What a time to be alive for fighting game fans. Street Fighter 6 just came out this year, there’s Mortal Kombat 1 on the immediate horizon, Tekken 8 just beyond that, and waiting in the wings is the upcoming free-to-play Project L. All of this on top of all of the still very much alive scenes of Guilty Gear Strive, King of Fighters XV, and much more. With all of those games, it makes the question of what kind of controller you want to use all the more important.
Ever since I started taking fighting games seriously, I’ve been a pad player, content with just using the default controller of whatever platform I was playing on. But during my recent trip to Evo, I saw a staggering number of people using leverless controllers, to the point where it made me think that it might be time for a change. Enter the Razer Kitsune, an all button fighting game controller that might just become my new preferred method of playing at least a few of my favorite fighting games.
Why Leverless?
Before we get into the specifics of the Kitsune, let’s break down what a leverless controller even is, and why so many people are making the switch. Instead of having an actual stick on the controller that moves your character in a full range of directions, that’s all replaced by buttons. The left-most three buttons are mapped to left, down, and right, with the bottom-most button in the middle being mapped to “up,” making it essentially the “jump” button. Then on the right side of the controller you have the two rows of four buttons each that you’d find on any typical fight stick.
There are a couple of advantages to having a controller with the directional inputs mapped to buttons: For one, input speed. When you do a half-circle motion on a stick, for instance, there’s travel time involved with the stick physically moving from back to forward. When you do that motion on a leverless controller, it's simply as fast as your fingers. We’re talking milliseconds of difference here, but with fighting game timings, milliseconds can make all the difference.
Then there’s accuracy to consider. There’s less room for error on a leverless controller because the movements are all digital. Forward is forward, back is back, down is down, and up is up. There’s no hitting a slight diagonal that causes you to jump when you didn’t mean to, or accidentally holding down when you meant to hold down and back in order to block.
And finally with certain games, there’s an advantage to being able to hold left and right at the same time. I won’t go into the specifics, but basically it makes performing certain techniques, like the infamous “Korean Backdash” in Tekken much easier.
Suffice to say, if any of these advantages sound appealing to you, and you don’t mind training your brain to press buttons instead of moving a stick to move, the Razer Kitsune will be an excellent entry point into the world of leverless controllers.
A Middle Ground
The thing that I like the most about the Kitsune is its size. It’s about the size of a digital tablet, at 11.66” x 8.27” x 0.75”, and weighs less than 2 pounds. That said, it’s not so small that your hands will just hang off the edge, and it feels very sturdy despite its size and weight. It’s got a removable aluminum top that you can replace with a customized plate, and the bottom has a rubber grip to prevent it from sliding around surfaces. Ultimately, it’s small and light enough to easily fit into the laptop sleeve of my backpack and I don’t feel like I have to worry about breaking, cracking, or denting with it in tow, which is a huge plus considering all of the walking that’s involved with carrying a fight stick around at tournaments.
The buttons have a very distinct feel to them, but are hyper responsive all the same. Razer puts their expertise in the world of gaming keyboards to use here by using the same optical switches as their Deathstalker v2 line of keyboards. The result is that the buttons are noticeably quieter than other fight sticks I’ve used before and distinctly less “clacky.” I personally like them a lot, but if for any reason you’d rather replace them with your own buttons, they’re all hot swappable.
Those are the big features, but the Kitsune nails some neat small details as well. There’s a cool LED strip that goes along the edges of the controller that lights up with some customizable lighting effects, a tournament lock that will disable the start/capture/home buttons along the top side of the controller so you won’t get disqualified for accidentally pausing the game, and a clamp that will lock your USB cord in place so it can’t get yanked out for whatever reason.
It’s worth noting that the Kitsune is a licensed PlayStation product meant for PS5 and PC hardware, not the PlayStation 4 or other consoles. It also costs $299.99, which is a lot of money for a controller that is primarily only designed for fighting games, but it’s competitively priced against both similarly small controllers like the $265 Snackbox Micro, and the comparatively enormous $399.99 Victrix Pro FS.
