The new drive mechanic puts all of your character's most powerful tools front and center while still discouraging spam and keeping the careful balance created by the EX system intact. Slower frame data encourages more of a back and forth between opponents, bringing whiff punishing and smart button usage back into focus over SFV's longer blockstrings. Multiple supers are back again with key restrictions from the old games removed: You no longer have to pick a super at the expense of others, and it's tied to a separate resource to EX moves. All of your meaningful decisions are now made in the moment. Will you take advantage of the defensive power of a level 1 super to get out of a jam, or save your cash for that risky combo into level 3 super that you've been practicing? Maybe you'll drop the combo and blow all your resources whiffing at air, having to claw your way back to victory in burnout.
The drive system doesn't end at just modifying existing systems though. Drive rush, drive impact and drive parry also exists as universal options that facilitate certain styles of play. Even the stiffest of characters gain some offensive mobility from drive rush. Drive impact both has the defensive capability to shrug off mindless offense and can combine with your character's other tools to create devastating 'checkmate' scenarios on offense. This leaves Drive parry feeling like the weak link. It's a powerful defensive tool with barely any risk involved, making it a little easy to shrug off some well executed mixups. Still, it's hard to deny the rush one gets from a well timed perfect parry into a punish.
Every returning character's kit has been retooled to combine the best from previous entries with new moves that thread the needle. This pairs with the new freeform to make your characters truly feel like swiss army knives again with a dozen ways to play neutrals, go on the offense, or respond to danger. Multiple supers lets the designers have their cake and eat it too, with flashy cinematic supers getting to share space with the more nuanced utility supers, giving each character a strong sense of style and substance.
These all facilitate a learning curve that makes learning characters truly rewarding in a way that feels missing from some other modern FGs. I latched onto Kimberly early on and while there's definetly a lot of habits in common for the best players, it feels like most other Kimberlys I come across get hyperfocused on specific parts of her kit. Every one I fight has just a little bit of room to express themselves, which is an important part of making repeated matches interesting.
Speaking of repeated matches, props to capcom for being the only developer to understand the menus are a means to an end and not something we want to spend an extended period of time looking at. The UI seems pretty bloated at first, but matching and instantly rematching through fighting ground quickly proves painless in the exact way I was hoping for. Combine that with the mostly-fixed netcode and you have a perfect system for hours and hours of play.
All those presentation bells and whistles are still there, don't get me wrong. The decision to move away from SFV's cold, function over form presentation was a smart one. The menus are coated with full splash screens of the characters fighting, the CSS gives every character space to show off their personality during the fight, even the loading screen gives you space to jeer at your opponent while the fight queues up. It's a rare combination of function and form that gives these legendary personalities a lot of room to show themselves off.
And if you're one of those people that enjoys the recent trend of lobbies with social features, this game has that too, and it's much less buggy and more functional than most attempts at it! If you're burned out at more targeted matchmaking then you can literally just drop into a random lobby with fandom folks and shoot the shit while you fight. Capcom directly identified that traditional matchmaking and arcsys style lobbies are two different experiences and cleanly separated them. It made me realize I enjoy the latter as a sometimes food.
As far as systems go, this is a dream sequel. Every major issue was fixed and even more new ideas were added on top of that. There's a host of content to play with on launch with regular drops already being established for new stuff.
The game only starts to leave something to be desired on the fringes. I'm all for the graffiti/hip hop influence, but I'm not sure it meshes well with the otherwise realistic rendering for the characters. There's a lot of stylistic quirks here that make it so SF doesn't feel like it's completely lost it's anime influenced edge, but on the whole I think leaning into something more stylish would have been better.
This isn't meant to disrespect capcom's effort here. Despite the impression the box art might give, the overhaul to facial animations mostly works well. We've come leaps and bounds from SFV Ken. Some uncanny valley just slips through on occasion in a way that makes you wonder if a more stylistic approach could have achieved more with less.
As much as the game pushes the hip hop angle, it's baffling for them to ship by far the worst soundtrack in the series to go with that. Boring, walgreens tier pop beats are assigned to every character without any consideration for their legendary themes from previous titles. Everything feels maybe a notch above Juri's infamous SFV theme. Forgettable at best, sometimes outright amateurish at worst. A damn shame after V's music only got better with each update.
Now, this last complaint is a little bit more subjective, but I definitely didn't care for world tour mode. I think it was a good inclusion for casual players to give them a safe space to learn the game and make them feel like they got their money's worth, but for me it felt like a boring slog where I had to slowly unlock moves I had instant access to 2 doors down. I'm choosing not to hold it against the game too much because it's clearly not meant for me. Hell, it even seems to have ripple effects on my experience considering how crowded the servers are every night. Still I wish most of the fun narrative content with these characters I've come to love wasn't locked behind a mode that isn't really for me otherwise.
