I think most gamers of my age have a story about the fighting game genre. If you grew up in the arcade scene, it would be impossible to deny the impact fighting games had on the population during their boom. You’d see kids stacked around a machine, everyone trying to get the best look possible or squeezing in to place their quarters in the queue. For a brief period of time, one arcade game reigned supreme over all others: Street Fighter II: The World Warrior.
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior was a revolution for the genre. It took the previous games’ concept and improved upon it in many ways. The biggest improvement was a more rounded cast of characters instead of just having Ken or Ryu, you now had access to six more notable characters who would go on to become staples of the franchise — Dhalsim, E. Honda, Zangief, Guile, Chun-Li, & Blanka. The game remains one of the greatest of all time and a measure by which all other games are judged.
At least it was, until the latest effort by Capcom just dropped, Street Fighter 6. The newest entry in the Street Fighter series has everything its predecessors had and then some, including arcade cabinets with fully playable Capcom games but more on that later. SF6 really goes out of its way to get people back into the hype of fighting games and it does so through a couple clever techniques.
The biggest change anyone who has played Street Fighter for any length of time will notice is the new Modern control scheme. Making fighting games more simple than ever, Modern allows players to perform special moves with just a touch of a button and simplifies some of the more in-depth mechanics within fighting games by tying them to different buttons, which players can customize to their heart’s content. Of course, if you prefer the standard six-button scheme that made Street Fighter famous, you can just as easily switch to the legacy control setup. I’ve found tremendous use for the Modern system, as it helped me get back into the swing of things.
It essentially allows players to use a single directional control in conjunction with a specific button to perform those special moves instead of having to remember the special command for each move. For instance, you no longer have to press →↓↘+ P to release a fireball. Now you can perform the same command with →+ SP, where SP is an assigned special button. The same holds true for throw maneuvers and counter commands, really allowing newer players to feel as though they’re playing the game on a deeper level.
Of course, you’re not forced to use the newer control scheme and they also offer a Dynamic setting that fans of other Street Fighter games will also be familiar with, so the amount of options available to players vis-a-vis control schemes is about as robust as one could ask for in a fighting game. This doesn’t even get to the ability to customize your made-up fighter with whichever fighting style & special move set you want, even if that means your character has special moves from a variety of different characters. You can literally build the dominant fighter you can come up with and then test him against others online or in tournaments made just for Street Fighter 6.
While the Modern control scheme is cool, it’s nowhere close to the newest and best feature in Street Fighter 6. That crown goes to World Tour Mode, which is a hybrid of Street Fighter, Final Fight, and Street Fighter 2010 (I know). World Tour sees the player create a fighter from scratch and then you embark on a story mode that sees you traveling around to different worlds and maps, getting into fights, and learning from different masters. It features outfits that boost your fighters’ ability, skills, and fighting styles you learn along the way, and a ton of fights and mini-games that allow your character to grow while taking a traditionally very bland genre and giving it some much-needed quality of life improvements.
I’ve spent about eight total hours in World Tour and it’s definitely calling me back for more. The environments are fully explorable, allowing you to platform and fight your way in and out of some pretty hilarious scenarios. The environments might not all be massive, but each one is full of vibrant detail and the very nature of the game allows for Capcom to continuously provide new zones, masters, and mini-games for the players to enjoy. Some of the mini-games include board-breaker, fighting multiple people at once, or even stuff like destroying cars and barrels. All of these concepts should be more than familiar to any self-respecting Street Fighter fan.
The Battle Hub is the online area where you can pair up or fight against other human opponents in many different matches. Street Fighter 6’s Battle Hub has regular matches, extreme matches, and handicap matches. They even offer fans the chance to play each other in older Capcom games like Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, or even Final Fight. The arcade machines can be found in the back corner of the Battle Hub and Capcom has stated they plan to rotate them and bring in some truly memorable classics from their library of video games.
Extreme matches are meant to be Capcom’s answer to popular tournament fighters like Super Smash Brothers Ultimate and the like. These matches are as fun as they are challenging and hilarious. You’ll encounter things like charging bulls, dropping bombs, a shock zone, mecha friends, and even killer drones. If you’re bored of one-on-one matches, why not add a parade of pissed-off bulls to your fight? Now you have to worry about a bull’s balls as well as fireballs! Everyone wins!
There is also the standard arcade mode, featuring the traditional characters and their story arcs. This is about the only part of the game where I have some criticisms and it’s not what you might think. The matches and the storylines are just fine, it’s the very abrupt and still-photo nature of the endings that bothers me. This game is absolutely gorgeous. If you look at the amount of work they put into everything from the intros of the characters to their animations as they interact, you can tell that this game is the culmination of years upon years upon years of trying to bring Street Fighter 6 into the modern era. So, why the hell are the endings so short and weakly done? We don’t even get a cinematic, it’s just pictures and subtitles.
If I’m being honest, though, fighting games have always been like this. You’ll spend two and half hours just trying to beat M. Bison as he’s cheesed you into a corner for the 5,746th time that hour, and the ending is over in 30 seconds with barely anything wrapped up and the fighter is usually doing something pointless like eating or walking away. I get that fighting games are about the journey and not the destination, but it would be nice if my destination didn’t look like FyreFest when I got there. I’m not asking for Beyoncé or Taylor Swift’s efforts, just give me some effort, like, 30 Seconds to Mars effort. That’s all I’m asking when it comes to the endings of fighting games.
Even with the mediocre endings, Street Fighter 6 won’t be leaving my PS5 anytime soon. The game has everything I’ve ever wanted in a fighter not named Mortal Kombat — which is also getting an amazing new game in September that we will be covering here on BSO, so don’t miss that. If you’ve been out of the fighting game scene for a little but were wondering if Street Fighter 6 was worth picking up, let me assure you that it’s worth every penny. The love, attention, and care that went into this game is second to none.
This review could go on and on and one about the sound design, graphics, and clean controls. It’s all there. All of the old music, new music, remixes, and amazing sounds that you’re used to hearing in Street Fighter games are present in Street Fighter 6. The levels look better than ever. The characters look better than ever. The game plays better than ever. Speaking plainly, Street Fighter 6 isn’t just back, it’s better than it’s ever been.
BSO Rating: 9.75 of 10
