Welcome back to Save State, where my fight stick went kaput due to my wife’s cat knocking it off of a shelf repeatedly, so I had to get a new one. Well, he did that three and a half months ago, but I figure I’ve used the new fight stick I bought for long enough now to warrant talking about it. Buying a controller is a lot more complicated nowadays than it used to be. Way back when, you could walk into a store, grab an official controller or some third-party version with additional buttons, and then head right back home to enjoy more levels of Super Mario 64. Of course, there were always MadCatz controllers as options in the event you hated yourself or your friends- nearly every gamer in their 30s had one of those $20 MadCatz controllers at some point, which promptly broke during any rough games of Mario Party (especially if you used your palms to spin the analog sticks).
Buying a fight stick, especially nowadays, is a daunting prospect. There are so many options, and not all of them are great in terms of price and performance. Some may prefer to just shell out the $300 or $400 to get a good one and then move on, but those kinds of fight sticks are considerably out of my price range: I don’t compete professionally, I just like putting baby in the corner in Guilty Gear and Street Fighter. So, while sticks like the Victrix Pro FS or Hit Boxes exist and are very quality for the price, I tried looking into different alternatives.
My original fight stick, an 8bitdo Arcade Stick, is a modest size, but surprisingly resilient considering it had survived multiple five to six foot drops because Midnight, the lovable scamp, won’t stay off my shelves. Due to the sudden breakage, I decided it was finally time to switch to a leverless arcade stick, a name that’s somewhat funny because leverless sticks are devoid of the joystick lever that is eponymous with the term fight stick. Instead, these controllers use separate buttons for movement actions- so forward, down, back, and up are all distinct buttons you can use with the tips of your finger instead of requiring full movements of your wrist to pull off special moves.
Ultimately, my research into a wide variety of fight sticks, both lever and leverless, led me to GP2040-CE, a special kind of firmware for Raspberry Pi devices that can support a connection with a wide variety of devices, including Nintendo Switch, PC, and even PS4 or PS5 (with some caveats). From there, I found a number of groups building their own fight sticks for sale, offering very similar feature sets, if not more enhanced features than the top dogs in the market, for a significantly cheaper price. This resulted in me ordering a Haute42 R16 Arcade Stick, fully intent on returning it if my needs weren’t met.
The Haute42 R16 is very minimalist. The arcade stick has everything sandwiched between two thin pieces of acrylic and has a whopping 16 buttons with LEDs and Kailh low profile switches underneath. There’s no loud click or anything when quickly hitting buttons in succession on the R16, which was actually something I considered important. More than a few times, my arcade sticks have made enough noise to actively disturb my wife, and the R16 is substantially quieter than anything else I’ve ever tried. The LEDs, on the other hand, can be quite bright and can add to the light pollution in your game room, though you can adjust their brightness to lower levels or turn them off entirely should you want.
Without jumping right into customizability, which is a huge plus for this arcade stick, the build quality and the buttons are probably more important to address first. One major thing about leverless arcade sticks is that you have eight buttons you’d typically use to pull off attacks and other actions- one for each controller face button, two for the bumpers, and two for the triggers. After that, you have your movement keys and jump button, of which this stick has two keys intended for jump because some people may prefer to jump by moving their middle finger off the down button, while others may prefer to use their thumb consistently. The R16 also has buttons for L3 and R3, which are useful for bindings like Drive Impacts in Street Fighter 6.
Each button has a several millimeter rim surrounding it, which a lot of these cheaper hit box style fight sticks were missing. Rather than what you’d normally see from popular buttons like Sanwa, who use a housing (which includes the rim), the switch, and button, the ones on the R16 are pretty low profile, and consist of just the button, switch, and rim. This change in design lets the R16 have an extremely thin profile which makes laying it on your lap or desk a simple task due to having consistently less bulk than most other fight sticks I’ve ever used.
Due to the simple acrylic panels that sandwich everything together, you can print and make your own customized artwork for the front and back of the R16 fight stick pretty easily. Of course, this was an alluring factor for me since I’m a graphic designer, but carefully cutting everything away until I had my own artwork layered underneath the acrylic panels was great. Placing artwork underneath the buttons took considerably more effort, however. You can also replace the switches if you need and can use your own art for the boot up screen on the stick, as well, though the image needs to be legible in black and white.
