Um dos melhores jogos de luta da história, e com certeza o melhor que eu já joguei na vida.

Fighting Games estão para mim como a água está para o óleo, não por desgosto, mas simplesmente por falta de competência, sempre tive dificuldade com esse estilo de jogo.

E partindo de quem faz parte da turma "aperta todos os botões e reze para algo acontecer", é inevitável classificar Street Fighter 6 como o jogo de luta mais acolhedor dentre todas as outras opções.

Digo isso não só pela opção do controle Moderno, que por sinal é algo incrível, mas também pela comunidade do jogo, que é absurda. A grande maioria das pessoas te acolhem independente do seu nível de experiência, e te ajudam com o que precisar, seja com dicas, dúvidas ou até mesmo auxílio pra troféus.

A adição do World Tour, onde você joga com o seu próprio avatar também é algo a se destacar. Apesar da história descartável, simplesmente viajar pelo mundo encontrando os principais personagens clássicos da franquia e ter a liberdade de quebrar qualquer pessoa nas ruas na porrada valem a experiência por si só.

Ainda jogarei o título por um bom tempo, e desafio qualquer um desse site a ter uma conversa amigável de 5 minutos com minha Cammy.

It's no secret that Mortal Kombat: Deception's Konquest Mode is one of my favorite parts of any fighting game. If you didn’t know that, you should have, but now it certainly isn't a secret.

From Shenmue to Hybrid Heaven, the illusive 1v1 fighting game/RPG is something I've been chasing for a while, and the day has finally arrived that I can say hello to the official ambassador for my beloved micro-genre. But it seemed unfortunate that such a Concept™, a Conmancept if you will, had to get its defining moment in a franchise I usually avoid. Street Fighter V didn't even launch with an arcade mode.

World Tour got me in the door, but the surprise of Street Fighter 6 is how it now has me hooked on Street Fighter gameplay. I know, truly shocking that someone who enjoys oft-derided Mortal Kombat games would see the light after experiencing kino.

My esteemed and beautiful backloggd family, I've even been playing a fighting game... online. Normally this bald boy can't make it through a single online match in MK or Tekken without ending up drenched in sweat, but starting out as such a noobie in SF I felt less pressure and therefore less critical of myself. I've spent way more time in the Battle Hub than I anticipated. The Conman has even played the daunting ranked matches (I'm only currently Bronze with Guile but I started at Iron and this is basically the first SF I've ever gotten into). I've played loads of the practice modes and combo trials, and I'm just having a blast learning and slowly getting better at the game.

This has gotta be, without a doubt, the best entry point to Street Fighter. The single player RPG campaign allows you to get to grips with the mechanics (I chose classic controls) and introduces you to the world and characters, allowing you to familiarize yourself with them and pick a main. Guile actually controls the least like the characters I'm used to in games because charge attacks are simply not part of my muscle memory, but something about him stuck and I'm in. What's even crazier is that retroactively this game has helped me break down my barrier to the other SF games: Street Fighter Alpha 2 is fire, which I discovered because it’s available to play periodically in the Battle Hub.

This is a content-rich and beginner friendly experience and I highly recommend it. For the first time ever I'm seriously doubting that the new Mortal Kombat and Tekken are going to live up to a freaking Street Fighter game in terms of personal appeal to me, a guy who hasn't even played 3rd Strike. While still based and Conmanpilled, World Tour feels slightly underdeveloped in a few areas such as the generic story, lack of environment/enemy variety, and artificial difficulty, so it can and should be expanded upon in future entries. Every fighting game should straight-up copy this. NRS, stop whatever you're doing and make Konquest 2. I saw the Krypt from 11, you know you want to.

I'm such a sucker I even went to Chipotle to get fighter points, but they didn’t just give me a tier-skip or whatever, it was enough points to get the entire fighter pass. Completing said fighter pass got me enough to get the subsequent pass. The passes also all include a retro Capcom game.

This is an addendum to my Street Fighter 6 review, which on retrospect was written entirely too early. Having spent a lot more time with this game and having beaten each character's story in arcade mode (and abandoned World Tour), I have some more thoughts about this video game, and now you've gotta listen to them.

I was pretty forgiving of World Tour's faults, citing its physical comedy (hitting cops in the back of the skull with Rising Uppercut) and fun character interactions. That charity only goes so far, however, and for me it dried up around chapter 10. I have probably 18 hours in World Tour alone and knowing that I am only 2/3 of the way through a mode who's only redeeming quality is short fits of comedy does not inspire me to sink another 6-8 hours just to see some credits.

It's not that a Street Fighter RPG is a bad idea on paper, but the execution here is all wrong. Most chapters break down into laborious runs between distant objective markers to talk to total non-characters, all while getting jumped by random goons in a way that feels more inconvenient than engaging. Even the more story significant characters present as these dry, dusty-ass create-a-character NPCs. You've got a roster full of genuinely interesting fighters to pick from, but characters like Zangief and Cammy are relegated to the role of "master," having zero agency in the larger narrative and ultimately being wasted for it. At a certain point, you don't even fight them directly to become their students, they just agree unconditionally to train you. But hey, you gotta run around and buy them gifts, give Cammy a metric ton of room temperature beer so you can max out your bond and get her Street Fighter 2 costume...

