Capcom done it again!
Street Fighter 6 is a more complete fighting game and beginner friendly experience in comparison to Street Fighter V's abismal first weeks of release.
Street Fighter 6 consists of three main modes:
-World Tour
-Battle Hub
-Fighting Ground
(All of which can be downloaded individually might I add! A nice touch from Capcom.)
World Tour is your Story Campaign Mode, an exploratory open-ended world with RPG elements.
A very very welcome change in the fighting game genre, where the main arcade ladder is mostly considered the "single-player mode".
World Tour is about your created player character exploring the world of Street Fighter, learning what it is to be a fighter and grow stronger in this over-the-top, goofy world. And by learning how to become a better fighter, we get to meet all the main rooster of SF6 (in addition to the DLC Fighters), master their fighting stances, and create the most outrageous/toxic/broken character you can imagine! This will eventually lead to a major tournament where you'll have use all the skills you've mastered and compete against powerful computer opponents that will give them all they got.
In addition, World Tour cleverly teaches you all nooks and crannies of SF6's game mechanics that can be used in Battle Hub and Fighting Ground. Very useful to newcomers who are, understandably, intimidated by fighting games in general. But as someone who is very familiar with Street Fighter, I like to take note on how some of the lessons/side quest are placed unevenly. For example, teaching the use of Drive Parries and Drive impacts, key mechanics in SF6, are placed by the end of campaign before the Grand Tournament, which could easily be placed in the mid section of the campaign, the local tournament as it's one of the first big checkpoints of the player's fighting knowledge.
Battle Hub is exactly what you think it is.
An online hub, where you can meet and communicate with other players in their mostly outlandish looking avatars, and battle them out in 5 different modes:
-Avatar Battles
-Cabinet Battles
-Extreme Cabinet Battles
-Casual Matches
-Ranked Matches
Or play solo with 1 mode:
-Retro Cabinets
Avatar Battles are about battling out against other players' avatars with their exact stats and active/passive buffs in World Tour. Expect ultra powerful max level opponents with wack combos to squishy low level newcomers using simple BnB (bread and butter) combos or auto combos, at least they show all avatar's level in the avatar battle arena.
Cabinet Battles are simply One-on-One from Fighting Ground but with hop on style matchmaking, you can even spectate and queue in those matches! Capcom pulling out the old arcade player experience before online matchmaking was a thing there! If you play solo on a battle cabinet, you'll be automatically be placed in Practice Mode, a nice touch but it would be even cooler if it's Arcade Mode to make the classic arcade experience more complete.
Extreme Battle Cabinets are similar to Battle Cabinets but uses the Extreme Battle, also from Fighting Ground, instead of One-on-One. And likewise, you can spectate and queue on ongoing Extreme Battle Matches too.
I'll reserve Casual and Ranked Matches on Fighting Ground Discussion, but in general you can idle around the Battle Hub matchmaking for Casual/Rank Matches, instead staring at the main menu screen of Fighting Ground or Practice mode.
One final cabinet area in the Battle Hub are the Retro Arcade Cabinets, fully emulated arcade cabinets that rotates daily, weekly and monthly, notable classic Capcom cabinet line-ups! It comes in Freeplay mode and High-Score Mode, where you try to earn a high-score in a single credit. Once you lose or even complete the game, you can choose to submit your score to the leaderboards, it's quite the challenge.
As of launch date June 2023 to August 2023, these are the current available cabinets in rotation:
-Street Fighter (1987)
-Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (1991)
-Street Fighter II' Turbo: Hyper Fighting Edition (1992)
-Super Street Fighter II Turbo: The Ultimate Championship (1994)
-Street Fighter Alpha 2 (1996)
-Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (1996)
-Final Fight (1989)
-Capitan Commando (1991)
-Magic Sword: Heroic Fantasy (1990)
-Son Son (1984)
-Mega Man: The Power Battle (1995)
-Side Arms: Hyper Dyne (1986)
-Legendary Wings (1986)
-Vulgus (1984)
-Savage Bees /Exed Exes (1985)
I hope Capcom can add more classic arcade line-ups in the future.
Note it's only singleplayer online in the Battle Hub, I haven't tested if these arcade classics can be played offline multiplayer in the Gallery. And if there's someone on the cabinet, you can't even use it! Damn they are really going hard on the arcade player-experience here!
And lastly Fighting Ground, aka the heart of Street Fighter 6.
Fighting Ground is where a majority of players will stick to, and Battle Hub as you can do casual and rank matches there too.