The largest thing the R16 does is give you an easily accessible button using your pinky finger, which you can use to really take advantage of your entire hand. Most 16 button leverless sticks have buttons on both sides of the jump button, instead, which I found gave my thumbs too many jobs to do while learning to play on a leverless. The duplicate up buttons, plus buttons to the left of movement and to the right of jump effectively give you two duplicate buttons you can bind to other actions as you see fit. To bind the additional buttons, you’ll need to connect the fight stick to a PC in order to access the web configurator that’s synonymous with GP2040-CE. This web configurator is also how you change the LED lighting to your preferred color combinations, whether you want the buttons to light up different colors when pressed and more.
The fight stick does come with a single page of instructions, and you’ll really want to search up a YouTube video or something similar to really get the most out of the web configurator. The instruction page shows information in both English and Japanese. It gives a brief overview on how to do things like change SOCD modes, which is important if you take this to a tournament: leverless sticks in King of Fighters XIV would allow you to do things like block on both sides during a cross-up by holding left and right simultaneously, for example. It also shows you how to change input modes, d-pad, or analog stick emulation modes, and how to cycle the built-in LED lighting setups.
Nothing on the included instructions even tells you how to get to the web configurator, though once you know how to access it, the configurator isn’t very difficult to use. Some may prefer to just gussy up the front and back of the stick with their preferred artwork and use one of the default LED lighting modes, of which there seem to be dozens. Otherwise, a brief amount of time spent in the configurator will let you adjust what buttons you want to be where, which buttons are which color at idle or when pressed, and more.
I play fighting games primarily on PC and occasionally Switch (I don’t know why I bought the Switch version of Under Night In-Birth II), so I was able to use this right out of the box. From what I understand, however, those on PS5 will need to use a Brook Wingman FGC adapter or something similar to facilitate its use on Sony platforms. I can’t speak too much about this, specifically, because I don’t own a PS5 and have no fighting games nor the needed adapter for PS4.
As far as build quality goes, the R16 will hopefully not be dropped too many times to the floor. While the switches and everything can be hot swapped due to everything just being sandwiched between two pieces of acrylic, this is a premium fight stick in a non-premium package. This thing, once I’m finished losing 6 matches in a row for the night, is going into a drawer since it’s thin enough to fit there. Acrylic isn’t known for its resilience against blunt force trauma after all. After having used this particular model for months, it’s held up very well despite a great number of play hours, but if you’re one known for dropping gadgets, you might need to look at something like the aluminum housed Haute42 M16, which goes for around $150 or roughly twice the price of the R16.
That being said, who is something like this R16 for? Well, my specific use case is: I’m a cheapskate with an art degree, and I wanted a 16 button leverless fight stick for PC and Switch use, so $78 seemed like a reasonable price for one. For those who regularly play on fight stick and want to try a leverless, the Haute42 devices might be right up your alley since there’s a lot of models for under a hundred bucks. If you already have a fight stick, but want one with extra buttons you can map, that would also be a solid reason for picking up something like an R16.
Who is the R16 not for? Anyone who drops their controllers. No, seriously, acrylic can hold up to my use of spamming highs and lows on people while trapped in the corner, but if you’re especially hard on your devices by dropping them, or if you for some reason are known for throwing them in a rage, this is not the device for you but also spend the money for a fight stick on therapy instead. I also wouldn’t recommend this for PS4 or PS5 players if you don’t want to do at least a little bit of troubleshooting, since you need to use an additional dongle to even get support on those platforms.
Overall, I think that the Haute42 R16 is a spectacular leverless controller that fits my needs perfectly. I wanted something cheap, easy to customize and decorate, with a lot of the buttons and features of controllers five times the price. Due to primarily playing on PC at my desk, this particular fight stick fits my needs perfectly and even works on Switch when I use it there, too. For those wanting a more robust controller, however, a little bit more can be spent to get a plastic backing or even an aluminum casing that will hold up far better against drops and falls than the R16. Over the roughly 3.5 months I’ve had this particular fight stick, it’s put in a significant amount of work and hits surprisingly above its weight class when it comes to features.
That being said, I think it’s safe to pull out some rollback net code on this entry of Save State. Join us again in two weeks when I discover some new, random title that I will hyper fixate on for roughly three pages thereabouts. Until next time!