Combopedia is a free fighting-game reference. 12 games, 281 fighters, 5,028 moves with input notation, all of it cross-referenced, searchable, and organized so you can actually find what you need.
No account, no email, no paywall on any move. Works on a phone as well as it does on a laptop.
Where it started
I am a returning fighting-game player. The very first fighting game I owned came from Odd Lots, the American discount store that resold whatever publishers had stuck in their warehouses. On a shelf that smelled faintly of cardboard, I found a boxed copy of Street Fighter Alpha for the PC. The cover art alone was the kind of thing a kid would peel off and tape to a bedroom wall.
I took it home and lost months to it. That is where the love started.
Then Tekken 3 came along and ruined me. To this day I still think it is the GOAT of all Tekkens. Greatest of all time. I will say this in front of any crowd, any panel, any bracket. The roster, the pace, the music, the ending FMVs that made you sit through the whole thing on every character. Nothing has touched it since.
I also played a lot of Street Fighter EX2 Plus. Please do not kill me. The game is fast, unbalanced, has an art style most people consider a war crime, and I love it anyway. The combos went on forever. The supers had more bars than a Marvel game. It taught me that the EX engine could be its own thing, even if it never got the credit.
Why I built this
I am going back to video games. Adult life took me away from them for a long stretch. Recently I have been working my way back to the things I cared most about as a kid. Fighting games were near the top of the list.
The thing about fighting games is that they have a learning problem nobody really fixes. Some give you a movelist. Some just hand you the controller and tell you to figure it out, which was magical when you were nine years old and had eight hours after school. Most adults do not have eight hours.
Even in the games that show you every move, you forget what you have already learned. The movelist on the pause screen is for during a match. It is not a study tool. There is no place to keep a running tally that says I know this one, I am still working on this one, this one came back to me last week. The knowledge slides off you between sessions and you spend the first half hour of every play session re-learning what you already learned.
Combopedia is the place I wanted to exist. Every move from every game indexed in one spot. The input notation cleaned up so it reads like English instead of File:Arcade-Stick-QCF.png. A tracker that lets you mark every move you know, every move you are still learning, and saves it in your browser so it stays with you.
What is where
The current shape of the site:
- Moves. Every move from every indexed game, color-coded by archetype, searchable by name or input.
- Fighters. Every fighter on the site, filterable by franchise, with their per-game appearances.
- Games. The games index. Sort, filter, search. Each game page is a character-select screen with the full roster.
- Series. One landing page per franchise: Street Fighter, Tekken, Guilty Gear, Marvel vs Capcom, Darkstalkers, the SNK library. Eras, iconic fighters, a chronology.
- Tracker. Mark every move you know or are still learning. Saved in your browser. No account. Export and re-import as JSON.
- Compare. Any two fighters side by side. See what they share, see what is unique.
- Quiz. Guess the fighter from the pixel sprite. Pick the games, pick how many questions, see how well you actually remember the rosters.
This is not my first one
I also built two sister sites. Same posture as this one: every fact, no account, no email, no ads on the data, made by one fan working alone.
- ▸Pokepedia, the free Pokedex and catch tracker.
- ▸JRPGpedia, a reference and party planner for the JRPG catalog.
Combopedia is the logical sibling. The same gap exists in fighting-game fan resources that existed in the others. The same approach works: put the data first, make it beautiful, make it free, stay out of the user’s way.