Or you can cave and buy it with REAL MONEY! You run past an incalculable amount of storefronts in Metro City and only like, one of them is actually open to sell clothing, and the only outfit parts you can find in there are dockers and buttoned up shirts. It takes about five chapters before it updates and they add maybe five more pairs of pants. Travel to other parts of the world like Rome or Japan and you'll be able to buy more unique items themed around these locations, but even then you'll sometimes find you have the option between two pieces of clothing. All of my issues with World Tour aside, had this mode provided more options to customize my character, I might actually feel inclined to stick with it. A carrot on a stick, sure, but at least it'd provide some sort of incentive. Unfortunately, Capcom would really just prefer it if you cracked open your wallet, because all you're getting otherwise is scraps. At a certain point, I just wish they stripped out World Tour entirely and sank all that energy into making more cutscenes for arcade mode. Just build out each character's story and cut this dead weight.

The true heart of Street Fighter 6 is playing it like a proper-ass Street Fighter anyway, and the small number of times I was able to coerce friends into playing with me was a blast, even if most of these sessions amounted to me getting utterly savaged. However, trying to coordinate private lobbies does have the unintended drawback of highlighting how poor Street Fighter 6's menus are. They're overly designed and full of superfluous options, and I really shouldn't have to spend five minutes trying to figure out where the hell a private lobby invite lives. I am over here fumbling through these menus in black and white, just knocking shit over in a panic - there's got to be a better way!

Playing online does highlight how good Street Fighter 6 can be, and were it the case that World Tour didn't exist to drag down the overall experience, I'd have no problem leaving up a 4.5/5, or maybe even bump it to a perfect 5. And, who knows, maybe one day it will be. This is a live service, after all, and I don't think any single part of this game is immune to change. So, that said, I know I'm coming at this from a pretty negative angle, but I'm trying to look at this as a whole, and where I fall currently - on June 20th, in the Year of our Jericho 23 - is that Street Fighter 6 is an incredible fighting game bogged down by a hideous in-game economy, dreadful single player campaign, and other assorted issues that while minor in isolation add up to be frustrating.

Street Fighter 6 World Tour rules! Its ability to own the 'goofy-self-insert-in-a-serious-and-tender-plot-of-self-actualization' shtick is fucking amazing. I loved getting lost in the city, snooping out arcade machines, decking out my threads and pile driving old ladies into the concrete. Video games.

Street Fighter 6 World Tour made me miserable! World Tour is an impenetrable grind and lasts three times as long as its story should. The sense of player progression is an unbearable drag. If I am optimizing how I grind and not just beating people up willy-nilly, I should be leveling up more frequently than once per half hour, and those stats should have actually meaningful effects on my matchups. When I walk into a tournament 10 levels above everyone else with all bought supplements and still have worse damage output & defense than the competition, something is wrong. These RPG environment systems work well with the fighting game loop but not the individual mechanics, they Destiny-ified this shit to kingdom come.

By the halfway point I was continuing purely out of buyer's remorse - there were freckles of fun but it was purely a job to me. Blech.

Fighting game's good too, I haven't played much of it admittedly, not big on fighting online randos and I haven't found a character I perfectly gel with. Gotta bring my boy Necro and my girl Sakura back someday, plllllEASE.

I got Kimberly to platinum using underhanded ninja tactics (extremely reckless neutral skips and spamming standing medium kick for hit confirm combos) which felt lore accurate. Now I'm learning Ken to polish my fundamentals and actually play neutral. This is my first fighting game (discounting my couple hours of Strive which I couldn't grasp at all before playing SF6) and it's definitely the most beginner friendly of the genre, even without using modern controls. Highly recommend trying out the World Tour to get a low-stakes introduction to the concepts and controls (you can also unlock the characters' second outfits for free here).

Depois do que ocorreu com SFV no seu lançamento eu não esperava me surpreender e ficar tão preso em SF6 logo de cara, onde a Capcom conseguiu fazer não só um dos melhores jogos de luta da história mas também continuar o incrível legado da franquia estabelecido por SF2.

SF6 na minha opinião esbanja em identidade própria e ao mesmo tempo em um aglomerado de excelentes ideias que funcionavam em jogos antigos mas que foi aplicado com maestria nesse jogo.

A direção de arte do jogo mantendo uma pegada realista mas ainda com traços caricatos na medida certa, ótimas músicas tema originais para cada personagem, o character design único e inconfundível, as mecânicas centrais de drive e um rollback netcode quase perfeito foram o estopim inicial para me prender nesse jogo, mas quanto mais eu jogava haviam cada vez mais motivos que me faziam gostar ainda mais do jogo e querer melhorar minhas habilidades nele.

Diferente do SFV o recente jogo da série lançou com MUITO conteúdo, seja pra quem gosta de jogar offline ou pra quem curte se aventurar em áreas mais online/competitivas que é o meu caso. Realmente é impressionante a quantidade de conteúdo que esse jogo possuí: Um modo história em "open world" com uma criação de personagem super completa, um hub de interação social sendo possível jogar os jogos clássicos em fucking fliperamas, modos casual, ranked, offline, o modo treino mais robusto que eu já vi na história, tutoriais extremamente didáticos para iniciantes ou mesmo veteranos, modo arcade, modo extremo, challenges e por aí vai...Chega a ser assustador como um jogo que lançou com um roaster pequeno de 18 personagens conseguiu entregar tanto em muitos sentidos.

