Why Some 22.5° Angle Shots Are Easier Than Others

The idea behind 22.5° super bullets is very simple: Dash in one direction and shoot in another. However, there are a couple intricacies that make certain angles much easier than others to execute.

Blue angles are much easier shots than red ones.

The first thing to understand is that Samurai Gunn 2 takes directional input in two different contexts: 4 direction inputs and 8 direction inputs.

In a 4 direction context, vertical inputs always take priority.

Shooting always uses the 4 direction input context, while dashing always uses the 8 direction input context.

This is important because, as you can see, the 4 direction context is asymmetrical. If a diagonal is held, in a 4 direction context, that’s always considered up or down. It’s easy to see why, in principle, this difference can cause some inputs to be harder than others, but to understand why it relates to 22.5° supers, there’s another fact about super bullets that you need to understand. You may even be wondering about it now: If shooting always uses the 4 direction context, how do 45° supers work?

The answer is very simple: When dashing at a 45° angle, the direction held when shooting is completely ignored. You’re already completely locked in to firing in the same direction you dashed. This mechanic of altering the super direction slightly is only present if the dash was perfectly up, down, left or right.

Since you can only initiate a 22.5° super by starting with a dash in a cardinal direction, there are really only two cases to consider:

· Dash horizontal, shoot vertical (bullet goes mostly vertical with a horizontal tilt)

· Dash vertical, shoot horizontal (bullet goes mostly horizontal with a vertical tilt)

On the first page, I made the claim that the first of these two cases is easier to input. Here’s where I back that up.

First, you input a dash. This is, as always, an 8 directional context input, so you must be sure to hold exactly the direction you want. There’s no leeway here.

Then, you prepare to shoot. Remember, you only have a handful of frames for this step; if you’re too slow, a regular bullet comes out with no tilt at all. Before shooting, the direction you’re holding must be rotated by 90 degrees. How tight is that?

Shooting always uses the 4 direction input context, which means that the answer is it depends! This is precisely where the disparity in difficulty comes from. When moving from exactly up or down to exactly left or right, you must be holding the perfect direction, there’s only one that will work. This means that in the few frames you have, you must push towards the direction you want and ensure that you let go of the direction you were holding, as well as making sure you time this precise input to occur before pressing shoot. But this input context’s asymmetry means the same is not true in reverse. When rolling from a horizontal input to a vertical one, there are three different directions you can point that all get read as the same vertical input. This means that it’s a much easier window to hit. This is true in general regardless of controller, but it is perhaps easiest to show using the direction inputs on an arcade stick:

Going from a vertical input to a horizontal one requires an extra step, and not an easy one

You can see that the additional step required by the asymmetry of the 4 direction input context is the most complex of them all. To go from a diagonal input to a cardinal input requires a fair amount of precision; you can’t simply let go because you still need to hold horizontal, but you must pull back on the vertical axis enough to cancel that portion of the input without overshooting and pulling to the opposite diagonal. All this in just a handful of frames!

Conclusion

this game is sick