Screen Freeze

Screen Freeze is a mechanic in the Street Fighter Series where many attacks temporarily pause the action.

Description
Screen Freeze is not exclusive to Street Figther, as other franches like the Super Mario and Legend of Zelda franchises also use the mechanic, in Mario screen freeze occurs when the player is hit and in Zelda games such as Twilight Princess screen freeze occurs when the player successfully makes contact with the enemy. Sometimes Screen Freeze only affects affects the characters making contact and other pauses the whole game.

In Street Fighter


In Street Fighter Screen Freeze occur on most normal attacks and unique attacks such as Reverse Spin Kick. Most Special Attacks do not do screen freeze in the main series, with unsafe special attacks tending to do very little to no screen freeze due to little need. In some team games such as Street Fighter X Tekken sometimes screen freeeze is increased on specials for safer tags. Screen Freeze is used as in modern games the amount of frames available to Combo is rather low. Screen freeze gives players more time to confirm if attacks connected or were blocked without increasing the frames to combo.