Street Fighter 6 (2023) Review
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played on ps4/ps5
developed by Capcom
published by Capcom + Taito (arcade)
review published on 05/06/2024
Street Fighter 6 is a Happy Meal toy without the Happy Meal.
Punching, kicking, screaming. It’s not a nightmare plane journey thanks to an unruly child, it’s STREET FIGHTER BABY! Capcom has got you covered. They sure love to serve a hearty fight! Capcom’s flagship fighting game series, Street Fighter, has a new numbered entry, Street Fighter 6. Yes, the sixth mainline one, as indicated by the number 6. It sounds better than The 40th Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game: Ultra Edition Collection. Another rodeo, and I am here for the thrill. It’s not like Capcom has emerged from a forgotten fighting game grave like with the release of Street Fighter IV (2008). A more apt description would be a walk of shame, back to the drawing board in the advent of the terrible launch mishap that was Street Fighter V (2016). Since then, Capcom has steadily been drip feeding the Street Fighter fanbase with more titles such as Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers (2017), Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection (2018), and Capcom Fighting Collection (2022). Those were nothing as bad as the release state of Street Fighter V, not even close. In fact, they were decent! Except for Street Fighter: Duel (2023), a mobile gacha game, no thanks. All the while, Capcom patched up the battered and bruised Street Fighter V with well needed adjustments and new features. The Capcom Pro Tour also provided a lifeline for the game, reassuring competitors to keep playing and extending the longevity of the competitive fighter. After many years, in its finished lifecycle state, Street Fighter V (now known as Street Fighter V: Champion Edition) turned out to be a great fighting game. To this end, Capcom are now on the lectern after successfully manufacturing multiple neuralyzers to wipe our collective memory of endured badness and the biggest, most formidable memory erasure device takes the form of Street Fighter 6.
From the jump, it looks fresh. A new character on the cover. Exaggerated quiff, pumped fist, smiling devilishly, surrounded by graffiti auras about to eat him. His name is Luke, the face of the new generation of Street Fighter. He is actually not new. We saw him as the last downloadable character in Street Fighter V, the fifth mainline one, as indicated by the letter V. Those who still keenly played Street Fighter V thought Luke was the disgruntled nephew who gatecrashed his own party. However, his party hadn’t started yet. Luke was two years early. His time management skills aren’t the greatest. Now, we are here at Luke’s party. Uppercuts, spinning bird kicks, and HADOUKENS are still your go-to beverage and finger food, and Capcom has graciously invited you to the dinner table for another feast. Show us some good hospitality and feed me all the big carbs! Let’s boot up Street Fighter 6.
On release day 02/06/2023, I was foaming out the mouth to play. After all the installations and booting up the game, I was bombarded with Terms of Service and Data Usage for Statistical Purposes. Right, that’s fine, typical normal thing to confirm these and be on my way to play! Met with the stop sign that is Confirm CAPCOM ID. A crushing feeling. This is where it gets headache’y. You need a CAPCOM ID in order to access online content. This CAPCOM ID is part of an online account service that wrangles other Capcom game titles to one online account. I hope you own a smartphone because you need to scan a QR code to access the CAPCOM ID account linking website. If not, enjoy inputting the 67 character length website address :). Most likely you will not have a CAPCOM ID before this point, unless you played Exoprimal (2023). At first it's standard account making, email, password, basic personal information. Agreed to another set of Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Okay, cool. Just when you think you're done, tapping on the bright yellow confirm button, you now need to link your CAPCOM ID account to your online platform of choice (PSN, XBOX, STEAM)! CAN I JUST PLAY THE GAME MAN?! I now need to log in to the PSN account on my phone’s web browser (remember… I am already logged in on PlayStation… because, you know, I WANT to PLAY SF6, I am literally READY to PLAY your video game). Only then, can you confirm the link, pressing X on the now cold PlayStation controller to select ‘Yes, I agree’. I really hope that was boring to read through, because that was the exact feeling I had experiencing that. A total deflation from hype, to boredom.
