Combo counter

In any of the games in the Super Smash Bros. series, the combo counter refers to a function in Training mode designed to keep track of combos. For each consecutive hit on a character, the combo counter will rise by 1, until the combo ends or until the player faults and allows for the hitstun to elapse. The combo counter will register a hit in the combo if it was made before more than one frame of non-hitstun. If not, the counter resets. Grabs and landing or teching will reset the combo counter.

In Super Smash Bros. Melee, the maximum number of consecutive hits that the game can record is 32,767. This irregular value can most likely be explained by binary data storage, as it's equal to 2¹⁵ – 1.

Challenges

There are two Challenges that unlock trophies in Super Smash Bros. Brawl involving the combo counter;

• Banana Peel Trophy: Get a 10-hit combo with a character in Training.
• Ouendan Trophy: Have 400 hits in combos between all of your characters in Training.

Exploits

• An infamous method of raising combos with Mewtwo (in Melee) and Lucario involves going up against a wall, such as one in Fourside in Melee, charging their neutral special and continuously pressing Start to reset the CPU's damage to keep it stuck in the attack.
  • Another trick available in Brawl and Smash 4 is to set the CPU's damage to 999%, grabbing it and pummeling repeatedly; each pummel racks up a number on the combo counter, and the high damage causes the CPU to be grabbed for much longer than usual, allowing the player to pummel a large amount of times.
• In Brawl onward, Smart Bombs can rack up a large number on the combo counter by being thrown in a timed fashion so that each Bomb detonates right as the previous one finishes.
• Characters such as Mr. Game & Watch and Sheik can use their rapid jab to rack up hits on a cornered opponent. King Dedede's rapid jab in Brawl can be easily exploited in this way on a custom stage by hitting the opponent between two walls. In Smash 4, this is not possible due to rapid jabs (and other multi-hitting moves) pushing the attacker back after landing many hits on the foe, breaking the combo.
• In Melee, the Freeze glitch, Soul breaker glitch and the Ice Climbers variation of the Black hole glitch allow infinite combos on any affected characters; these glitches also enable the player to reach the maximum of 32,767 combos without hacking.

Trivia

• In SSB, the game wrongly resets the counter to 0 when a character bounces off a wall, is grabbed, or gets sucked into a tornado on Hyrule Castle.