Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square Combo Cancelled

Combat canceling has already been discussed in a very comprehensive and technical length here so I'm not going rehash any of that wisdom. I needed an excuse to mess around with my amateur hour video editing "skills", so I wanted to visually demonstrate (through actual human finger input and the resulting player avatar output) some of the methods of canceling (instant, buffer) Eric Williams talks about in his article.
As an example, I chose Kratos' combo. Although at first glance, this appears to be an ultra button mashable combo (it is), there's a deeper layer of responsiveness that gives different types of players the ability to express themselves according to their skill level.

This brief video demonstrates the extremes in the physical input boundaries of the player. The first example is the classic button masher player where attack timing is thrown out the window. The second example shows the extreme case where the player can choose with precision when to advance the combo.



So how it is possible that the same combo can be performed with such drastically different input timings? Here's the non-technical answer via my amateur illustration:

In short, the player has a huge chunk of time to press the appropriate button in order to combo into the next attack. This is only made possible through the beauty of canceling.

NOTE: The goal of this post is to demonstrate through video and illustration the methods for canceling (Instant, Buffer) that Eric talks about in his article .