The Capcom Pro Tour 2023 US/Canada East event that took place over this past weekend proved to be an interesting event. Though SR|NuckleDu ended up taking the Capcom Cup X qualifier slot with his first place victory at the online premier, Paladin, a 16-year-old Ryu player, became a bit of a fan favorite upon defeating XSET|iDom and eliminating FLY|Punk.
Ultimately, Paladin ended up securing a respectable fourth place finish at the event. Paladin was able to do this through his talent and hard work with Ryu. However, it seems that Punk was plagued by an input issue present in Street Fighter 6 during his first match against Paladin during their set together.
As analyzed by MDZ Jimmy, also a Ryu loyalist, there was a sequence in which Punk was clearly trying to use Cammy’s Cannon Spike to anti-air Paladin’s jump in attempt with Ryu, but instead got Spiral Arrow — hilariously dubbed “Spiral Error” by MDZ Jimmy.
Under normal circumstances, the Dragon Punch motion (forward, down, and down-forward) is supposed to take priority over the fireball motion (down, down-forward, and forward) in Street Fighter 6. In previous games, this has made it difficult for some players to walk forward, poke with a crouching medium kick, and cancel into a fireball.
It would seem that Capcom had hoped to remedy this problem by also making quarter-circle forward motions also have a half-circle motion variant (back, down-back, down, down-forward, and forward). Using a half-circle motion for a fireball motion will have it so that the fireball special takes priority over any Dragon Punch specials a character may have access to.
Needless to say, this ended up being a costly error for Punk as Paladin was able to take the match thanks to that jump in, which later turned into a 3-0 set victory for Paladin. Regardless, this scene highlights one of the problems with Street Fighter 6’s input system and its potential consequences.
Here’s hoping that Capcom can make some adjustments to Street Fighter 6’s input system in a future patch to address this problem.
During my analysis of Paladins recent CPT run I discovered something interesting:
Punk lost his first match against Paladin because of an accidental spiral arrow input which ONLY exists in SF6!
Here’s what happened (1/4) pic.twitter.com/EuRNi8xd2W— Ali Abbas (@MDZ_jimmY) January 16, 2024