Por falar em roaster a Capcom sabe muito bem criar personagens novos excelentes e consegue trazer os clássicos ainda mais bem trabalhados e aqui não foi diferente, é um personagem mais carismático que o outro que até mesmo personagens que eu não curtia nos jogos anteriores me despertou interesse para aprender a gameplay deles.

Os modos de acessibilidade estão incríveis, o controle moderno para quem preferir jogar dessa forma não é desbalanceado ou superior aos comandos clássicos mas sim estão equivalentes em suas devidas proporções, a criatividade e a profundidade impressiona, o ritmo de gameplay está excelente e o mais importante o jogo está divertido ao extremo.

De negativo mesmo, as únicas coisas: A narrativa do modo World Tour é bem qualquer coisa e os objetivos de algumas quests as vezes são apenas bobas, mas sendo sincero, na minha opnião um jogo de luta tem que ser bom em seu gameplay principal que é a luta e SF6 faz isso com maestria, então relevo muitos dos problemas do World Tour, mas com certeza gostaria que ele fosse algo ainda mais elaborado mesmo ele sendo divertido. E sobre o gameplay ainda há pequenas coisas a serem devidamente balanceadas como Drive Rush no neutro e Throw loop, mas de resto o jogo é muito bem balanceado como eu não via a muito tempo em um Fighting Game.

SF6 é realmente incrível e eu não consigo parar de jogar, eu como fã de fighting games fico feliz que mesmo após os erros do seu antecessor a franquia se reergueu e é nítido o quanto de carinho e dedicação foi colocado nesse jogo e isso apenas transparece na qualidade final que a obra foi recebida. 9.5/10

To quote another Capcom game, "a solid beginning may lead to a perfect ending". A solid beginning was something that Street Fighter V unfortunately didn't really have, and it pretty much haunted it for the rest of it's life, even if it deserved the contempt or not.

So what can Capcom do to deliver this solid beginning to 6? Well, how about a fun as shit mode where you make your own self-insert, and run around Metro City delivering shoryukens to the back of some old lady's head and initiate fights with everyone you see? A Yakuza-like perhaps, but for me it's Mortal Kombat Deception's Konquest Mode expanded and perfected. It turns out all you need to attract more casual fans is a cool single player mode that just so happens to have a neat fighting game attached to it. Vets like myself love it too, because the Capcom references and lore drops never stop falling on top of you, and the cellphone interactions with the fighters is so fucking adorable. God, it's probably the best mode I've ever played in a fighting game.

Capcom is always Capcom, they do silly things constantly, but here they've proved that they've learned from the last game. I haven't felt this good about a Street Fighter entry since Third Strike, and obviously it remains to be seen whether this can have that kind of longevity. Regardless, everyone I know who's playing is absolutely fuckin' happy, and you know what? I'm fuckin' happy. It feels so nice seeing the game launch this well after V's clumsy-ass stumble out of the starting gate. I do think there's a special kind of quality to having Street Fighter do good, and attract all this attention even from friends in my circles who don't normally play fighting games, perhaps more good things will come in the end....more fighting game friends.....yes....let's fuckin' go. Yes, I WANT YOU TO PLAY FUCKIN' FIGHTING GAMES!!

For now, I have high hopes.... perhaps a perfect beginning may lead to an even better ending. Rooting for ya champ.

probably my favourite system mechanics in any fighting game, battle hub perfectly encapsulates the arcade setting as cordial yet caustic, netcode is excellent, this is the best starting roster any of these games has ever had, world tour gets dry after a little bit but finally manages to capture these characters essences in a personable and human way which has been a rarity in SF up to this point, endless quality of life features officially make this the new standard to aspire to for all pending releases, dhalsim sounds like he’s telling opponents to kill themselves whenever i land drive impact. five stars

just a casual update on this. prior to the game's newly implemented master rate update - which introduced ELO as a separate, zero-sum figure which factored into matchmaking and more clearly delineated skill in players - a charitable interpretation of the game's ranking system would be as an extension of the game's thesis, the idea that the journey for strength is never-ending. and there was certainly an appeal to that: now that you've reached master rank, you'll have to duke it out with every other person who put in the time and managed to make it to the top.

on a mechanical level, though, this felt tangential at best, and over time would likely only result in an increasingly lopsided system where most players had managed to get into master rank just by playing the game over a long enough stretch of time. having master rate now lends each and every battle this genuine tension & palpable weight. after all, nobody wants to be at the bottom of that leaderboard. nakayama's team designed sf6 with the notion that the versus mode is philosophically endgame content, a mode that, for absolute newcomers, should best be reserved until after the completion of world tour and some additional reps in practice. with this in mind, master rate goes beyond just 'endgame' content - it feels like a high level expansion where you're invited to prove your salt.

for my part, i've enjoyed two brief stints in the top 25 north american dhalsims, although as it turns out the mantle is hard to keep (as of writing: #45). is it impressive? i dunno, i feel like i have a lot more to learn and my character is underplayed by a margin of almost 200,000 players (as of august 14, there were around 221824 ken users. this is to be contrasted against a paltry 29183 dhalsim users). im not actually really a competitor in the FGC, but id like to keep growing stronger and keep fighting strong opponents. so i dunno, we'll see where this goes.

