Street Fighter 6 — Impact of a Modern Classic

This Street Fighter 6 review was made possible thanks to ever-faithful Damage Control Blog reader Phronemophobia/GoblinJunkBot, who requested this review through our Ko-fi account. If you’d like to do the same, feel free to do so.

Street Fighter 6 always looked intriguing from the outset in the many previews provided since its reveal last year, through the character unveils and general gameplay videos. Yet even though I’m a guy who runs a dedicated fighting game column on a blog, I considered skipping it.

My finances currently not being great (to put it subtly) was one reason, and I couldn’t be more grateful to the generous reader who pitched in to help me get a copy. But a bigger one was me remembering the launch state of Street Fighter V too well. It’s tough to put into words the feeling of disappointment that manifested from me after merely observing the menus and content and saying “That’s it? Really?” under my breath. Spending $60 on a game for future potential feels terrible, and I never wanted to do that again.

That’s fortunately not the case with Street Fighter 6. It’s, in fact, apparent right from seeing the menus that Capcom sought to immediately prevent this level of buyer’s remorse. The main sections, including the Fighting Ground, Battle Hub, and World Tour features and their requisite modes are cleanly listed in the menus right at the start, crafted to ensure the player knows all the options at their disposal. It’s feature-rich where it counts for a new fighting game release, from a team that knew how important first impressions are.

Even if the features were underwhelming (and again, they aren’t), I would have somewhat forgiven Capcom if the gameplay was solid. The new post-Yoshinori Ono team led by director Takayuki Nakayama and producer Kazuhiro Tsuchiya (the latter in his final role at the company) knew where to deliver, despite my concerns about the initial cast size. The game starts with 18 characters, a solid number for the first iteration of a fighting game; but it feels small when writing that number down considering the previous game only launched with 16. Feelings about the size are mitigated when seven characters are brand-new, including Luke, essentially previewed as part of SFV’s last season. The number of new faces gave me the impression (again, an important factor) that the development team put solid effort into this game, and their designs are all great, especially Manon, Marisa, and Jamie. There’s a good reason why the first two are the most popular among the group, and not entirely due to their physical attributes.

The characters, more importantly, all feel great to play. It’s a testament to how good they play in battle when I had the hardest time settling on a main. Look, I don’t intend to continue making comparisons to SFV in this review. This is supposed to be a review for the new game. But it’s worth bringing up several times because of the efforts the development team made to avoid that title’s early missteps. Nearly every character in the initial roster feels complete with plenty of moves at their disposal. Poor Lily feels lacking in her move set and options despite being made for ease of use, the reason why she’s ranking low on the still-early tier lists, but the other characters have everything they need. It’s the antitheses of the stripped-down characters from SFV, in which too many characters from the initial roster and even some in downloadable content seasons were lacking in options until the final season. The new team clearly used that season to ready themselves for this game, and they delivered.

The core fighting system also feels great. The features seemed overwhelming when I first saw previews for the game and wrote about them, as if the team was making this too complicated in order to satisfy the largest Street Fighter audience. But they all feel great during matches. Drive Impacts don’t quite work like Focus Attacks, but they’re a great extra tool for exposing defensive opponents for punishing damage and combo opportunities. The Drive Gauge prevents overuse of them, though anyone as good as defending as they are at attacking (not me… yet) can use Drive Parries to build meter back. Drive Impacts and Parries are both not as hard to use as Focus Attacks and Parries from the Street Fighter IV and Street Fighter III titles, respectively, but include the offensive and defensive necessities to keep the match flow going spectacularly.

There’s a lot I like about SF6’s core gameplay system, including Overdrive (aka EX) attacks using the Drive Gauge instead of the Super Art meter that’s reserved specifically for Super Arts, which offers more opportunities to use the former attacks for more damaging combos and quicker matches. I couldn’t stop thinking about how this is all far better than the rushdown-heavy SFV gameplay system, which offered few options for anyone who wanted to play in a variety of styles. The same applies to the defense-favoring SFIV system.

There’s, in fact, at lot here to appeal to players of all types, returning players and novices, to ease them into the game, including the Classic and Modern gameplay modes. I like alternating between both depending on the character, and it’s good that many of them largely feel viable in both styles offline and online.