Fighting Ground has all the bells and whistles you need in a fighting genre, your story arcade mode, training/combo trial/tutorial mode, offline matches, special matches and online matches.
Arcade mode, much like in SFV and SFIV, has the option to tweak player difficulty, and enabled bonus stages. It now has also the option to disable story cutscenes and set a 6 player ladder or 12 player ladder.
Arcade mode's story is very different from previous SFs, as SF6 takes places after SFIII:3S. It doesn't revolve around a Grand Tournament with a major antagonist plotting for world domination or what not. Sure JP is consider the antagonist of SF6 as he plays an antagonising role in Ken's, Kimberly's, and Cammy's Arcade Story. Heck, he's even the final boss in World Tour, as he's the antagonist to your friend and sparing partner Bosch. But he's not a major treat in comparison to M.Bison's, Gill's, or Seth's shenanigans. He's intimidating but he's just minding his own business, which happens to be fucking around Ken's Masters foundation, lol. It's a welcome fresh air that not every fighter has to have some beef with the "boss" archetype, I like that. It really shows how a majority of OG World Warriors have grown the past 3 decades, how the newcomers aren't always playing a pivotal role in the general story, and how we finally moved on post Shadaloo/Illuminati BS (even though a lot of brain dead FCG fans wants Dictator to be playable yet again...).
Training mode is the first recommend thing to do in my book. It has your Practice, Combo Trial, Tutorial, and Character Guide, all the tools you need to learn what every character does, what are there best options in a situation, and learning some nice BnBs and beginner optimal combos.
SF6's Practice Mode is very fleshed out, it has an excellent Frame Data indicator compared to previous SFs and even compared to other fighting games currently active. Numerous options were you recreate any scenario imaginable, to lab the heck out of your choice of fighter to play as. And of course, the option for matchmaking while labbing. The only thing we want now are hitbox/hurtbox options, at least PC players can mod that in.
Offline has only two options, One-on-One and Team Up, but no Tournament funny enough. We do have a tournament mode, but that's only accessible to the Battle Hub and there was officially one sanctioned tournament as of 09th of August 2023. There was a hoopla with how the tournament pools made the servers unstable due to crossplay, making it near impossible to registre your entry to the tournament and even participate in one lmao. Capcom better fixes it cause that's a pretty cool thing to have and there are trophies/achievements for tournament play in SF6. One-on-One is the staple of fighters, opponent against another, first one to get a KO wins, wins by timeout, etc. You can do player vs. player, player vs cpu, or cpu vs cpu. You get the gist of it. Team-Up is identical to One-on-One with the added caveate of 3v3, or 2v2 player set, much like in SNK's the King Of Fighters series.
Special Matches are where the extreme battle can be played offline/locally. This unique over-the-top game mode is very different from your traditional 1v1s. It varies from adding stage hazards or changing the winning condition from your traditional fighters. For example, with stage hazards the game will throw in a huge Met from Mega Man, or even Tesla Colis that will electrocute a given area, which in turn can be use to your advantage or disadvantage thru out the match. And for new winning conditions, there are battle modes where the winning condition is to execute all the demanded moves before your opponent complete theirs, or another game mode, where the winning condition is to fill up your life bar up against opponent by attacking them, while a ravaging bull will occationally stamped thru out the stage. Very much a silly fun time to have.
And at last, Online. Here we have three modes: ranked, casual, and custoom room. Ranked is ranked, and it's serious bees-waxs, er, business. A new addition to ranked in SF6 is that Capcom asks you what kind of player are you before going to matchmaking. Depending on your response, Capcom will matchmake you with players on the same level of expertise as you and there's no comming back I think. As an example, say, you're an absolute newbie to SF6, no worries, Capcom will matchmake you to their beginner servers (marked with a cute chick icon) with players of the same skill level, and good thing no Pubstomper Scrublord can even enter the server either! But once you've ranked up to somewhere between High or Mid Iron rank or even lower, you'll be sent out of the beginner server to the main servers where the matchmaking system will still match you with players of the same skill level. Another new addition to ranked in SF6 are the placement matches when selecting a new character. Again in previous SFs, like SFIV and SFV, all players will start at the lowest possible rank. Let me tell you, the ranked climb can be pretty bad as there can be cases of smurfing that can ruin a new player's experience in SFV, but that's the name of the game in the FGC, pretty toxic mentality not gonna lie. Anyhow, placement matches are a great way to make ranked more enjoyable as it rewards good players an early high ranked placement once they've completed the 10 matches flawlessly (note the highest possible rank to get after your placement matches is Diamond 1 and depends on how you answered Capcom's player experience question). But I felt the placements can be quite janky, as my Ryu was ranked Iron 2 after placements with a 8/10 win rate and doing good executions on my simple BnB and Punish Counter combos, compared to my Dhalsim ranked at Bronze 3 placement in a 6/10 win rate by just flailing around, going for throws and dropping combos, or even recently, when dicking around with Jamie, I got a Bronze 4 placement with a 4/10 win rate. And after placements, the general rule is a First To 2 match set against your opponent, but you and your opponent can quit after completing a match at 0-1, 1-0 or 1-1. It's a general good fighting game etiquette to complete the FT2 set, cause, people can sense the salt when they see you or your opponent immediately going for the quit button or waiting out the timer. So yeah, Ranked is fun, and frustrating, that's fighters for ya. Casual is casual, same premise as ranked but I think you can play as long as you want with no real lost in your MMR. And Custom Room is like in previous Street Fighters, a sort of server browser where you can search or create a custom room for people to join in and do 1v1s, with the added bonus of allowing a maximum of 4 spontaneous matches going on in the room.