You might think that this is a harsh knit pick, but it doesn’t make a good first impression to immediately roadblock your players into a mandatory signup process if you want full functionality, offline and online, of the game you just bought. Was £80 too low of an ask? Is my PSN paid subscription not enough? I can hear an imagined voice now. “Why are you so bothered about a ten minute signup? It’s for functionality purposes. You’re gonna get hundreds of hours of playtime, can’t you spare ten minutes?” That’s IF the game holds my attention for that long, even me being a self proclaimed Street Fighter fanboy, it is never a given. Imagine if after booting up a game for the first time, you had to wait ten minutes before it was playable and it would be only playable if you jumped through a few hoops on your smartphone first? OH WAIT! We have already been putting up with inserting a disc into a console only to be spooked by an install window akin to the big box PC games of yonder years for a decade now. Most of us have accepted it. This is distracting me from actually discussing and thinking about Street Fighter 6. Honestly, I just thought the initial booting of Street Fighter 6 was a pisstake. I don’t want to be made to feel like a chump.
When the game finally decides to start, Street Fighter 6’s main menu greets you with a buffet of potential avenues to start your journey. There are three core pillars: Battle Hub, World Tour, and Fighting Ground. Interestingly, the three core modes of the game were segregated into separate downloadable content. Each mode provides a variety of flavours in gameplay so be sure to download them all. The main Street Fighter 6 download only includes the Battle Hub, the other two are separate downloads. Meaning, you can literally choose to banish one or two thirds of the game from your system. The key distinction here is that the control is in the hands of the player. If you’ve had your fill with the two downloadable modes, you can choose to uninstall them, saving a few gigabytes of system storage. If you don’t want ice cream after the main course, you don’t have to eat it. There is only one problem here. Street Fighter 6 has season passes that adds content to these two modes. Are season pass players realistically going to uninstall and reinstall these modes everytime a new character is released? I’m not sure about most players, but maybe some would. Do you want melted ice cream? Maybe, but probably not.
The Battle Hub, a sprawling hall of muchness. You, embodied as your own created World Warrior avatar, can challenge other player avatars to a bout on any of the numerous nearby arcade cabinets, transporting you into a Street Fighter 6 match. You can even spectate other players’ matches by physically moving your avatar over to their cabinet and after a quick menu navigation, you are watching their games. As an avid fighting game community player, this was a bit uncanny to see in action. It was like a Street Fighter themed fever dream of Gaia Online (2003). Simulating the offline experience of play made me want to go to my local and press some buttons, surrounding myself with tangible people, with real faces and unique voices. Nevertheless, functionally it works, and getting to send a wholesome GGs through the text chat was cool. Beyond the arcade cabinets are a number of features. In the centre lies a circular space for Avatar Battles (we will come back to this), off to the sides of the main entrance are little kiosks manned by NPCs (with real sounding names I cannot remember) inviting you to purchase cosmetic items for your avatars or enter a tournament. As you manoeuvre from each feature, huge screens tower you, following you around the hall, displaying tidbit information like today’s MVPs and in-game advertisements for the latest in-game or real world collaborations such as Spy x Family or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It’s all getting a bit on the nose now. Venture deep enough and you will plop yourself onto a retro cabinet to play classic Capcom games or Extreme Battles with eXtreme rules! And if you want to escape the busy spaces, you can retreat upstairs to host your own DJ session and crank some beats out! Maybe you want to see more sights, so why not try World Tour.
After watching the Buckler Basic Training Course on your smartphone, how apt, you see Popeye wailing on a punching bag centred in frame. He is your fighting coach, the guy from the front cover. Remember him? Luke! A short tutorial finishes, and you are free to peruse Metro City and discover all the things that are patiently waiting for you. This mode of play is VERY hangoutable. Grab some street food, climb rooftops, beat up random passers by. Everyone is hanging out, whether they want to or not. You decide who fights or lives peacefully. You are the dictator of their lives. Using your honed special moves, happily named Master Actions, you can employ them in the open world to destroy destructible objects and reach inaccessible areas which regularly treat you with some goodies. Torpedoing across the city with your Spinning Bird Kicks is something you need to witness. As you complete missions and finish street fights with random pedestrians or obvious bad guys, you gain levels to further improve your avatar. Whatever you do, you are slowly progressing, that little level number will soon be big. Some side activities offer special minigames that not only give you a small reprieve from battle, but actively teaches how to perform special moves or perfect parries without feeling like you are being lectured about deep system mechanics through a boring textbook. This is a great way to introduce new fighting game players to specific mechanics and techniques. Very cool!