There's a lot to nitpick, but in the 10 years I've been playing fighting games I haven't played this one that started off this strong...ever? It correctly identifies some weak points not only with it's own series, but the entire genre that needs addressing. Even more important than all of that it's just so much goddamned fun. It makes me look forward to what future fighting games influenced by this will do instead of being wary of the future like I was post-ST
It's the most fun I've had with a game since I first got into Skullgirls all those years ago and it's only going to get better. A culmination of a legendary hot streak from Capcom. Street Fighter is great again with no 'buts' attached.
The drive system doesn't end at just modifying existing systems though. Drive rush, drive impact and drive parry also exists as universal options that facilitate certain styles of play. Even the stiffest of characters gain some offensive mobility from drive rush. Drive impact both has the defensive capability to shrug off mindless offense and can combine with your character's other tools to create devastating 'checkmate' scenarios on offense. This leaves Drive parry feeling like the weak link. It's a powerful defensive tool with barely any risk involved, making it a little easy to shrug off some well executed mixups. Still, it's hard to deny the rush one gets from a well timed perfect parry into a punish.
Every returning character's kit has been retooled to combine the best from previous entries with new moves that thread the needle. This pairs with the new freeform to make your characters truly feel like swiss army knives again with a dozen ways to play neutrals, go on the offense, or respond to danger. Multiple supers lets the designers have their cake and eat it too, with flashy cinematic supers getting to share space with the more nuanced utility supers, giving each character a strong sense of style and substance.
These all facilitate a learning curve that makes learning characters truly rewarding in a way that feels missing from some other modern FGs. I latched onto Kimberly early on and while there's definetly a lot of habits in common for the best players, it feels like most other Kimberlys I come across get hyperfocused on specific parts of her kit. Every one I fight has just a little bit of room to express themselves, which is an important part of making repeated matches interesting.
Speaking of repeated matches, props to capcom for being the only developer to understand the menus are a means to an end and not something we want to spend an extended period of time looking at. The UI seems pretty bloated at first, but matching and instantly rematching through fighting ground quickly proves painless in the exact way I was hoping for. Combine that with the mostly-fixed netcode and you have a perfect system for hours and hours of play.
All those presentation bells and whistles are still there, don't get me wrong. The decision to move away from SFV's cold, function over form presentation was a smart one. The menus are coated with full splash screens of the characters fighting, the CSS gives every character space to show off their personality during the fight, even the loading screen gives you space to jeer at your opponent while the fight queues up. It's a rare combination of function and form that gives these legendary personalities a lot of room to show themselves off.
And if you're one of those people that enjoys the recent trend of lobbies with social features, this game has that too, and it's much less buggy and more functional than most attempts at it! If you're burned out at more targeted matchmaking then you can literally just drop into a random lobby with fandom folks and shoot the shit while you fight. Capcom directly identified that traditional matchmaking and arcsys style lobbies are two different experiences and cleanly separated them. It made me realize I enjoy the latter as a sometimes food.
As far as systems go, this is a dream sequel. Every major issue was fixed and even more new ideas were added on top of that. There's a host of content to play with on launch with regular drops already being established for new stuff.
The game only starts to leave something to be desired on the fringes. I'm all for the graffiti/hip hop influence, but I'm not sure it meshes well with the otherwise realistic rendering for the characters. There's a lot of stylistic quirks here that make it so SF doesn't feel like it's completely lost it's anime influenced edge, but on the whole I think leaning into something more stylish would have been better.
This isn't meant to disrespect capcom's effort here. Despite the impression the box art might give, the overhaul to facial animations mostly works well. We've come leaps and bounds from SFV Ken. Some uncanny valley just slips through on occasion in a way that makes you wonder if a more stylistic approach could have achieved more with less.
As much as the game pushes the hip hop angle, it's baffling for them to ship by far the worst soundtrack in the series to go with that. Boring, walgreens tier pop beats are assigned to every character without any consideration for their legendary themes from previous titles. Everything feels maybe a notch above Juri's infamous SFV theme. Forgettable at best, sometimes outright amateurish at worst. A damn shame after V's music only got better with each update.
Now, this last complaint is a little bit more subjective, but I definitely didn't care for world tour mode. I think it was a good inclusion for casual players to give them a safe space to learn the game and make them feel like they got their money's worth, but for me it felt like a boring slog where I had to slowly unlock moves I had instant access to 2 doors down. I'm choosing not to hold it against the game too much because it's clearly not meant for me. Hell, it even seems to have ripple effects on my experience considering how crowded the servers are every night. Still I wish most of the fun narrative content with these characters I've come to love wasn't locked behind a mode that isn't really for me otherwise.
There's a lot to nitpick, but in the 10 years I've been playing fighting games I haven't played this one that started off this strong...ever? It correctly identifies some weak points not only with it's own series, but the entire genre that needs addressing. Even more important than all of that it's just so much goddamned fun. It makes me look forward to what future fighting games influenced by this will do instead of being wary of the future like I was post-ST
It's the most fun I've had with a game since I first got into Skullgirls all those years ago and it's only going to get better. A culmination of a legendary hot streak from Capcom. Street Fighter is great again with no 'buts' attached.