it's a significant motivator, then, that this is probably my favourite street fighter at this point, as well as probably my favourite fighting game. not to say that this is without fault - i appreciate world tour's inclusion immensely but it's half-cooked, the in-game economy leaves something to be desired, battle passes suck and the devs need to do more to encourage casual retention (further costumes is one thing but what about alternative winscreens, a functional music player, further customization of titles and versus screens, etc), matchmaking needs to be further expanded to utilize the game's strong netcode (why am i somewhat region locked), and no, you're not imagining things, the game's input register really is kind of wacky.

but i think a lot of other complaints at the moment stem from the amplification of certain voices on social media - as well as the fact that these people are also vying for a million dollars in the capcom pro tour and need things to resolve in their favour. so if we can learn to accept third strike as one of the apexes of this genre, a game constructed around problems with no clear, safe answers, a game where half of the normals kind of feel like shit, a game where chun li and yun and ken and all manners of bullshit are allowed to run rampant and free, then we can accept sf6 as a similar work in progress too. an evolving slate, one in which we have to learn - with time - to deal with strong characters and strong universal systems and strong offensive options.

this game really hits this absolute sweet spot of accessibility and depth of systems without presenting straightforward or clear solutions in a way that gets my brow furrowed in concentration and my brain eager to keep playing. i come from a samurai shodown background so everything to do with this central notion of not going on autopilot and guarding against the tendencies of players, in a sense moreso than worrying about the characters they inhabit, strikes a resonant chord with me. im really excited to see where it goes, and of course it goes without saying EVO top 8 this year belongs in the pantheon of fighting game tournaments. just a total gem. thank you capcom for giving me aki on my birthday

addendum: KB0 third strike review, november 2020:
"rather than establishing new legends, this game is about characters unsure about what the future entails, about what their next move should be, about what it even means to continue fighting - they waver, they fail, they practice, they move on. "

what a joy, then, that this is the overarching idea that propels world tour! street fighter has never really had traditionally good narratives, but when it chooses to it has pretty good vignettes and pretty good character writing, both of which world tour thankfully has in spades. very smart to organize a narrative around each character kind of just doing their own thing instead of trying to wrap them all into a sweeping narrative ala SFV.

Yeah, World Tour is kinda mid, but you can also hit cops in the spine with a spinning bird kick. What am I gonna do, give this a three? C'mon.

I am so exceptionally unskilled at fighting games that I've never in my life been able to clear a single CPU match in Street Fighter 2 on normal difficulty. I am not made for these kinds of games, but much like shoot-em-ups, I keep trying. I don't talk to very many people and, though I'd like to, I play games with fewer still. The extremely small group I've discussed playing Street Fighter 6 with have all said similar things about their own skill level, but thanks to "modern controls," we all have a Street Fighter we can finally enjoy. Not that a simplified control scheme has benefitted me so tremendously that I don't start hyperventilating whenever I see someone play as Zangief (people saying he needs to be buffed scare me because they understand this game in ways I never can), but it is nice to have a Street Fighter I can comfortably play with others at my own skill level and feel somewhat competent about it. And hey, actually being able to finish literally anyone's story mode is invaluable to me.

I still hesitate to call this "the best one" since a lot of 3's feel and aesthetics nudge it out for me, even if I am categorically worse at that game. A lot of the music is kinda flat for me, and I'm not really digging the character creator, at least not as a tool for making convincing human beings. If you desire a fighter that resembles a podracer pilot then hell yeah, you've never been more equipped to see through your sick fantasies and I am genuinely happy for you. I want to play as a cute kickboxing girl who wears cute clothes, and it took me three hours before I found a good looking top and I had to travel to freaking Mexico and get beat up by a literal child to get it. Outfits also fit horribly on everyone. Everything is too baggy, and I'm sure it's to account for the uh, wide variety of body shapes people will be rolling with. Necessary compromises, but I can't help but feel like some of the custom character features are a bit lacking.

None of this is enough to totally pull me out of World Tour, of course. Interacting with the Street Fighters™ is a lot of fun, and no doubt you've already seen dozens of silly text message exchanges floating around out there already, assuming you aren't already teaching Ryu how to use a phone or striking out with Juri at this very moment. The matchmaking lobby - which also uses your custom character - has some real PlayStation Home vibes and I'm way into that, too. Remember to greet your friends with a tomahawk buster directly to their face, as is customary in Metro City.

Speaking of, I appreciate how significant Metro City and Final Fight's lore is to the story. You can also play Final Fight in the game, but why the hell would I do that? Final Fight sucks! I like everything that's in Final Fight, but I hate playing it, so hey, I'm getting the exact amount of Final Fight that I want in my diet. Mike Haggar is rich in protein.

God, why did I write that. Take that out. Remove it from the review.

I don't have any complex thoughts on arcade mode, in the usual sense of me finding it very difficult to articulate my opinions on what does and doesn't work about fighting games. There's no shortage of writers on this site who have both the eloquence and knowledge to run circles around anything I could possibly type up here, but suffice it to say I find it very good and I've had a blast testing out each character and seeing who gels with me. I was adamantly in the anti-Juri camp for years. Hated her design, I think feet are disgusting. Put some shoes on that Juri. But playing as her in arcade mode and a few online matches and being called a dumb bitch loser by her in World Tour has turned me around. I am now pro-Juri and I pray I do not regret this change of position. Cammy is my favorite character series-wide and I've found her to be just as enjoyable to play as she always has been, and Kimberly has been a lot of fun too.

