Chao Clash

Clash is the fighting game: two chao on a stage with platforms and edges, knocking each other off it. Open it from the garden panel.

It is the one mode you play with your hands. Race and Karate run themselves and Stadium is turn-based; Clash is real-time and every input is yours.

How a match works

Three stocks each. You lose one by being knocked out through a blast zone off the side, off the top or below the stage. The goal is not to drain a health bar but to hit hard enough, at the right angle, to send someone somewhere they cannot return from.

Everything is authored in frames at 60 Hz rather than seconds. What a player learns is “this move hits on frame 7”, so that number is decided rather than inherited from however long an animator made the punch. The animation is stretched to fit the frame data.

Techniques

Aerials have landing lag, so throwing one at the ground carelessly is punishable.

Invulnerability is drawn as a ghost, not as a visibility flicker, so you can see when a fighter cannot be hit. It applies to spot dodge, air dodge, ledge grab and parry alike.

One air dodge per airtime. It ends the jump and the fighter falls, so it is an escape you spend rather than a movement option you repeat.

Shielding

Hold to raise a shield. It is not free:

• It drains while held — about 6 seconds from full.
• A broken shield stuns for 60 frames, which is a whole punish.
• The bubble is sized from the shield’s remaining HP: it shrinks steadily while held, and drops in a visible step on each hit. What is left is what you can see.

Blocking uses the boxing stance, and a held weapon tilts across the body.

Parrying

A 4-frame window with 8 frames of invulnerability and 16 frames of attacker lag. It reflects projectiles and melee both — the tightest defensive option and the most rewarding.

Your specials are your Stadium loadout

Clash has no move-picking screen. The four moves you equipped in Chao Stadium are your four specials here. One place to build a chao, two modes that read the build differently.

There is a weapon select, one row per fighter under that fighter’s specials. It equips the weapon on the chao itself, shared with the garden and every other mode — so what you pick here is what that chao carries everywhere.

The translation is derived rather than hand-authored, from two things every move already carries:

• Its effect archetype decides the shape: frame data, hitbox geometry, launch angle, and which direction the move wants to be.
• Its power decides the magnitude: damage and knockback rise with it, and so do startup and recovery.

That coupling is the balance. A 125-power move hits hard and is slow enough to punish.

Three turn-based concepts are dropped, because a positional fighter has no use for them:

• Accuracy. A hitbox either overlaps a hurtbox or it does not.
• Energy and priority, which are turn economy with no turns.

So a move that was reliable in the Stadium because of its accuracy is a different move here, and a cheap move you spammed for its energy cost has nothing to recommend it. The same chao is a different fighter in the two modes.

Venues

Nineteen venues, from a plain competitive arena to stages with more character: the terrace, the beach, the bazaar, the dojo, a frozen stage, a summit, the rings, the heartwood, the salt flats, the narrows, the emberworks and the frostfall among them.

Every venue is held by a boss — nineteen of them, from Heartwood Court through to Frostfall Gorge. Each opens the next, so the ladder is climbed a rung at a time.

Between them the bosses cover every second evolution: all ten pairs a chao can grow into, and the moves only that pair unlocks. The last fight is Stillfall at Frostfall Gorge — a Chaos Chao carrying the Chaos Saber, and the heaviest opponent in the game.

Beating the first ten earns the Fire Catalyst.

The ten elemental weapons

Ten of the bosses each drop a weapon the first time you beat them (1.4.5). Every element has one, and the game announces the win the way the Arena and Karate already did.

Each unlocks one Arena art, and the art needs both halves: the weapon and a chao of the matching element. A fire chao holding Emberbrand learns Cinderwake; a fire chao holding Rimefang learns nothing.

⚠️ The Bastion is the exception, and it is a fix rather than a rule. Its art, Ironrend, required element “steel” — which no chao can obtain: nothing in the game grants it, no rite or catalyst reaches it, and the only “steel” anywhere is the Bastion’s own row in the weapons table. The art was unobtainable for the entire life of the feature. Since 1.4.6 it requires the weapon alone.

⚠️ Chaos is not the same case. The Emerald Rift keeps its element gate, because chaos is reachable — by ascending.

And since a chao’s evolution type now counts as an element, the matching half of these gates is easier to meet than it was: a run chao is a lightning chao for this purpose whether or not it has been through the rite.

The weapons hang on a chao’s back at the same size and position as the five that came before them. Every one of the fifteen is in the gallery, and the full table with effects is in the weapons reference.

Where Clash fits

Clash rewards you rather than your chao. A well-raised chao gives you better tools, but a strong chao played badly loses to a modest one played well, which is true nowhere else in the game.

If you have a Stadium team you already have a Clash fighter.