Live game so obviously thoughts will fluctuate depending on the season, but this is purely for the campaign experience.

Loved this way more than I did Witch Queen. Played the entire thing solo legendary and thought it was just the right amount of difficulty. Things hit hard, and enemies could take a beating but without feeling bullet spongey like I thought they were in WQ. Neomuna is easily my favorite location they've introduced. Headlong is a top 5 FPS mission of all time. The final fight was a real bastard and I still felt like it had too much health, but not nearly as bad as the Savathun fight.

Strand is easily the best thing they've added in the games lifecycle. It might wind up being a blight on PVP but I do not care about Crucible, y'all gotta hold that. In PVE it's the first subclass to pull me away from using Well. Super excited to use it in content from the rest of the game.

This sure is "one of those" and yeah, it's fine. Not offensively bad, does what these games do but doesn't do any of it in a particularly interesting or banner way. Played 2 and a half hours of it and think I'm done. Thought I could play the bullethell-arena-roguelike genre or whatever the hell you want to call it forever but this squashed that thought. Best thing I can say about it is that I really liked the music. I don't think it fits the vibe of the game but it did make me very nostalgic for gameboy music in a way that most other chiptune stuff doesn't.

Played this when it originally released but got stuck in a quicksave death loop and abandoned it but finally came back so I could play Control.

Loved the story and all of the flavor around it. the manuscripts, the radio shows, the TV shows, all fantastic. Great cast and super engaging and was the main thing keeping me from dropping the game again.

Gameplay really wore thin and this is maybe the quintessential 360 era game of all time. Forced walk and talk segments, story beats undercut by having to walk backwards to pick up some mundane collectible, super simple gameplay loop stretched out 4 hours longer than it needed to be, unnecessary and boring vehicle segments, long "epic" holdout action segments, it's got it all.

Capcom truly did something exceptional here.

Street Fighter was in such a rough spot. SFV launched so badly, completely barebones and lacking features that are standard for the genre, horrible balance issues, and poor netcode. Even after Ono left and the new leadership managed to bring it to a pretty alright state (barring the prevalence of Luke) it still had that launch stench that no one wanted anything to do with it.

The team learned well from that experience, and Street Fighter 6 has launched as one of the most feature rich, well polished fighting games of all time. A diverse cast of fighters including incredible redesigns of the classic world warriors along with a whole host of new faces that are realized so, so well. A massive amount of content and things to do, both offline and on. A hip hop street aesthetic hearkening back to the arcade days of the 90s. They managed to do what fighting game devs have been trying to do for the past decade and managed to design a game that is wholly welcoming and easy to pick up for newcomers while offering a tremendous amount of depth and tech for the hardcore.

The main menu has you select between 3 main modes:
World Tour, a single player open world mode where you create your own avatar, train under the iconic cast to learn their moves, converse and get to know them like it's a Persona social link, and put together a wild Frankenstein of a fighter. It's pretty fun, I don't really have too much to say about it. Once I finish it and grind out the zenny for everyone's costume 2 I don't really see me coming back to it that often, but I love that it's here at all. Before netplay became a thing and when I was living in the sticks, I pretty much only played fighting games offline, by myself. So if I could have had a mode this fleshed out back in the 90's I would've been in pure bliss.

Battle Hub is the online lobby, where you take your World Tour avatar online to play matches at arcade cabinets, participate in tournaments, tackle "Extreme Battles" with goofy Smash Bros style hazards and rulesets that can level the playing field between players of wildly different skill levels, and even play classic Capcom arcade games in the Retro Corner for a place on the leaderboards. Sometimes I just hop in to go look at the eldritch horrors people have turned their avatar into. It's a functional lobby system which I guess has to be stated after Guilty Gear Strive's HUGE fuck up.