The Capcom Fighting Network or CFN has been revamped for SF6.
Clubs previously called Dojos in SFV has added bullettin boards to interact with other club members with simple text chats, sharing replays, and now giving suggestions on new club uniform designs, or even new logo designs. Very cute idea.
Replays is an upgrade from SFV, where the game cleverly suggests you replays in relation to what character the player is using, in order to better themselves without relying necessarily on googling some reputable FCG player on how to improve your playstyle. Replay is also a downgrade at the same time, as you have to add replays in order watch them on the replay menu, not directly compared to SFV's replay system.
The Player/Replay search system is better implemented to SFV's as it's quite a maze to navigate SFV's CFN.
I don't have much to say about Modern vs Classic controls, but here one thing I like to say: I like using Modern controls, especially in World Tour and the Avatar/Custom Character Battles. Sure I get a 5% damage debuff on my specials and supers compared to using Classic but it works out for my character being this monster of a fighter pulling Yoga Teleports to Screw Pile Drivers with ridiculous ease and godlike CA reactions.
To concluded, Capcom really pulled no punches with Street Fighter 6, easily my Game Of The Year next to The Legend of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, and my long anticipated Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon.
10/10.
Street Fighter 6 is a more complete fighting game and beginner friendly experience in comparison to Street Fighter V's abismal first weeks of release.
Street Fighter 6 consists of three main modes:
-World Tour
-Battle Hub
-Fighting Ground
(All of which can be downloaded individually might I add! A nice touch from Capcom.)
World Tour is your Story Campaign Mode, an exploratory open-ended world with RPG elements.
A very very welcome change in the fighting game genre, where the main arcade ladder is mostly considered the "single-player mode".
World Tour is about your created player character exploring the world of Street Fighter, learning what it is to be a fighter and grow stronger in this over-the-top, goofy world. And by learning how to become a better fighter, we get to meet all the main rooster of SF6 (in addition to the DLC Fighters), master their fighting stances, and create the most outrageous/toxic/broken character you can imagine! This will eventually lead to a major tournament where you'll have use all the skills you've mastered and compete against powerful computer opponents that will give them all they got.
In addition, World Tour cleverly teaches you all nooks and crannies of SF6's game mechanics that can be used in Battle Hub and Fighting Ground. Very useful to newcomers who are, understandably, intimidated by fighting games in general. But as someone who is very familiar with Street Fighter, I like to take note on how some of the lessons/side quest are placed unevenly. For example, teaching the use of Drive Parries and Drive impacts, key mechanics in SF6, are placed by the end of campaign before the Grand Tournament, which could easily be placed in the mid section of the campaign, the local tournament as it's one of the first big checkpoints of the player's fighting knowledge.
Battle Hub is exactly what you think it is.
An online hub, where you can meet and communicate with other players in their mostly outlandish looking avatars, and battle them out in 5 different modes:
-Avatar Battles
-Cabinet Battles
-Extreme Cabinet Battles
-Casual Matches
-Ranked Matches
Or play solo with 1 mode:
-Retro Cabinets
Avatar Battles are about battling out against other players' avatars with their exact stats and active/passive buffs in World Tour. Expect ultra powerful max level opponents with wack combos to squishy low level newcomers using simple BnB (bread and butter) combos or auto combos, at least they show all avatar's level in the avatar battle arena.