Progressing through the story introduces you to some familiar faces, the World Warriors and friends. They adore you. They like you so much that they will help you with your training. Scattered around the globe, you visit different countries to say hello to each mentor. In doing so, you are literally becoming a World Warrior. However, when compared to Metro City, these areas are only vignettes, a single screen, one image. As the fixed camera slowly follows your avatar’s movements, you start to wonder what lurks around the edges of the frame. The beaming background calls you to explore. The invisible walls prevent you from discovering more. Street Fighter 6 is telling you this is only a play area, a micro ecosystem with different window dressing. The whole of Brazil, France, and India are diminished to occupy a constrained space that you can stride from one side to the other in five seconds. This should be considered an international threat to tourism.
As you train with your new best friends, they give you the ability to use their moves in combat and in the open world. Neat! This opens up the headline feature of the World Tour mode, the ability to customise your avatar’s entire moveset with a smorgasbord of punches, kicks, grabs, projectiles and supers! It is the best part about Street Fighter 6. The sheer amount of possible combinations engages the imagination. What if I had Ken’s Shoryuken with Blanka’s Rolling Attack? Multiply that idea by one hundred and that is the appeal of this feature. Devising new strategies and combos is wonderful. A little toy that you can customise and play with for hours. You can then transition from World Tour to Battle Hub to fight other player avatars in Avatar Battles. I pulled off some cool moves, saw some crazy shit, and that was the most fun I had with the game. Crazy, brain rattling fun. A sad truth about the competitive scene is that a great portion of this demographic refuse to play the literal best part of Street Fighter 6. Out of stubbornness, old good vs. new bad, or rabid infatuation for the competitive battlefield. Yes, I have seen your figurine display cabinets. There is no excuse. Play the single player. What kind of review is this? Where’s the review of the fighting in this fighting game? Let’s take it to the Fighting Ground.
Fighting Ground is your traditional fighting game experience. Arcade, versus, training, and online modes are all here. If you want to spice things up, you can hop to eXtReMe Battle for some whacky fighting fights. Here are some special considerations, for better and for worse. Street Fighter 6’s training mode blooms your screen with its many petals. The introduction of new features and functions to the training mode allows players to experiment and practise in many different ways, discovering nuances that can swing fights in your favour. Unfortunately, just like Street Fighter Vee, the arcade mode in Street Fighter Six is rubbish. PowerPoint treatment cutscenes- again, for real. A bloated sad old man trying to get up from his ass indented leather armchair to switch the channel on his ancient relic television. That is Street Fighter 6’s arcade mode.
The online infrastructure is the best in the series’ history. Online battles closely match the experience of offline play. Online and offline, a differentiation as old as time, now closely aligned in its fighting values. This is a huge accomplishment which will help the game’s longevity and help convince players to play one more Ranked Match. There is a concern here and we have already seen it during the pandemic era. Players who get used to an online environment might be less willing to try their luck at offline events or locals. In its first year as a competitive fighter, Street Fighter 6’s Capcom Pro Tour run was smaller in scale, similar to Street Fighter V during the pandemic. Even though Capcom touted the big bucks for the winners of Capcom Cup, it still doesn’t change that there weren’t many Pro Tour events in the first season. Competitively, I disengaged from it. What I was seeing, both in and out of the game, was not exciting. I fear that Street Fighter might fall into the same trap as other online centric games, where its fanbase is LITERALLY the internet, the rose tinted view of pro players as ‘pinnacle of play’ embraced as a marketing force which runs over casual and experimental interpretations of the game, and a sense of community transmogrifying into something more alienating and isolating epitomised by lonely Discord servers. I don’t particularly want to compete in my bedroom, even though my pyjamas are very comfy, and that’s saying something!
