The punch landed. The sound was still winding up.
The uppercut sound had a 290 ms wind-up inside the file. Trimming it moved the impact to about 5 ms. The delay was in the asset.
// 01
Look inside the sound
The ChampChase audio review started with punches that felt like light taps or sounded late. Its candidate inspection measured low-frequency energy, peak and average level, attack time, and how much energy arrived in the first 60 milliseconds. Waveforms and spectrograms helped separate an immediate impact from a quiet lead-in followed by a thin spike.
// 02
A specific fix, in milliseconds
One selected uppercut had roughly 290 milliseconds of wind-up before the hit. The review records a front trim that moved the thump to about 5 milliseconds into a 0.26-second clip. This is timing within the audio asset. It is not a measurement of input latency, frame rate or the whole audio engine.
// 03
Immediate was not the rule for every sound
The finisher kept its roughly 220-millisecond lead-in as a deliberate dramatic choice. A miss kept its airy character. The point was to make each sound suit its action, rather than normalize every punch into the same noise. These are recorded asset measurements and review decisions, not a player study. The game they belong to is ChampChase.