parry window, or recovery of a GI or during the startup or parry window of an RE.

Stun Property

Certain moves apply stun (indicated by the “stun” text appearing below the health bar). After the stun property is applied, every subsequent move in the combo will have counter hit properties, allowing for unique stun combos. Common ways to get stun are counter hitting certain moves, wall splats, and lethal hits.

Wall Splats

Certain moves will cause a wall splat when the opponent is sent towards the wall. Depending on the attack, this will often lead to a combo. Once an opponent has been wall splat twice, they will not be able to be wall splat again until the combo is over.

Defense

True to the Soulcalibur series, there are a plethora of ways a defender can stop an opponent’s offense.

Movement

Movement to create whiffs is the most basic, and powerful defensive option. Sidestepping and backstepping to create whiff punish opportunities from vertical attacks will grant the defender a bigger reward than the attacking player landing their vertical attack. Defenders can also backstep to create whiffs from out of their opponent’s reach and whiff punish with a long range attack of their own while the opponent recovers.

Combinations of movements are frequently seen in high level play. “Step Duck” (or “Step Crouch”) describes a defender performing a side step and instantly following up with a crouch. This acts to sidestep quick vertical attacks and crouch to avoid high horizontal attacks which don’t frame trap the initial sidestep. “Box Step” is the movement sequence of performing a backstep followed by a sidestep. Backstep can be canceled at any time so not all box steps have the same duration.

Health

Every character in Soulcalibur 6 has the same health value. The total hp for each character is 240. At the tickmark (30% hp mark, or 72hp), the health bar will change from light blue to yellow. This indicates that the low health player benefits from the guts bonus. Guts reduces the amount of damage taken, and increases the damage done by critical edges. Throws and Critical Edges which contain multiple hits, scale as if the entire damage was dealt as one hit. This damage reduction is a function of life remaining, and move level used to hit the low health player. Chip damage is unaffected by guts scaling. Chip damage cannot kill a blocking opponent.

Guts Scaling

Below is a table showing how damage values are affected by different levels of GUTS

Lights
30% health	30% damage reduced
20% health	30% damage reduced
10% health	40% damage reduced
Mediums, Heavies, Throws, and Critical Edges
30% health	5% damage reduced
20% health	10% damage reduced
10% health	20% damage reduced

Being in low life also boosts the damage dealt by the Critical Edge of the low life player. The boost of damage comes in 4 stages.

CE Damage boost
30% health	5% damage reduced
20% health	10% damage increase
10% health	15% damage increase
5% health	20% damage increase

Guarding

Holding the button will cause the player to guard. Players cannot move forward, backward, or sideways while guarding. Pressing , , or while guarding will crouch, while pressing , , or will jump. Timing the with the enemies attacks will perform a Perfect Guard. Perfect Guarding grants extra meter, completely negates chip damage, and reduces guard damage by a flat 1% per hit.

Guard Stamina

Every attack does an amount of guard damage on block, this increases the defender's guard stamina (up to a value of 100%). When guard stamina reaches 60%, the player’s health bar will glow yellow, when guard stamina reaches 80% the health bar will glow red. Guard stamina decreases passively over time whenever the player is not blocking. Guard stamina can also be reduced by running forward or by specific moves such as Sophitia’s Critical Edge.

Guard Crush

Once Guard Stamina reaches 100%, or would be set to 100% by an attack, the player's guard can break. Guard Crush will leave the opponent unable to guard, and the first attack that hits them will have counter hit properties, allowing for damaging combos. Only certain moves can break guard, for example, if a player does single A on an opponent's guard when they are at 100% guard stamina, the opponents guard will not break.

Guard Impact

Guard impact (GI for short) is a universal parry available to every character. In Soulcalibur 6, as opposed to past entries, there is only one guard impact option, performed by inputting . This guard impact parries every move type in the game, except for break attacks and unblockables. Performing a GI against an A+B break attack will result in a Lethal Hit for the attacking player. The guard impact costs 10% guard stamina to use (it cannot break your own guard), and recovers 12% guard stamina upon successful parry.

Each character’s GI is exactly the same in terms of animation frames and resulting frame advantage upon successful parry.

GI’s parry window is active from frame 2-11 The recovery is 35 frames after the end of the parry window This means the total animation for a GI is 46 frames.

Post GI

The frame advantage the defender gets from successfully parry the attackers’s move is dependent upon the move level. Parrying different move levels result in different levels of advantage for the GIing player.

Level 3 GIs (Light attacks) - +28 Level 2 GIs (Medium attacks) - +16 Level 1 GIs (Heavy attacks) - +8

The combo performed in post GI is scaled to deal less damage. However, the player at disadvantage has the option to reGI or reRE thus preventing a guaranteed combo. reREs are mechanically identical to normal REs but there are slight differences to reGIs compared to normal GIs. For level 1 and 2 GIs, the defender can reGI and reRE as soon as the attacker can take an action. For level 3 GIs, there is a 3 frame delay to the fastest possible reGI and reRE.

For a reGI: reGI’s parry window is active from frame 4-18 The recovery is 30 frames after the end of the parry window This means the total animation for a GI is 49

If the parried player successfully reGIs, the combo scaling in the resulting post GI situation is lessened.

