SF4 Chun Li’s LP Kikoken has a maximum range of approximately one full-screen distance. It’s just about gone by the time she catches up to it. (That restriction hurts.)

Chun Li’s HK Spinning Bird Kick deals outrageous amounts of damage, at the cost of atrocious startup and zero frame advantage. Ironically, these limitations aren’t severe enough.

It turns out that HK Spinning Bird Kick doesn’t travel fast enough to match LP Kikoken speed. When factoring in all nine impact freezes, it’s not a close race. That rules out using HK SBK to push the opponent backward into the fireball. Chun Li is airborne through most of SBK, so interrupting her with a conventional projectile is out of the question as well.

With the benefit of certain (rather elegant) setups, it may be possible to connect a small portion of HK Spinning Bird Kick ahead of her fireball – which of course permits her to recover and continue the combo. Some of these sequences wouldn’t even cost her any super meter.

Unfortunately, a simple meaty setup is nearly sufficient to link after the last hit of HK Spinning Bird Kick – because its frame data isn’t bad enough. There’d be nothing special about using an inventive setup to combo after one or two hits of SBK, because we’ve already seen it done with LK Spinning Bird Kick loops since early last year.

On the other hand, if all versions of Spinning Bird Kick had terrible frame disadvantage across the board – in the neighborhood of -5 perhaps – then it would be worth seeing. A potentially cool combo setup goes to waste due a shortage of limitations.

Incidentally, the only reason Chun Li can’t link c.LP after counterhit meaty HK SBK is because apparently Spinning Bird Kick receives no frame advantage bonus on counterhit. LK SBK is supposed to be +2, yet she still can’t link c.LP (which connects on the 3rd frame) even if the last hit registers as counterhit.