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Martin: No Filter Fighters controls

Two players can share one keyboard out of the box. Every key can be remapped in Settings, and controllers are detected automatically once you press a button.

Player 1

Action	Default key
Move	W A S D
Attacks (4 buttons)	F G V B
Special	H
Super	T / Y
Sidekick	C

Player 2

Action	Default key
Move	Arrow keys
Attacks (4 buttons)	J K M ,
Special	L
Super	I / O
Sidekick	.

Menus

• Mode select: W/S to move, A/D or left/right to change CPU difficulty.
• Character select: W A S D to move, F or Enter to confirm.
• Stage select: A/D or arrows, F/J/Enter to start.
• Pause: Esc or the controller's Start button. Resume, Restart or Quit to Menu.

Gamepad

Plug in a controller and press any button once so the game registers it. The on-screen touch buttons hide themselves while a controller is connected, which is how you know it worked. Any button can be rebound in Settings, and that includes the controller's own buttons.

Phone and tablet

Touch buttons appear automatically on phones and tablets. Hold the device sideways — the layout is built for landscape, and in portrait the play area gets squeezed. Tap once on the game area so the touch layer takes focus.

Meta Quest

Quest 2 and Quest 3 can run the game in the headset browser. Open the game, tap "Play in VR", and it renders on a large virtual screen driven by the Touch controllers. Click the game first, then use the fullscreen button for the best framing.

If the keys do nothing

Click once inside the game window. This is the single most common problem: the canvas has not received keyboard focus, so the page is scrolling instead of the character moving. The second most common cause is a key remap that survived from a previous session — open Settings and reset.

How the buttons are laid out

Martin: No Filter Fighters uses a six-button-per-player layout rather than a motion-input layout. There are no quarter-circle commands to learn — every special and super is a single key press. That is unusual for a fighting game and it is the main reason people who do not normally play fighters can pick this one up in a session.

Four attack buttons, two modifier buttons

Each player has four attack keys in a row, one special key, two super keys and one sidekick key. The attacks are the buttons you will press constantly; the special and supers are the ones you save for an opening. Because the attacks sit under four adjacent keys, your hand rests in one place and never moves.

The sidekick button is a resource, not a combo piece

You can call your sidekick once per match. That single-use limit is what stops it from becoming a spam button — the decision of when to spend it is one of the few genuinely strategic choices in a match, and burning it early usually means losing the neutral game later.

Why there are two super keys

The game gives each player two super inputs, mapped to adjacent keys. In practice this means you can keep your hand on one side of the keyboard and still reach the super you need, whichever direction the fight is going.

Keyboard choice matters more than you think

Ghosting: why player 2 loses inputs

Most cheap membrane keyboards cannot report every key at once. The limitation is physical: the keys share a wiring matrix, and pressing several keys in the same row can produce an ambiguous signal that the keyboard simply drops. This is called ghosting, and the related limit on how many keys register reliably is called rollover.

In a two-player game on one keyboard, both players are pressing six or more keys at the same time. That is exactly the situation where ghosting shows up. If player 2's attacks sometimes do not come out, this is almost certainly why — and no in-game setting fixes it.

The practical fix

Move player 2 to keys that sit on a different part of the keyboard than their movement keys, so fewer simultaneous presses land in the same matrix row. Or give player 2 a controller, which sidesteps the problem entirely. Or use a keyboard with n-key rollover, which reports every key independently — most mechanical boards do this, most bundled office keyboards do not.

Non-QWERTY layouts

The defaults are described as WASD, but what the game actually reads is the physical position of those keys. On an AZERTY keyboard that position is ZQSD; on Dvorak it is something else again. The character still moves correctly — the labels on your keycaps just will not match the guide. If that bothers you, remap in Settings to keys that match your layout.

Controller setup in practice

Detection

Plug in or pair the controller, then press any button once. The game waits for that first input event before it registers the device, and the visible confirmation is that the on-screen touch buttons disappear. If they are still there, the game has not seen your controller yet.

Remapping

Every controller button can be rebound in Settings, the same screen as keyboard bindings. Do this in Training rather than in a real match: you want to test the new binding against a live opponent without losing a round to a mis-press.

What about fight sticks

A standard arcade stick reports as a gamepad and works the same way — press a button once so the game detects it, then map the eight buttons to the eight actions. The game does not require analogue input, so a digital stick loses nothing.

Combos: why this game has no combo list

Search for Martin: No Filter Fighters combos and you will mostly find gameplay clips rather than notation, and that follows from how the inputs work. There are no quarter-circle or charge motions to chain: every attack, special and super is a single key. A combo here is a sequence of separate presses you time yourself, not a string you copy out of a movelist.

What that changes in practice is what is worth practising. Instead of a ten-hit route, learn three short sequences: one that ends in a special, one that ends in a super, and one that drives the opponent into a wall. The third pays off first, because holding the attack that breaks a wall, floor or ceiling carries the fight into a different arena and resets positioning in your favour.

Test all three in Training, where a dropped input costs nothing and you can repeat the same attempt twenty times without losing a round.

Practise without losing

The fastest way to learn the controls is Training mode, and the reason is structural: Training removes health pressure, so a mistake costs nothing and you can repeat one input twenty times in a row. Arcade mode does not allow that, because every failed attempt advances the match.

A fifteen-minute routine that works: five minutes on movement alone, five minutes on one attack string, five minutes on the super. Then one Arcade run on the lowest CPU difficulty. By the end of that you will know whether the character suits your hands.

More Martin: No Filter Fighters guides

This page is one part of a set: the Martin: No Filter Fighters game page is where you play it, the control list maps every key, the Android guide covers phones, and the help page fixes what breaks. The II Turbo page explains the version naming if you have seen it elsewhere.

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