Fighting in Street Fighter 6 will seem familiar. Playable stages are small holidays. What country would you fight in? The characters and moves you know are all here in addition to new ones. Flashy graffiti inspired visual motifs accompanied by cool super animations is great to experience. Getting a gist of each character is easier than ever. Each character is a specific archetypical playstyle which changes the dynamics of a given character matchup. The game’s input system is a refined version of Street Fighter V’s, simple to perform but harder to master. The major aspects to consider is the newly implemented Control Types and Drive System. As you select your character, you will be asked whether you want to play with Classic, Modern, or Dynamic controls. Dynamic is the outlier here, if you want the game to autopilot for you, sure?! Classic is the tried and true Street Fighter control type where mastery of inputs is a must. Modern, the new baby blood control type, circumvents this by allowing players to perform special moves with very simple, smash bros-esque, shortcut button combinations. Of course, this is balanced accordingly through damage value alterations, but depending on the character and how much commitment you have, this is a viable strategy. I won’t be surprised if Modern controls become a menace in the competitive scene.
While depleting your opponent's health bar is still the main goal, managing drive gauges is equally as important. You start with a full drive meter. Whatever you do during the fight, you will gain or lose drive meter. You can choose to use specific universal drive moves which will come at a hefty cost to your drive gauge. When emptied, you enter the burnout state, making you vulnerable and susceptible to oncoming attacks. You need to make a strategic decision whether to play aggressively or defensively to counter this. The coveted stun mechanic is locked away until you land a drive impact, whether on block or hit, on a cornered burned out opponent. This unfortunately leads to circumstances where no matter what you do, you will be stunned. This scenario is coined a checkmate situation. From what I have witnessed in high level competitive play, players who deliberately play around this mechanic will still feel the wrath of a checkmate situation that could cost them 50-60% of their health from a simple combo. That is game losing. Commentators have recognised this, going as far as stating “he’s dead” everytime it happens and proceeding to talk about the result during the game winning combo, completely ending the speculation of who is going to win with a harsh full stop. Please, stop doing this. From a broadcasting point of view, it’s amateurish. This is premature ejaculation and you need to finish properly. You have one job.
The addition of a perfect parry mechanic on the surface was a great idea. However due to its simple input (MP+MK), it isn’t very exciting when someone gets one. Most parries are performed when holding a crouch block which means even if you’re early or late on the input, it isn’t very risky to do. You might eat a throw, so what? Sitting with a crowd of avid players watching a tournament match and they coldly say “Oh, they got the perfect parry” is a failure. It should be bombastic, an uproar, a hype moment to put in a compilation, but instead it’s a footnote. To add insult to injury, the game literally freeze frames on that moment, giving it a gravitas that isn’t deserved.
In fairness, Street Fighter 6 is a very reactionary kind of fighting game and you are constantly adapting to your opponent. However, you can only adapt so much until the oversimplified drive mechanics creep back in and ruins your day. Additionally, I have experienced inputs not registering properly in the game (especially super inputs while in burnout), resulting in me losing the game. This is extremely frustrating and it means I cannot take the game competitively seriously if I am doubting my own inputs. I don’t play the game competitively anymore. What is frustrating is that even if I watch a player playing well, with a considerable life lead and managing both drive gauges, one error could lead to a number of circumstances that eventually build to defeat. Maybe you reacted to a raw drive rush in neutral with your fast long reach normal attack but still got hit, how about delaying your tech from throwloop but you get shimmed, even taking your turn from a knockdown could lead into a perfect parry punish counter combo into level 3 super. These are just some of the moments that could lead to a quick defeat. If you’re a Twitter fiend, you might have come across the LET'S GO GAMBLING video and it has resonated with the core competitive audience, epitomising the state of aggression and defence play in the game. Aggression prevails just like in real life. It’s harsh and easy to do. Competitive Street Fighter 6 is death by circumstance.
I am sure with balance patches, mechanical tweaks to the input system and new additional characters I will start to enjoy the game again. I want to emphasise that the first month of play was a joy! Experiencing all the new features of Street Fighter 6 (especially World Tour which was a nice single player surprise) is worth the price of admission alone. Unfortunately, the core gameplay loop of the competitive experience is just not for me. It is harsh, too simple, and the ‘hype moments’ you see on Twitter and YouTube are not hype due to death by circumstance. Do not let the rantings of a washed-up player like me deter you from trying out Street Fighter 6, especially if this is your first foray into fighting games. If this game sparks your interest and subsequent love for fighting games, then please give it a go! Fighting games are great fun! Just thank the grand orbiters of the universe that Daz Sampson wasn’t on the character select theme.
