Ok, finally i have a little bit of free time to go over those clips. Sorry about the delay.
While making those Ken combo clips, i tried to focus on concepts that Saturn left out of his speedruns. Here's some of the stuff that i'm guessing he didn't know about ...
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SNES SSF2 Ken sample combo 1
A lot of advanced combos involve trading hits. In fact it's more boring to do a "perfect run" because it reduces the possibilities. Anyway if you are that adamant about avoiding damage, then you can do the same combo by throwing a slow fireball from full screen away and catching up to it using air Hurricane Kick. Ken can definitely do
LP fireball, whiff air Hurricane Kick, s.HP xx LP Dragon Punch as a 3-hit combo.
The other combo in the video requires very strict timing and spacing, and even then it doesn't always work, but it does look cool. I'm surprised that it wasn't used in the Ken speedrun because although it's difficult, it doesn't involve an elaborate setup. It only works against a small number of characters though - Guile and Bison for sure, dunno about others. They have to lean back a certain way after the c.HP in order to delay the fireball's impact.
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combo 2
Again, the concept of meaty attacks is something that Saturn overlooked in his videos. They open up a lot of possibilities for comboing after attacks with a lot of recovery, such as Ken's fireball. Every character put two fireballs in one combo using this technique.
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combo 3
Backwards facing attacks are triggered by very specific setups and character combinations. Timing is important but not nearly as important as using the proper setup. It also depends on the character's jump arc, because some characters' jumps simply have too much horizontal speed to land in the right spot. With Ken, you're basically forced to use a vertical jump but Zangief can do a backwards attack following a standard crossup j.D+HP splash.
It's much easier with Gief, and works against a much wider selection of characters. The best opponents for this technique are Guile, Honda, Blanka, Chun Li, and Ryu/Ken. In almost all cases, they have to be crouching for it to work. Once you get it to work, you still have to find an attack that will connect because most backwards facing attacks will simply whiff.
After Guile gets dizzy, Ken does a crossup j.HP which isn't normally possible. Some characters actually lean back and forth during dizzy animation. You can use almost any jumping attack as a crossup if you time it right, jumping from behind them so that the attack connects while they are leaning forward. It adds a little bit of variety to typical combos.
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combo 4
Lots of interesting things happen during this clip. First of all, Ken does an air Hurricane Kick against a cornered crouching opponent, which actually puts Ken into the corner briefly. This is important because in SSF2, the Hurricane Kick always pushes the opponent away. In fact if you do this exact same thing midscreen, making the Hurricane Kick hit Sagat in the exact same way, Sagat will get pushed away from Ken. However, in the corner, the game gets a little bit confused because it assumes that Ken is in the corner behind Sagat, so the Hurricane Kick impact pushes Sagat to the left. But as soon as Sagat gets hit by a special move he automatically stands up which prevents Ken from getting past Sagat and landing in the corner. So Sagat ends up getting pushed towards Ken. This combo contains 3 air Hurricane Kicks and it's all because of this setup.
The next interesting thing in the combo is the low jab followed by the third air Hurricane Kick. Getting that to combo requires a technique that i mentioned earlier, but Saturn didn't know about it so he misinterpreted it as something else. Any character with a rapid fire light attack can jump-cancel it by holding UF, U, or UB while chaining into the next light attack. Here, Ken does
LP, advance 25 frames, D+LP, advance 17 frames, D+LP, advance 17 frames, UF+LP, advance 1 frame, D, DB, B+HK.
This rapid-fire light attack jump canceling trick was also used in the combo against Guile after he got dizzy. I did
crossup j.HP, s.LK -> vertical j.HK xx HK air Hurricane Kick using the same method to jump-cancel the s.LK attack.
The meaty s.HK combo is interesting because it's not a simple meaty setup. Normally the goal of a meaty setup is to shorten recovery to link some slower attack afterwards. For example,
meaty s.MK, s.HP is a 2-hit combo although s.MK normally recovers too slowly for the s.HP to combo. However, the second hit of s.HK produces plenty of frame advantage, because it's possible to do
crossup j.HK, s.HK, c.HK as a 3-hit combo against crouching Ryu with the first hit of the s.HK whiffing. The problem is that s.HK normally pushes the opponent too far away for a follow-up attack. The first hit connects which pushes the opponent away, then the second hit connects which pushes the opponent even further away. Thus, the goal of the meaty setup is to reduce the time between the first and second hits, so that the pushback from the first hit is almost entirely nullified. This leaves Ken close enough to link c.HK afterwards.
Finally, the four-hit combo at the end uses two interesting concepts. Not many people know that the first hit creates one frame of extra hitstun compared to any hits in a combo. So Ken is able to combo
s.MK, c.LK whereas he would not be able to combo
crossup j.HK, s.MK, c.LK.
As Saturn pointed out, the game usually prevents players from canceling multiple successive chained light attacks. For example, Ken's
c.LK xx HP Dragon Punch works but
c.LK -> c.LK xx HP Dragon Punch isn't supposed to work. You can bypass this restriction using what's called renda kara canceling:
D+LK, advance 17 frames, D+LK, advance 14 frames, F, D, DF, LK, HP. Ken chains the second c.LK into s.LK (which never connects), and "kara-cancels" it into HP DP. It costs (at least) one frame more than a standard cancel but in many cases it's the better option.
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Well, that's everything for now. Hopefully this gives you some more ideas to play with.
By the way, it's universally accepted that the best games in the SF2 series are SF2: Hyper Fighting and Super SF2 Turbo. Obviously SF2: World Warrior was a huge deal because it was the first in the series and it revolutionized the genre, but in retrospect it simply has too many balance problems. SF2: Champion Edition has a few cool things, but the balance problems are still there because Bison and Guile are too strong.
When SSF2 was released in the arcades, it absolutely devastated the SF community. It was much slower than HF, the new characters were useless, nearly all of the old characters played the exact same way, and it brought no gameplay changes to the table. By the time SSF2T was released, it was too late and other fighting game franchises had begun to take over. Still SSF2T is a classic because they added a LOT of new things to the game and also to each character, plus they addressed the speed issue.
The only good thing about SSF2 is that it has a combo counter, which makes it a lot easier to impress people who don't play the game enough to judge whether or not something was a combo. Other than that, the vast majority of people prefer SF2:HF.
Haha, told you it was gonna be a lot of text.
