My first experience with the Street Fighter franchise (or even with fighting games in general) was with Street Fighter 2 for the SNES. This was the base model, before any of the expanded rosters or speed increases were brought in, and even then I was hooked. I’ve since owned or at least played almost every iteration of the franchise since then (the first run of the Street Fighter cabinets with the pressure sensitive buttons is, alas, one of the ones I have yet to lay hands on) and enjoyed seeing both the mechanics and the lore grow richer and more satisfying over time – a few missteps notwithstanding. So, when Street Fighter 6 was announced, I was initially skeptical due to how soon after Street Fighter V‘s last fighters it was coming out, but then I saw the trailers and that skepticism turned into anticipation. And I was not wrong to be hyped about this game.
Street Fighter 6 divides itself into three distinct chunks. You have the Battle Hub, an online hub for battles and challenges specifically with other players online, Fighting Ground, the more traditional Arcade-style mode where you pick a character for a single player story, versus match, or training, and the narrative and custom character-driven World Tour mode. While there is some functionality shared between these modes, they might as well be different games in one rapper in other respects – including the fact they they are all distinct downloads, which learned much to my consternation when my download correctly installed World Tour and Battle Hub mode, but not Fighting Ground, which prevented me from selecting different styles for my Avatar in the Battle Hub, and which also required a complete uninstall and reinstall of the game. So, if you’re using the downloadable version on PlayStation 5, make sure everything installs correctly the first time. At the very least, I was able to mess around in a limited training mode while the game reinstalled, and I didn’t lose any of my World Tour progress.
World Tour mode features your player Avatar and designated rival character travelling the world, meeting the core cast of playable fighters in search of the meaning of strength. They get into friendly and not-so-friendly fights with random people in the world, bizarre rooftop superheroes, and even household appliances like Fridges and floor sweeper robots. Along the way you meet, and platonically romance, all the Street Fighter 6 core cast in order to learn their fighting styles, starting with the game’s icon character, Luke, who takes on the role of your first coach and introduces you to the world of Street Fighter 6 – specifically the starting location, Metro City, the general mechanics of the mode, and to your rival, Bosch, a man even more driven by a search for strength than your player avatar, though for darker reasons.
Once you get past the first chapter’s tutorial fights and missions- which unlocks classic mode controls for World Tour mode, don’t forget to switch over- you’re given free rein to wander around in the world. The best way to explain what that’s like is like playing a Yakuza/ Like a Dragon style game, but with Street Fighter matches for each combat. You can walk up to and talk to NPCs and challenge them to a fight (rarely will someone not fight you) and many will also force you into combat. The background of these fights will consist of the current area and NPCs around you the moment the fight starts. Each fighter has a level, a style, and bonus challenges to attempt in addition to beating them, but challenge or not, you get XP and money for each fight you win.
You can buy items like stat boosters or healing items or find them in various caches around the various locales you can travel to, and unless you never get hit, you’re going to need them. World Tour mode does not automatically restore your HP after each fight and losing a match means you lose whatever progress since the last save, so managing your character’s health and money is important. You need money to buy healing items to restore your health, both in and out of combat, but you also need it to buy equipment to customize your character’s look and stats, and to buy gifts for the various canonical Street Fighter characters so you can improve their fighting styles. Because the true end-goal of World Tour mode is to become stronger – which you do by levelling up your character and bonding with each of the mentor characters, which unlocks new interactions and special moves. In addition to making your character more capable in battle, each mentor has a move that allows your avatar to traverse the world, like Chun-Li’s spinning bird kick which gives you the ability to cross from one side of a gap to the other, which is very useful in several of Street Fighter 6’s locales.
Speaking of your avatars, World Tour begins with you customizing the look of your character, picking a form (male or female) and then an identity (male, female, or just human). As far as I can tell this hasn’t changed much of anything yet, mechanically or narratively, and I’ve spent a few thousand zenny just to check (changing your avatar’s look or even just identity in World Tour mode always costs 1000 zenny). What does affect things mechanically are your avatar’s height and reach, with larger characters hitting harder but being much easier to hit, and longer reach making you much easier to get off balance.
Your World Tour avatar and any unlocked emotes and equipment can also be used to customize your avatar in the Battle Hub. The Battle Hub is used to set up custom tournaments, has weekly challenges for in-game bonuses, and more. It’s very well polished and, from what I can tell, has excellent netcode, which is vital for an online matchmaking system (at the end of the day, this what the Battle Hub is), behind all the polish and presentation. In addition to all of that, it also contains a number of classic Capcom games to play, both single and multiplayer, including Bionic Commando, SonSon, Super Ghouls and Ghosts and more.
The Fighting Ground is the ‘traditional’ fighting game experience. You can play through an arcade story mode, each character has a story that helps introduce them or catch you up to speed on their place in the world, presented in the form of gorgeously illustrated stills accompanied by voice acting and sound effects. It also contains Street Fighter 6’s in-person versus mode and all important training mode, where you can practice each character to your heart’s content. While the training room does make a return for getting those pixel measurements for the people that absolutely need it, you can now train on any of Street Fighter 6’s multiple battle stages. Oh, and every time you beat an arcade story mode you unlock something, primarily character art, but also music, new options, even new games for the battle hub.
The biggest change from Street Fighter V to Street Fighter 6 is the removal of V-trigger and replacing it with the Drive Gauge. This goes down as you block attacks, get hit with supers, or use Drive abilities, and refills as you attack or take a short rest in battle. The Drive Gauge itself can be used for Drive rushes, powerful launching attacks, parries, EX moves (now called overdrives) and reversals. If you run out, however, you go into a state called burnout and your defense is hampered and you become vulnerable to stun. It encourages high risk, high reward play while allowing punishment for overreach and prevents the situation that often happened in Street Fighter V where many characters were reliant on activating V-trigger to get access to their full arsenal.
Speaking of full arsenal, many V-triggers have been reworked into Street Fighter 6’s new super system, where each character has essentially three supers, one taking a single level of super meter, often an enhanced version of a basic move like the Hadouken, L2 supers which tend to be self-buffs, like Juri’s Feng Shui engine, and L3 Cinematic supers, which almost all require a melee hit to activate and which gain a critical art version with a new animation and extra damage when you’re under a quarter health. Put together, it means matches feel faster and more impactful, and that every single hit and bit of health can really count. I can’t wait to see what the pros make of the system this time.
Is Street Fighter 6 perfect? No, especially in World Tour mode where some set pieces overstay their welcome (I’m looking at you Metro City Subway), but overall the experience is amazing, all the characters new and returning feel right, even the legacy characters replacing older ones have the right sort of feel for their character archetype, something that hasn’t even been true of the original characters in their previous titles. I know I’m going to be spending a lot more time with the 18 core fighters and all the DLC characters as soon as they drop as well.
Tim played Street Fighter 6 on PlayStation 5 with a review code. Street Fighter 6 is also available on PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S and Steam.
Ironically SF6 doesn’t have any half circle inputs