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.
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.