Cabinet Battles are simply One-on-One from Fighting Ground but with hop on style matchmaking, you can even spectate and queue in those matches! Capcom pulling out the old arcade player experience before online matchmaking was a thing there! If you play solo on a battle cabinet, you'll be automatically be placed in Practice Mode, a nice touch but it would be even cooler if it's Arcade Mode to make the classic arcade experience more complete.
Extreme Battle Cabinets are similar to Battle Cabinets but uses the Extreme Battle, also from Fighting Ground, instead of One-on-One. And likewise, you can spectate and queue on ongoing Extreme Battle Matches too.
I'll reserve Casual and Ranked Matches on Fighting Ground Discussion, but in general you can idle around the Battle Hub matchmaking for Casual/Rank Matches, instead staring at the main menu screen of Fighting Ground or Practice mode.
One final cabinet area in the Battle Hub are the Retro Arcade Cabinets, fully emulated arcade cabinets that rotates daily, weekly and monthly, notable classic Capcom cabinet line-ups! It comes in Freeplay mode and High-Score Mode, where you try to earn a high-score in a single credit. Once you lose or even complete the game, you can choose to submit your score to the leaderboards, it's quite the challenge.
As of launch date June 2023 to August 2023, these are the current available cabinets in rotation:
-Street Fighter (1987)
-Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (1991)
-Street Fighter II' Turbo: Hyper Fighting Edition (1992)
-Super Street Fighter II Turbo: The Ultimate Championship (1994)
-Street Fighter Alpha 2 (1996)
-Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (1996)
-Final Fight (1989)
-Capitan Commando (1991)
-Magic Sword: Heroic Fantasy (1990)
-Son Son (1984)
-Mega Man: The Power Battle (1995)
-Side Arms: Hyper Dyne (1986)
-Legendary Wings (1986)
-Vulgus (1984)
-Savage Bees /Exed Exes (1985)
I hope Capcom can add more classic arcade line-ups in the future.
Note it's only singleplayer online in the Battle Hub, I haven't tested if these arcade classics can be played offline multiplayer in the Gallery. And if there's someone on the cabinet, you can't even use it! Damn they are really going hard on the arcade player-experience here!
And lastly Fighting Ground, aka the heart of Street Fighter 6.
Fighting Ground is where a majority of players will stick to, and Battle Hub as you can do casual and rank matches there too.
Fighting Ground has all the bells and whistles you need in a fighting genre, your story arcade mode, training/combo trial/tutorial mode, offline matches, special matches and online matches.
Arcade mode, much like in SFV and SFIV, has the option to tweak player difficulty, and enabled bonus stages. It now has also the option to disable story cutscenes and set a 6 player ladder or 12 player ladder.
Arcade mode's story is very different from previous SFs, as SF6 takes places after SFIII:3S. It doesn't revolve around a Grand Tournament with a major antagonist plotting for world domination or what not. Sure JP is consider the antagonist of SF6 as he plays an antagonising role in Ken's, Kimberly's, and Cammy's Arcade Story. Heck, he's even the final boss in World Tour, as he's the antagonist to your friend and sparing partner Bosch. But he's not a major treat in comparison to M.Bison's, Gill's, or Seth's shenanigans. He's intimidating but he's just minding his own business, which happens to be fucking around Ken's Masters foundation, lol. It's a welcome fresh air that not every fighter has to have some beef with the "boss" archetype, I like that. It really shows how a majority of OG World Warriors have grown the past 3 decades, how the newcomers aren't always playing a pivotal role in the general story, and how we finally moved on post Shadaloo/Illuminati BS (even though a lot of brain dead FCG fans wants Dictator to be playable yet again...).
Training mode is the first recommend thing to do in my book. It has your Practice, Combo Trial, Tutorial, and Character Guide, all the tools you need to learn what every character does, what are there best options in a situation, and learning some nice BnBs and beginner optimal combos.
SF6's Practice Mode is very fleshed out, it has an excellent Frame Data indicator compared to previous SFs and even compared to other fighting games currently active. Numerous options were you recreate any scenario imaginable, to lab the heck out of your choice of fighter to play as. And of course, the option for matchmaking while labbing. The only thing we want now are hitbox/hurtbox options, at least PC players can mod that in.
Offline has only two options, One-on-One and Team Up, but no Tournament funny enough. We do have a tournament mode, but that's only accessible to the Battle Hub and there was officially one sanctioned tournament as of 09th of August 2023. There was a hoopla with how the tournament pools made the servers unstable due to crossplay, making it near impossible to registre your entry to the tournament and even participate in one lmao. Capcom better fixes it cause that's a pretty cool thing to have and there are trophies/achievements for tournament play in SF6. One-on-One is the staple of fighters, opponent against another, first one to get a KO wins, wins by timeout, etc. You can do player vs. player, player vs cpu, or cpu vs cpu. You get the gist of it. Team-Up is identical to One-on-One with the added caveate of 3v3, or 2v2 player set, much like in SNK's the King Of Fighters series.