I still don't think I've narrowed down my "main" just yet, and even though I feel confident in my opinion of Street Fighter 6 at this point in time, I'm going to be playing a lot more of it. One of those rare games where I can see myself coming back to it throughout the year and for which there won't be a true end point, so much as I eventually taper off and find that I'm not picking it up anymore. Nevertheless, leaving a review now as I have put a significant amount of time into this and feel unwavering in my assessment that they made a damn good Street Fighter.

Edit (6/16/23): I've been playing more of this and I regret leaving such an early review. I've removed the score and will be making an additional log when I complete it that adds on top of my thoughts here.

Something that surprises me about Capcom is how good they are at comeback stories. I wouldn't really call them an underdog of the video game industry, as they have a few consistently good franchises, like Monster Hunter, Ace Attorney, and Mega Man. But for every perfect series under their belt, there's another one that faltered at some point with an impossibility for recovery. Yet, despite the huge mountain left for the next game to climb, they climbed it nonetheless. Devil May Cry 3 is maybe the greatest comeback story in the industry done out of the developer's own ego for not wanting to be responsible for the worst game in the series. Resident Evil 7 took the series back to its roots with actual horror, instead of doing whatever 5 and 6 were plotting, and it saved the series from the brink of cancellation.

While not to the same degree, I would say Street Fighter 6 is in a similar boat. Street Fighter V is a good game and I will forever stand by that, but it took a hell of a while for it to get to that point. With one of the worst launches ever for a video game, the devs didn't make up for it until years later with much needed improvements, balance changes, and gameplay additions. Street Fighter 4 was responsible for keeping the genre as a whole from becoming obsolete, but as much as I love that game, it faltered near the end of its life and needed a change. SFV was a very safe play, because unlike SF4, there was very little risk involved.

A few issues that were introduced at the start, and some even persisting throughout, were character depth, universal mechanics, and freedom. Movesets were barebones, as the proximity normals from SF4 were removed. Every character was easy to understand, easy to pick up, and easy to master. The V-System was cool, but was different for every character, leading to loads of problems regarding balance and expression. Universal mechanics can be hard to balance, as some characters will naturally benefit from them more than others. In SF4, Balrog not only had no meaningful way to FADC (Focus Attack Dash Cancel) to extend combos, but he also had one of the worst Focus Attacks in general, having negative horizontal range. Meanwhile, Evil Ryu got a number of damaging combo extensions from FADC and also had a great Focus Attack despite that.

The overall barebones movesets and clunky universal mechanics limited the overall freedom and expression available to players. You want a max damage punish against a blocked DP? Great, do this exact combo and use your super at the end if you have the meter. EX extensions were limited, and any more combo variety was limited to the V-Triggers and V-Skills, which not every character could even use to their advantage. Some characters were just stuck with a shitty V-System. Both of Lucia's triggers and skills were limited to combo extensions and hardly anything else. If they did anything else, they were generally really bad at it. Very few characters got as fleshed out of a system as Cody and Akira; not to underplay those that were a bit worse but still useful, but about half the roster suffered from uninteresting game plans and movesets.

Thank the glorious bastards at Capcom who made SF6 possible. Right off the bat, this game grabs your attention with every fiber of its being. Every frame of animation and every nanosecond of sound oozes personality. SFV lacked any kind of signature style that made it stand out, so seeing SF6 establish a unique identity for itself even from the initial teaser trailer is astounding. Characters move with style, their hits leaving a powerful impact. Supers finally look cool again, most even looking cooler when they become their critical art variant when you reach 25% health or lower. Luke's level three is pretty brutal; he runs you over and unloads a barrage of punches while mounted on you. But his critical art? It's the same thing but he fucking kills you. Your character helplessly is stuck as they block each punch. It's only when they try throwing a punch of their own that Luke utterly obliterates them. He fucking kills his opponent. They explode and Luke just exhales afterwards as if it took little to no effort at all. When you get hit with something like this, you know you messed up.

One thing I will say that has irked me for a while is Capcom's neverending boner for SF2. They make it their job to include each of the original eight world warriors because they were the characters who revolutionized the genre, I think. I wouldn't have a problem if half these characters weren't the absolute worst. Ryu, Ken, Guile, and Chun are cool. I like them a lot, their gameplay is unique, and there's a lot to their characters from a lore and personality perspective. However, Zangief, Blanka, Honda, and Dhalsim suck ass. Although arguments can be made for their unique gameplay archetypes (I love watching Zangief kill with three command grabs as much as the next guy), there's absolutely nothing to their character outside of that. I have not met a single person, offline or online, that genuinely likes Honda or Dhalsim for their character traits or personality. Zangief is Russian and he wrestles. Blanka is monkey. Honda is sumo guy. Dhalsim is yoga. Congrats, you now know everything there is to know about these characters. It pains me to see some of these characters constantly returning when I'm positive that nobody likes them. I don't see why some of these characters couldn't be swapped with another that fulfills the same function. Hell, Lily essentially has all of T. Hawks moves, input for input, just with clubs instead of long arms, so if they're willing to let another veteran retire and pass on their legacy to someone with a more promising future, why can't they do the same for someone like Honda or Dhalsim?

