Sitting here practicing Erron Black and his money shot special is "down forward square"

So I was working on combos and found that pressing "Square Square down forward" activated his money shot special... without pressing square after the "down forward" part. This kombo is not mentioned under any of his moves/specials/kombos lists. Same thing happens with his stance.

I'm wondering if this is a mechanic that's sort of hidden within the game. Have you guys found anything odd like this?

I would bet it has something to do with the negative edge being in the game from what I gather from Jason's mention of it. There were the occasional quirks like this in MK9 as well where button releases counted or certain inputs can be stored and then combos would work from there. It could very well be a bug from what I know but this reads to me like the way this game and at least a few other fighting games handle input.

It's negative edge and there's an option to turn it off under your controller settings. It defaults to on, and basically it counts button presses and releases for special activation.

See, it would make sense if the deal was that I was doing it fast enough for the second "Square" input to be put towards the special... but the second square input throws a second punch AND activates the special... it's pretty sweet, whatever it is.

Yeah there are some characters where negative edge makes pulling off certain combos much more difficult. For example I was messing around with Kung Jin's Bojutsu variation and I wanted to do his standard 1,1,1 combo into the spinning bo hit, so the total input would be 1, 1, DF3. However since DF1 is also a special move (the thing where he raises the staff and shoots a fireball) the negative edge was activating that move because I hit DF too quickly. This changes it from a decent little damage dealer, to 2 hits and a miss.

So if you are ever messing with a combo into a special and you find that it activates a different special instead take this into account and consider turning negative edge off.

@hypnotoadbrwowrowrow: It's like this: Press Square = Punch, Press Square = Punch, D,F+Release Square = Special

Ah okay, gotcha.. at least, that's what the game sees, I swear I'm releasing square before the directions lol Cool, that could make for some easy combos.

There could be some buffering at play too (haven't played the game yet to see, just guessing). Maybe they have a weird implementation of it; I wouldn't usually expect negative edge to buffer because I think of it as a kind of "manual buffer" (though it's possible that other games do this and I hadn't noticed). Anyway I guess that's what practice is for...figure out what patterns help you execute and drill them in :)

Yeah, it's slightly different from what traditionally constitutes a negative edge in games like Street Fighter etc. Their last handful of games have been like that, where a button press (or at the very least, a button release) BEFORE the directional input will still cause the special move to come out, which can be frustrating if you're playing a character that has two specials that share the same motion with a different button press and this effect causes one to trigger while you're trying to input the other because of the last button in the string you're cancelling from.