Special Matches are where the extreme battle can be played offline/locally. This unique over-the-top game mode is very different from your traditional 1v1s. It varies from adding stage hazards or changing the winning condition from your traditional fighters. For example, with stage hazards the game will throw in a huge Met from Mega Man, or even Tesla Colis that will electrocute a given area, which in turn can be use to your advantage or disadvantage thru out the match. And for new winning conditions, there are battle modes where the winning condition is to execute all the demanded moves before your opponent complete theirs, or another game mode, where the winning condition is to fill up your life bar up against opponent by attacking them, while a ravaging bull will occationally stamped thru out the stage. Very much a silly fun time to have.
And at last, Online. Here we have three modes: ranked, casual, and custoom room. Ranked is ranked, and it's serious bees-waxs, er, business. A new addition to ranked in SF6 is that Capcom asks you what kind of player are you before going to matchmaking. Depending on your response, Capcom will matchmake you with players on the same level of expertise as you and there's no comming back I think. As an example, say, you're an absolute newbie to SF6, no worries, Capcom will matchmake you to their beginner servers (marked with a cute chick icon) with players of the same skill level, and good thing no Pubstomper Scrublord can even enter the server either! But once you've ranked up to somewhere between High or Mid Iron rank or even lower, you'll be sent out of the beginner server to the main servers where the matchmaking system will still match you with players of the same skill level. Another new addition to ranked in SF6 are the placement matches when selecting a new character. Again in previous SFs, like SFIV and SFV, all players will start at the lowest possible rank. Let me tell you, the ranked climb can be pretty bad as there can be cases of smurfing that can ruin a new player's experience in SFV, but that's the name of the game in the FGC, pretty toxic mentality not gonna lie. Anyhow, placement matches are a great way to make ranked more enjoyable as it rewards good players an early high ranked placement once they've completed the 10 matches flawlessly (note the highest possible rank to get after your placement matches is Diamond 1 and depends on how you answered Capcom's player experience question). But I felt the placements can be quite janky, as my Ryu was ranked Iron 2 after placements with a 8/10 win rate and doing good executions on my simple BnB and Punish Counter combos, compared to my Dhalsim ranked at Bronze 3 placement in a 6/10 win rate by just flailing around, going for throws and dropping combos, or even recently, when dicking around with Jamie, I got a Bronze 4 placement with a 4/10 win rate. And after placements, the general rule is a First To 2 match set against your opponent, but you and your opponent can quit after completing a match at 0-1, 1-0 or 1-1. It's a general good fighting game etiquette to complete the FT2 set, cause, people can sense the salt when they see you or your opponent immediately going for the quit button or waiting out the timer. So yeah, Ranked is fun, and frustrating, that's fighters for ya. Casual is casual, same premise as ranked but I think you can play as long as you want with no real lost in your MMR. And Custom Room is like in previous Street Fighters, a sort of server browser where you can search or create a custom room for people to join in and do 1v1s, with the added bonus of allowing a maximum of 4 spontaneous matches going on in the room.
The Capcom Fighting Network or CFN has been revamped for SF6.
Clubs previously called Dojos in SFV has added bullettin boards to interact with other club members with simple text chats, sharing replays, and now giving suggestions on new club uniform designs, or even new logo designs. Very cute idea.
Replays is an upgrade from SFV, where the game cleverly suggests you replays in relation to what character the player is using, in order to better themselves without relying necessarily on googling some reputable FCG player on how to improve your playstyle. Replay is also a downgrade at the same time, as you have to add replays in order watch them on the replay menu, not directly compared to SFV's replay system.
The Player/Replay search system is better implemented to SFV's as it's quite a maze to navigate SFV's CFN.
I don't have much to say about Modern vs Classic controls, but here one thing I like to say: I like using Modern controls, especially in World Tour and the Avatar/Custom Character Battles. Sure I get a 5% damage debuff on my specials and supers compared to using Classic but it works out for my character being this monster of a fighter pulling Yoga Teleports to Screw Pile Drivers with ridiculous ease and godlike CA reactions.
To concluded, Capcom really pulled no punches with Street Fighter 6, easily my Game Of The Year next to The Legend of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, and my long anticipated Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon.
10/10.