I apologize for letting my SF2 hate leak into this review. While a lot I've said has been negative, I want to let it be known that I say this out of love for SF6. This game is the coolest thing ever. With that being said, I have another complaint: how is there not a Final Fight rep in the base roster? The main setting for the game is Metro City, the setting of the Final Fight series. Decorations based on the series are everywhere, including a massive statue dedicated to Mike Haggar. You can meet Carlos from Final Fight 2 just hanging around. But, nobody from the games is actually playable. They added Kimberley, a student to Guy, which kind of makes me more upset than if she had been absent. They really wanted to make ANOTHER Bushinryu specialist instead of revamping one of the two they already had? Zeku was awesome, one of the few new additions to SFV that made the game worth buying all on his own, and his style differed greatly from Guy. This was a perfect opportunity to get the gang back together, considering Cody is still the mayor and lots of the gameplay in world tour is just beating up the Mad Gear. The devs said in an interview that the hardest character for them to cut was Cody, which kind of makes me worried that he won't be playable at all. It just sucks to see all this tribute to Final Fight without an actual character to play as.

With those complaints about the roster out of the way, I really like everyone else. Veterans were implemented with revisions that allow them to keep up with everyone else while also remaining interesting, and new characters are fresh and varied. Ryu is somehow cool, he now has an install to improve his fireball, and a new palm attack that's great for pressure and combos. Ken has rekkas, giving him the same high/low mixup he's excelled with, but in a new coat of paint. Deejay was completely revamped to have decent tools all around, but with feints to fake out the opponent and get some greedy resets and fake outs. Zangief is finally scary again, unleashing damage that other characters get by expending multiple resources over the course of a combo in a single command grab. The new system seems to favor him quite a bit, so I'm excited to see the tournament upsets. The new characters are great, as well. Marisa hits like a freight train and has armor on everything. I'm sorry, you whiffed a jab at half screen? You fucking idiot, let me take a fourth of your health bar with a single charged special move. Lily is just T. Hawk with a new install, but I like T. Hawk, so I like Lily. Manon is somehow a scarier grappler than Zangief when she plays the long game. Each command grab she gets powers up the next one, meaning if you take her to round 3, you WILL be eating grabs that take a third of your health. Jamie has a lot of style and flair, but his ego does annoy me a bit, which is funny because one of his apparent dislikes is people with big egos. He's got a lot of unique combo routes, even after his level three, so I wouldn't be surprised if people are finding new combos with him for a while. JP has the best win animation in any fighting game. I love his parallels with Bison; rather than being an upfront dictator, showing his power to the world, he acts behind the scenes and prefers to keep himself unknown, which is portrayed greatly in his gameplay. A pressure monster who benefits from being in your face vs a long range poking and zoning monster who is more dangerous the further away he is from you.

Every character presented here has something unique and interesting to offer. I think I might have to give them all a fair shot, even the characters I typically don't like, just because the gameplay is impeccable. Instead of an EX meter, a new meter takes its place in the form of the Overdrive meter. EX moves are now OD moves, and multiple actions can be performed for specific amounts of the gauge. A Drive Parry is like the parry from days of old but done with a button press. Holding it isn't as broken as you would think it is; it allows you to avoid chip damage, but doesn't change the frame data of the move, i.e. you hold parry against a +4 attack, that attack will still be +4. Timing your button press perfectly will result in a perfect parry, with a highly reactable screen freeze, allowing you an easy punish, so getting good parry punishes still requires precise timing. Doing a dash input while holding a parry results in a Drive Rush. This is like a faster dash in neutral, but if you do a move at the end of it, its frame advantage increases. You can perform a raw Drive Rush from a cancellable normal by simply inputting dash, opening up new combo opportunities and frame traps. Drive Impact is a big, armored, unblockable lunge. In the corner, trying to block it results in a wall splat, giving the opponent a combo. Challenging these directly is a death sentence, so a jump, grab, or a Drive Impact of your own will get you out of danger. When your OD meter is completely gone, you enter burn out. In this state, you take actual chip damage, and each of your opponent's moves has greater frame advantage on block. Eating a Drive Impact in the corner while in this state will result in a traditional stun like previous titles.

The magic of a universal system that benefits everyone is that you don't ever have to balance the mechanic itself, but rather, balance characters around the mechanic. Like I said earlier, V-Triggers were cool, but each of them were so radically different, that they warranted individual balancing of how they worked. With any universal mechanic, some characters will naturally benefit from them more than others, and some characters will struggle to fight against its benefits, but as long as everyone can make some decent use of it and there are no apparent abusers of the system, then it's good.

The abundance of options within the system offers lots of creativity and flare. The drive meter refills itself over time, giving the player tons of meter to play with without having to wait too long to get bars like SFV. Nobody likes limited access to their tools, so you start every round with full OD meter and build it over time instead of according to moves that you land. Drive rushes and OD moves open up lots of combo opportunities. Characters with lackluster OD moves can still make use of drive rush for new combos and vice versa. Supers being tied to their own meter also gives more leniency to how they can be used. Everyone has a level 1, a level 2, and a level 3. These vary in terms of utility; some characters often make use of every super they have, while some characters would rather save up for level 3 and cash out at the end of a round. Bottom line is: the characters themselves are easy enough to understand, but the system mechanics give more depth to everyone, adding personal expression and tense optimization. I think the way the system mechanics work make everyone easier to get a hold of. I've been playing characters I never even thought of trying before, like Ken and Zangief, just because the system mechanics give a lot of leeway between characters.

