One of the weirdest quirks about Sailor Moon S for the longest time has been its lack of an input buffer at the beginning of rounds. This small quirk changes the meta of the game, especially for characters with charge moves, as they have to wait longer to input any special moves.
That changed slightly, as the Toronto Sailor Moon community recently discovered a glitch that not even the Japanese players had discovered. Their finding was that if you are able to end a round with charge stored, that storage will be retained at the beginning of the next round — by way of the game engine not resetting the charge storage variable at the end of rounds. This gives you access to charge moves from the first frame of any round other than round 1, provided you already stored the charge.
But this wasn’t the end of the discoveries, as Koushun discovered that because the game does not read input in between rounds, you do not need to hold the charge in order to maintain the buffer. this means that at the beginning of the round, you can even walk forward for a frame before inputting the charge move.
海外プレイヤーが発見したタメ時間持ち越しを応用して歩き開放と組み合わせてみた。 pic.twitter.com/RjRbuUAKFe
— 紅春 (@Koushun1022) April 15, 2018
Sprint also looked further into the discovery, and found that the game goes so far as to not reset the variable in between games. This means that if you end a game with charge, you will have access to charge at the beginning of round 1 during the next game!
発見：再戦のラウンド１にもできます。タイトル画面に戻ればできない。
7E005D = 1P入力 (2=左)
7E00A4 = 戦中の1P入力 (バグはここ)
7E105D = シャボンタメ時間
7E105E = シャボンのステート (0=タメ中、1=タメた、2=前歩き) pic.twitter.com/xl3ymA6qKH— Gavin Ward (@SprntGd) April 15, 2018
This led people to ask what would happen if you were to lose and change characters in a tournament set. Unessential dug deeper and found that it would still store charge if you switch characters — even if the previous character used had no charge moves, such as Uranus, Mars, or Neptune. All that matters is that you store the charge prior to the end of the round. This shows that the charge variable exists globally for each player, regardless of character used.
This 24-year-old game still has territories unexplored. This new tech also may see some changes made to tier lists, as well as tournament rule sets.
Sources: Unessential; Gavin Ward; 紅春