Fighting Ground is the final mode that kind of has a bit of everything in it. There's Arcade Mode, which gets you a little bit of character story for each fighter. There's local play, obviously, but you can also local play the same goofy modes that are in the Battle Hub too. You can set up custom rooms, which are the best I've ever seen in any fighting game that allow you to set up 4 cabinets how you want with any of the game modes and even training mode, and anyone in the room can spectate any of them. And if you don't want to load up Battle Hub you can queue for ranked or casual matches from here too.

There's one other section of Fighting Ground that I wanted to talk about in it's own part because SF6 contains what is possibly the greatest training mode and tutorial section of ANY fighting game ever made. In addition to a basic system tutorial they have character specific guides that are written as if the character themselves are explaining things as a nice touch, but the guides themselves are excellent! They do more than just teach how to do the characters special move inputs, but more importantly, WHEN and WHY to use them. They really try to layout a super basic game plan for them so that you can pick up a new character and have SOME semblance of what to do with them. Then in the training mode they give you so much useful information displayed in an easily digestible way. They explain frame data and show it to you in such a clean and efficient way that it's easy for ANYONE to understand. They offer several drill type exercises to help learn super fundamental aspects of fighting games.

The star of the battle system is the Drive Gauge, allowing full access to universal offensive, defensive, and movement focused abilities. For casuals, they allow you to press your EX moves (now called OD in what I have to assume is a full embracing of FGC slang) to see big flashy damage and the Drive Impact, similar in use to Focus Attack from SFIV, allowing for an easy "get off me" button that's simple and easy to throw out. And for higher level play, where DI is too committal and punishable, you get Drive Parry a la SFIII as well as Drive Rush which lets you gain advantage on ANY special cancellable normal. The mental stack is massive but I look forward to managing to handle it better over time.

It's not totally perfect though and I do have a couple qualms. The music is really hit or miss. Some themes are pretty good and I like the dynamic implementation of them, how they weave from round start to low health to the next round. Ryu and Jamies theme really stand out, but a lot of them are stinkers. I play Marisa so I've heard her theme the most and it's so, so, SO bad. Graphically the game is pretty ugly too. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's easily the best a mainline Street Fighter has ever looked in 3D, but I kind of wish they'd dropped PS4 like Tekken 8 and MK1 did. Like I look at SF6 like "wow this looks so slick" because I'm used to SFIV and V, but my friends who aren't look at SF6 and go "wow why does it look so ugly" and honestly? I get it. This is also going to be the most monetized SF has been, with both character passes and they're about to launch a battle pass, so who knows how that will end up. I hope it's not too bad but only time will tell.

Oh, I also forgot to talk about the whole Modern Controls thing. They're really pushing Modern as a selling point. Essentially it turns SF into an anime style control scheme where you only have 3 attack buttons instead of 6 and then a special button to get all of your specials, which are no longer motion inputs and instead Smash Bros style where it's just a single direction. The downside is you lose about 20% damage from them and you also lose access to your whole kit and only what they mapped to the Modern combos. I don't have an opinion on it because I haven't used it. With years of SF legacy using Modern is much harder than Classic for me. But if you've never really played them much you can hop on and skip the execution barrier somewhat, though I feel you'll be hampered in the long run.

This wound up being way longer than I expected. I had a lot to say. Last night, 62 hours after I first launched the game, I had 28 hours in it. It is truly so much fun. The team has a clear reverence and love of Street Fighter, Capcom's legacy, and the fighting game community in general. I will not stop playing this game for a very long time. I cannot wait to see what this team does over the game's lifespan.

There's never been a better time.
Get into fighting games.

never heard of this but I kept seeing someone I follow on twitch stream it and every time i went "is this dude really streaming roblox?" watched 30 minutes of it and purchased immediately.

so refreshing to get the enjoyment of a AAA shooter without having to free up 200 GB and upgrading 3 different PC components just to still be plagued with poor optimization issues. the game is 2.1 GB and runs at over 140 frames, even with a massive 255 player match and destructible environments.

especially love the voip comms. no one has been toxic, everyone is just roleplaying, it owns. i love that when you die it auto triggers your mic and you can let out a death gurgle. good fun.