While I don't take part in most of them myself, the efforts gone through to turn Street Fighter into a more widely accessible game are commendable. I would like modern controls a lot more if they didn't remove half of your moves, it feels terrible not having every option available to you. This sucks even more because I really want to try learning pad (I've been a keyboard warrior my whole life) but have been deterred because inputs on it feel awful. Modern controls could've been the answer to my prayers, but it just feels objectively worse. I'm glad it's getting other people into the game, and I'm glad it's an option, but if it were up to me, I would prefer the classic controls in terms of normals and modern in terms of specials. World Tour is another big selling point to get more casuals on board with fighting games that I'm not a huge fan of. People like making fun of modern open world games and simplifying them as "dude you just go to a place and do a thing and then go to another place and that's the whole game," but that actually is this whole game. The most you ever do in this mode is fights. There is one method of gameplay and that's it. I've only played a few hours and I'm already sick of it. I like how I can create an avatar that looks stupid as hell (if you ever see Grug from The Croods in the battle hub, say hi) and give them moves based on other fighters, but it's WAY too much work for what it's worth. I'll keep playing just so I can get more outfits without having to pay, but it's VERY repetitive.

Speaking of the battle hub, it's been a hot minute since Capcom made good online services. The online call for rollback gets annoying fast when most people don't even know what that entails. SFV had rollback, but it was still shit. Capcom is capable of good online, I still play SF4 to this day and the online is one of the only things worth mentioning about MVCI, but there's plenty of bad online services as well; SFxT online makes me want to die. But, the online in SF6 is pretty good. You join a lobby and can play casual matches with anyone in there. You still have access to SFV background matchmaking, so I think this should please everyone. It's fast, efficient, and easy. The battle hubs also have shops, display boards of who's on a big winning streak so you know who to look for, and a fighting ground for your avatar character. It's really fun, I'm surprised this kind of lobby hasn't been done this well before.

One last complaint because I don't know where else to put it: despite the incredible visual style, the music is pretty bad. Every character got a brand new theme (except Luke but that's because they made his SF6 theme first and then remixed his SFV theme based on it) and most of them are far cries from what they once were. Ryu has an upbeat jazzy tune which I dig, adds some more personality to him. JP has a nice theme, but it falls into this trend that most of the other character themes are under where it sounds like all buildup with no payoff. Some of them are just straight up bad. Guile's theme… look how they massacred my boy. This is especially out of place considering that the stage and menu themes are fire. The main theme, Not On The Sidelines, pops off and got me excited for the game on its own, and I can't ever remember hearing it in game. Hopefully legacy music options will be available, because the current selection sucks.

I'm glad Capcom is great at making these kinds of comebacks. That notion implies that I'm glad they screw up to being with, but those screw ups are equally as important as the redemption stories. We never would've gotten DMC3 if Hideaki Itsuno didn't see how bad DMC2 was and feel the need to save the franchise. We never would've gotten RE7 if the devs hadn't taken a step back to the roots of the series in the first place and remembered what made the games before RE6 so good. We wouldn't be here enjoying this masterful fighting game if Takayuki Nakayama and Shuhei Matsumoto hadn't recognized the abysmal direction that SFV was going in and wanted to make a change. This is the first fighting game that I've been part of at launch, and I'm going to stick with it until the end. It's not perfect, and it never will be. There will be broken characters, there will be long losing streaks, but never have I fallen in love with a game so quickly and been this happy that other people love it as much as I do. Thank you for everything SFV, but it's time for a new challenger to enter the ring.

Has the potential to be one of the greatest fighting games ever made.

There was once a time where I was excited to see the Capcom logo when I started up a game. There was a time after that when seeing that logo filled me with dread. There’s a time right now where it excites me again. Let’s hope this isn’t cyclical.

Street Fighter 6 is easily one of the most beginner-friendly fighting games I’ve ever seen, filled to bursting with dozens upon dozens of quality of life tools to help newbies get both into the genre and into the lab. A lot of scrub quotes have come out in the wake of the addition of modern controls from those horrified at the thought of fighting games having higher skill floors, but a bad player on modern will still get absolutely worked by a mediocre player on classic. Auto combos and Smash Bros. special inputs can only carry you so far; this is still Street Fighter, the game of grounded neutral and footsies, and you will learn your fundamentals or be bodied.

Fortunately, it’s never been easier to start the learning process. Training mode allows you to see inputs, frame data, activate preset CPU behaviors, find out when you’re actionable, tweak values, parameters and game logic to your heart’s content; perhaps this is a bit less impressive in an era where feature-rich labs are more common than they were a generation ago, but this is a stacked selection. You won’t be left wanting for much besides visible hit and hurt boxes — an obvious miss by Capcom, all things considered — and near-seamless character transitions from the pause menu can get you practicing as or against someone new without even backing out from the lab.