The only feature I didn’t like was Drive Rushing, at least initially. It works somewhat similar to Focus Attack Dash Cancels (FADCs) from SFIV to extend combos, down to involving the same button presses. Using both the medium punch and kick buttons simultaneously in this manner feels awkward, and the timing on extending combos is strict. But I learned not to hate it after using it for some time. There fortunately aren’t quite as many uses for Drive Rushes compared to FADCs, as the former are solely for extending ground combos and recovering from normal (and NOT special) attacks quickly to take an opponent off guard. It merely brought back bad memories of FADCs that were depended on for several combos depending on the characters, which badly burned meter. But Drive Rushes are far more manageable.

The game itself is lovely, and I eventually found mains to focus on with Kimberly and Luke after Manon didn’t quite working out for me. A Laura player like me couldn’t quite gravitate to another grappler, as the two characters can’t be used similarly. But I will kneel at my bedside every night and pray that Makoto returns, who I think will feel great with this gameplay system.

If the fighting modes weren’t enough, the robust World Tour mode feels like a game within a game. Fighting games tend to have optional single-player modes when the developer cares enough, but I was impressed with the size and feature set of the World Tour mode. I like to refer to these as side modes to the main fighting game feature, but classifying the World Tour as this is misleading. It offers two big hub worlds, Metro City (with requisite Final Fight fanservice) and Nayshall, and opportunities for the player-created avatar to meet all the characters and learn their techniques, in a story that continues from the prequel comics. It’s too much fun to go around the cities to fight enemies and characters with broken-ass hybrid move sets that would never be allowed in online ranked modes.

The mode could use improvement, though. The enemy encounter rate is too high, and was only manageable after my avatar was sufficiently overleveled. The hub worlds crafted are nice, but could use a more features. Those arcade games, including (of course) Final Fight and SonSon, could be gathered in singular places that players can seamlessly enter without going to the Battle Lounge Game Center where the seamless online matchmaking with the similarly-seamless (provided the connections are good enough) online fighting happens.

Little happens in the story, with its focus on gang and crime activity being on par with side quests in other open world urban city games, and it doesn’t end on a satisfactory note. The Final Fight fanservice is more minimal than I expected considering Metro City’s existence. But I still respect the effort put into what tends to be a side mode for most fighters, and chances are Capcom will improve it with updates and assorted content over time. As it stands, it feels very much like a Sega Yakuza/Like a Dragon game at home, with all the positives and negatives associated with that.

SF6’s main presentation always looked good from the previews, but there’s nothing like seeing the character select screen and the characters themselves walking to the arena wrestling/MMA style on a main screen as a person is playing it. The Street Fighter games know how to bring the style with the substance, and Capcom is only improving at it. I didn’t, in all honestly, think the soundtrack sounded too great from the previews, the catalyst for my post from last year asking for classic options. But it’s grown on me, and sounds great in the game itself, where it matters. The composers brought a modern hip-hop touch to the soundtrack, in contrast with Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike’s 1990s-style hip-hop, and it works well.

The only element that made me recoil was the microtransaction and unlocking schemes. Capcom has a habit of making color unlocks harder with each new Street Fighter game, and they’ve reached a new low with the need to use Drive Tickets in SF6. The colors cost 1,000 DT each when it’s difficult to earn half that in a week, meaning it will take a long time to unlock all of them for even one character. That is, unless you’re willing to use Fighter Coins, which involves ponying up real cash. The cash payouts are much lower compared to the amounts offered in the beta tests, and it couldn’t be clearer that Capcom knew how poorly they’d be received when the full plans weren’t revealed until after the enthusiast press posted their pre-release reviews. Not this review, though.

Considering all the uses for Drive Tickets, including for special avatar outfits in the World Tour, and the current schemes, there’s strong potential for Capcom’s monetization plans for SF6 to be just as bad, if not worse, than they were in SFV. Perhaps now is the time to put pressure on Capcom to try and prevent that from happening.

It’s a real pity that microtransactions are a blemish on the reputation of an otherwise stellar fighting game product. Street Fighter 6 is the culmination of nearly all the goodwill that’s been built up with the Street Fighter brand over the years. I’m looking forward to all the content the game will receive over the next six years or so, but it will be just as fun to watch and participate in the metagame’s development over that time, which should really blossom at Evo. I may be too old to play fighting games at a competitive level these days, but this game will deliver casual enjoyment for several years to come.