Hit Confirm

For some people this might be the first time they’ve even heard the term Hit Confirm, so let’s take a quick look at the glossary:

From the glossary

Source: glossary.infil.net

Performing an attack, seeing that your attack successfully hit, and then reacting to this information by continuing the combo. That is to say, you “confirm” that your first attack hit before you launch further attacks, and if the attack was blocked instead, you stop and don’t follow through with anything else. This is important because, usually, you will be cancelling into a move that would be unsafe if it was blocked, so you only want to do it if it won’t get you killed.

In some games this can be a pretty advanced skill, since you might not have a tonne of time to recognise if your attack hit or not. In really fast cases, good players may even employ special tricks, like looking at the opponent’s health bar or using special audio cues, to help them react as fast as they can.

As the glossary mentions this can be difficult depending on the overall speed of the game and what type of move you’re trying to confirm from. Hit confirming a move like Saber’s second hit in her auto combo in Melty Blood Type Lumina is a lot easier than any of her other moves for example. That’s it though, did your attack hit? Execute your combo! Did it get blocked, either stop if you have used a safe move or cancel into a safe move.

Hit confirm

Hit confirming is a thing in pretty much every fighting game I have ever played. I am sure there are some exceptions out there, I remember Tobal No.1 making this at the very least insanely difficult, if not outright impossible. I claimed that it wasn’t possible, but honestly I don’t know. As it does apply to most games and as I know very little about Type Lumina, let’s move over to a game where I can actually talk about the subject a little more confidently.

While I haven’t played the game in a while, the most amount of time I have ever spent on practising hit confirms, was in Street Fighter V with Karin’s crouching medium kick. The concept is rather simple, if crouching medium kick hits, go into Tenko and then into Orochi. If crouching medium kick is blocked, don’t do anything. The execution of this when you’re starting out is not easy at all though. Think about it, you have only a single move to determine if you can go into your full combo, or not. Failure would at best lead to a wasted opportunity when crouching medium kick connected and nothing happened, or at worst you went into Tenko after a blocked crouching medium kicked and will now lose a lot of life.

As you can see, hit confirming is a rather crucial skill. Simple? Yes. Easy? No! But can you practice it? Yes, yes you can!

Practising Hit confirms

To set this up should be relatively easy in most fighting games, if not all of them and it should work almost exactly the same way too. Set your dummy to block randomly and only execute your combo when you manage to land a hit. If they blocked it, go for a route that keeps you safe, in Karin’s case, that’s doing nothing as far as I remember anyway. For other characters, perhaps in other games, the alternative route might be a safe block pressure string. The point is to use your hit confirm, to keep you safe and prevent you from overextending.

This might seem absolutely impossible at first, however this is something that you can practise and get good at relatively quickly. Infallible, maybe not, that would take a little, a lot longer if you can push it that far, but you can at least get decent enough to make your opponent scared of it though in a relatively short amount of time. I haven’t played Karin since 2018 I believe, so the recording for the YouTube video took me about half an hour if not more, just for this one clip. And even then, I am a lot worse at it than I used to be. It should do though, at least for the purposes of demonstration. As mentioned in the beginning, hit confirming can be fairly easy or extremely difficult depending on what you are trying to confirm and what type of game it is you are playing. Start out with the easiest one and work your way up the difficulty ladder. Do not neglect it though, because the better your hit confirms are, the scarier you will be for your opponent.

Closing Words

Have you tried to learn any hit confirms with your character? If yes, which character and in what game? If not, are you going to try it? Let me know in the comments either here or on the YouTube video! My name is Sasa and I will see you next time.