World Tour mode has remained a somewhat surprising draw, though perhaps it shouldn’t be too shocking; there are going to be a lot of people who are only interested in playing this with their friends, and the game may as well not exist for them if there’s nothing else to keep their attention when said friends aren’t around. Getting to sprint around Metro City and interacting with all of the masters is fun. Texting Ryu or fumbling Juri is as goofy as it is entertaining, as is the inherent ridiculousness of literally almost every single person who walks down the street being ready and willing to start throwing elbows so long as you ask. You can also sucker punch them to deal extra damage before the fight even begins. This makes you a scumbag, but scumbag tactics work well enough. It’s fairly grindy if you’re aiming to see most of the content and max out your relationship levels with your mentors, but most players probably won’t run into this wall before they wrap up their playthrough.

The experience is marred by a few tiny dents that still need to be banged out. Online ranked matchmaking is complete and utter garbage; if you get lucky and do too well in your placement matches, you’ll get ranked far above where you’re actually meant to be. Normally, this wouldn’t be much a problem, as losing matches will make you lose LP, decreasing your rank. The core issue is that you can’t drop below the division that you were placed in, presumably as an effort to stop smurfs from deranking and stomping noobs. My Manon got placed in the Gold bracket. I am not good enough to be in Gold. All I can do now is lose set after set against players far better than I am with virtually no recourse, as I am outright not allowed to drop down to the bracket I ought to be in unless I play a completely different character. The current implementation of ELO needs to change. I can’t seriously imagine that there are enough intentionally deranking players out there racking up double perfect K.O.s against Modern Ryus to justify not letting anyone fall below their placement division.

Additional minor complaints are that the input system oscillates a little inconsistently between “too tight” and “way too lenient”; some of the example combos will eat your motions if you perform them before you’re fully actionable, while characters like Zangief can reliably throw out a launcher into air grab by churning half-circles instead of 360s. Also, the inclusion of the omitted-from-pre-release-coverage battle pass and time-limited microtransaction cosmetics fucking suck for a game that’s already $70 with at least three DLC seasons to come. They’re inconsequential enough, luckily, but Capcom is going whaling in a game that’s priced at a premium to begin with. I’m hoping that the content that’s going to be locked behind even more paywalls is going to be pretty limited and uninteresting, but I’m not exactly optimistic about it.

The foundation here is rock-solid, and the trajectory it takes from here is going to determine whether Street Fighter 6 can truly cement itself within the canon of the greatest games of all time, or just remain a really good entry in a series that already has a few of those under its belt.

JP is going to win the Capcom Cup.

For a long time fighting game developers, and game developers in general have tried to reach out to a broader audience by simplifying core mechanics, on the surface this makes sense, a lot of really popular games are also really simple. But if you think about it for two seconds it's actually fucking stupid, because a lot of really popular games are also utterly byzantine to a normal person- DotA, LoL, the entire genre of MMOs, anything that Europeans push to the top of the steam best sellers, etc. And many more games pretend to be complex to cover their simplicity, such as every single game that is the subject of jokes like "increases semen retention by 2.5% on a Tuesday" or has a skill tree that unlocks basic abilities that should have been in the toolkit by default. Capcom decided to make SF6 an order of magnitude more complex than their last game, their accessibility tool is forcing you to choose between two radically different control schemes with far reaching gameplay implications, and a practice mode with a dozen pages worth of settings to tweak for every conceivable scenario so you can skip "training" and jump right into human growth hormones. Naturally they've been rewarded for this with a wildly successful game.

As an overall fighting game package, Capcom's most concerted effort in forever and a bit, even if it does come with all the usual bullshit Capcom-isms to try and pry every last penny out of you. They've clearly put a ton of work into making this accessible to new players, to ensuring that there's plenty of content on offer across single- and multiplayer modes, and to making the online experience as smooth as possible for casual and competitive players. And hey, they even moved the characters' stories on beyond their status quo! Imagine if KOF did that! There's something for everyone, and despite the embarrassment of having the first thing you see be the game shilling Chipotle at you, as a new fighting game launch it's miles above the disastrous day one of SFV.
On that front, good. For me personally though, I don't really like how this game looks, the music might as well not be there (and they know it, which is why they're charging you for the actual good stuff), the roster is extremely weak and from what I've experienced so far as a competitive game I don't think it has the juice - I won't be surprised if people are as sick of it as they were SFV within a year. So, you know, as someone who only really engages with fighting games competitively that's not great for me, but the amount of stuff they give casual players to do is actually pretty enticing and means it's not really as hard a hit as I was expecting. I don't mind as much, because while I'm waiting on the next attempt I can make my dumb avatar and run around kicking passersby in the back of the head and unlock all the cool art and play SonSon and So onSo on. I don't like Street Fighter 6, but I kind of do!

Also had no idea Luke's thing was being a gamer bro PMC guy. Gotta be the most putrid fighting game character ever, and that's counting the paedo in Karnov's

This is seriously the best fighting game in a very long time. For someone who really didn't care for Street Fighter V no matter how many times they kept updating it, this is awesome. This is what we've all been waiting for.

Street Fighter 6 is oozing style with so many fun new mechanics, moves, designs, and a real street feel. The mechanics are great, they feel good for those who are veterans looking for that technical challenge and good for those who are new to fighting games. This really has everything to offer.

Now of course this came out today, so it'll take me a lot of time and playing to see how it resonates with me, but so far I'm loving it.

Aight I'm gonna fight these streets
( •_•)
( ง )ง
/︶\

Damn... streets got hands