By James Chen, with assistance from John Choi and Derek Daniels

April, 10 2000 | Over the many years of Street Fighter, Capcom has tried their best to make special moves easier and easier to perform. One of the things they realized is that people tend to hit the button half a second before they complete the motion for a special move. For example, if someone using Ryu did a fireball motion with the fierce button and hit fierce right before they reach towards on the controller, a crouching fierce will come out instead of a fireball because the button was pressed before the motion was completed.

Video Links
Guy's Whiff Cancel
Gen's whiff Cancel

To remedy this problem, Capcom allowed the first few frames of any normal move to be canceled into a special move. Thus, if you DO hit the fierce button half a second before reaching towards, your crouching fierce will come out. But, since you complete the motion of the special move, the code for the fireball will be registered, and when you let go of the fierce Button (remember, special moves can be done by releasing a button as well), the fireball will then cancel the whiffed fierce and come out. This whole concept is very similar to the "Kara Canceling" technique in Third Strike.

It turns out that in Street Fighter Alpha 3, characters with chain combos can take advantage of this, namely Gen and Guy. Since all the moves used in their chain combos are just normal moves, they exhibit all the behaviors of any normal move, including their ability to be canceled into a special move in the first few frames.

Thus, if you put two and two together, you can take advantage of this by canceling moves that aren't normally cancelable into special moves. Let's look at Guy as an example. You can do his normal Final Fight Chain Combo: jab -> strong -> fierce -> roundhouse. Jab and strong are bufferable, but fierce is not (the fierce in the chain combo is different than his normal standing fierce. Although the normal standing close-Up fierce is bufferable, the fierce in the Final Fight Chain is not). However, that fierce can still be chained into roundhouse. And since you can cancel the first few frames of ANY normal move into a Special... well, I think you're getting the idea...

Basically, this means Guy can chain his fierce into the roundhouse, but then instantly, and I do mean instantly, cancel the roundhouse into a special move... or a super combo. So as a combo, Guy can actually do jab -> strong -> fierce -> roundhouse (but only for a split second) and then cancel the roundhouse into the Level 3 Kick Super and have it all combo.

Now this is MUCH harder to do than it sounds. The time frame in which you are allowed to cancel a normal move ranges in the milliseconds. So essentially, to pull this off correctly, you have to do the standing jab into the strong into the fierce, start the motion for the super, and for the timing you would normally hit roundhouse to complete the chain, tap roundhouse twice as FAST AS POSSIBLE. The first time you hit roundhouse, it will chain the fierce into the roundhouse kick. And hopefully, the second time you press it, the roundhosue will be canceled into the super.

Gen can do this as well. Since his chain combos follow the ZigZag pattern, that means you can chain Gen's fierce into a roundhouse (standing only). So crouching fierce into standing roundhouse is a legitimate chain. Thus, you can chain the crouch fierce into a standing roundhouse, and then cancel that roundhouse in its first few frames into the Level 3 Zanei Punch Super. Basically, after hitting crouch fierce, do the motion for the super, and roll you fingers from roundhouse to fierce as fast as possible. If timed it right, the stand roundhouse will come out but then be instantly canceled into the super. So you can actually pull off a combo that goes like: c.jab -> c.short -> c.forward -> c.fierce and then do a whiff Cancel into the Level 3 Super, and it will all connect.

Keep in mind that this is all VERY hard to pull off, and its practicality is very much in question. Basically, there really is no reason to ever use this technique in tournament battle merely because its difficulty outweighs its rewards. Guy can simply do strong -> fierce canceled into his kick super and Gen can leave out the crouching fierce and just buffer the crouch forward kick. But it's fun to try, and a great challenge to actually pull off for you combo freaks out there.

And if you ever, EVER manage to pull off a whiff Cancel in the course of a real battle, I'll give you some major props!!!