Auto GIs

Auto GIs are specific moves which contain guard impact properties at some point during their animation. There are many sources of auto GIs. They may be attacks such as Xianghua 6A+B or Sophie 6B or They may come from stance transitions like Kilik’s Monument or Siegfried’s Basehold. Each auto GI has a specific subset of moves in which their parry is effective. Some auto GIs are only effective against weapon attacks, others are effective against high attacks, and many other conditions exist including combinations of attack properties. All auto GIs work against fewer total moves than a normal GI, so they tend to give bigger reward to compensate for the higher risk. This higher reward can come in the form of damaging lethal hit combos, guaranteed combos that cannot be reGId, and more.

Characters with a strong emphasis on auto GIs include Amy, Kilik, Raphael, Seong Mi-na, Siegfried, Sophitia, and Xianghua.

Armor

Armor is a defensive mechanic unique to only a few characters that allows the defender to XXX. The characters with the highest presence of armor moves in their movelist are Nightmare and Astaroth. Other characters which have very few armored moves include Haohmaru, Hwang, Mitsurugi, Tira, and Voldo.

Abare

Abare is the concept of attacking while at minus frames. This concept is not unique to Soulcalibur, but it is worth mentioning as an especially valid option in Soulcalibur 6 because the presence of GI (and evasion) means it’s a moderate risk for the player with advantage to use an attack. Moves with evasion, such as tech crouching and tech jumping attacks, can be great to interrupt your opponents mixup or evade highs/low attacks. The frame advantage from fast attacks is also quite small, so mashing a fast attack while at minus frames will eliminate the opponent’s slower, more threatening mixup options. Mashing at minus frames will also condition the opponent to use frame trap options, which in turn can allow the defender to capitalize on the use of guard impact.

Soul Gauge (Meter)

Critical Edge

Critical Edges are powerful attacks that cost 1 bar of soul gauge and go into a cinematic on hit. Performed using , Critical Edges are commonly used for block punishing, whiff punishing, and during combos. They are NOT reversals.

Soul Charge

Soul Charge is a new technique in SOULCALIBUR VI (despite sharing a name with a different technique in older games). Performed using , Soul Charge will spend 1 bar to knock the opponent back and put the user in a powered up state with powerful moves exclusive to soul charge. Soul charge also causes your attacks to deal chip damage

Soul Attack

Soul Attack is a technique added in season 2 of SOULCALIBUR VI. Soul attack costs 1 bar and is performed using . Soul Attack is a unique attack that will put the user into Soul Charge.

Resist Impact

Resist Impact is an enhanced Guard Impact performed with . It is identical to Guard Impact except that it works on Break Attacks and Unblockables, and costs ½ of a bar of soul gauge instead of 10% guard stamina to perform.

Meter Burning Attacks

Meter burning attacks, commonly referred to as Brave Edges (holdover term from SC5), are attacks that require the user to expend a portion of their soul gauge to perform. 4 characters have meter burning attacks (Yoshimitsu, Geralt, Setsuka, and Groh).

Gaining Meter

Meter can be gained in the following ways: Moving Forward while in 8 Way Run (after a few steps), Landing an attack, Whiffing an attack (or getting an attack blocked), getting hit by an attack, Throwing the opponent, Getting your throw broken, breaking a throw, lethal hits, successful just inputs, parrying a move with reversal edge, landing a reversal edge on guard/on hit (different amounts awarded), landing a charged reversal edge on guard/on hit, losing a round resulting in your opponent being 1 round away from winning the game.

Regular meter gain Light attack: 1/60th of a bar medium attack: 1/24th Heavy attack: 1/15th Whiffed attack: 1/120th

Setsuka meter gain Light attack: 1/60th medium attack: 1/40th Heavy attack: 1/30th Setsuka gains less meter from forward run and reversal edge

Knockdowns

Knockdowns are the single best source of offense and mixup potential in Soulcalibur VI. This is because the options of the defender getting off the ground are dramatically reduced.

How to Knock the Opponent Down

Knockdowns come from many different sources. Universal options that every character has to knock the opponent down on hit are s and both normal throws( and ). s will launch the opponent into the air with enough time to perform a damaging combo. Most combos will result in the defender in a grounded position and the attacking player at significant damage. Throws are powerful because they are unblockable and result in a knockdown and advantage upon successful. Counter hits are another common source of knockdowns. Many moves have counter hit properties which will result in knockdown. Counter hitting and knocking down your opponent for either attacking or stepping are powerful ways to make your opponent think twice about taking action.

Types of Knockdowns

There are fundamentally two types of knockdowns: hard knock downs and ukemiable knockdowns. Ukemiable knockdowns allow the defender to perform an ukemi. Hard knockdowns disallow the defender from performing an ukemi, thus limiting the defender’s total options.

Defender Grounded Actions

Defender can get up with guard, roll sideways, roll towards the opponent, or roll away from the opponent. Kilik, Taki and Xianghua are the only characters that have unique attacks that can only be performed while downed

Forward roll and backwards roll will return the defender to a standing position. The defender is vulnerable to ground hitting moves for the entirety of this animation.

Side roll will keep the defender in the downed position. This can be useful for evading certain verticals used for oki.