Lite Reviews Street Fighter 6
Or, Anime Player Tries Grounded Footsies for the First (?) Time
I always feel the need to clarify my fighting game credentials whenever I talk about a new title or the experience that I’m having in-game, so here goes: I’m not really a big Capcom head. My first Capcom fighter ever was Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, but I was only playing it casually and I still don’t really get tag fighters even after bouncing off of Marvel, BBTAG, DBFZ, Skullgirls, and so on. My family are big on Capcom games, having grown up on the Dreamcast and competing in SFIV events, but the first Street Fighter game I ever put any time into was SFV and only during the final season of the game. I’ve dabbled in the retro games but never really stuck to any of them either, and people look at me funny when I try to tell them I think SFIV looks kind of ugly. (It does! Marvel 3 literally came out right after and the SFIV characters in that game look way better than they do in SFIV.) People now mainly know me for Guilty Gear or Melty Blood, and apparently, to my embarrassment, locally there’s a few people who still remember me as a Smash player. So I’m not great at Street Fighter, and my purchase of SF6 was mainly a vote of confidence in Capcom and the genre rather than something I was especially excited for… although I did burn a lot of money on buying the big Collector’s Edition box for PS5.
This is not really going to be a traditional review, and it’s also not something that’s intended to dissuade or persuade anyone from purchasing the game, but ‘review’ is the word that best describes what I’m doing- looking over the game from top to bottom and observing what works for me and what doesn’t. I decided to write this because one, I had already written and talked about the game a lot in very informal formats, and two, I finally hit Diamond 1 and felt like I could write a little more informed about the game after having sunk a good amount of time into it and getting ‘better.’
I’m also going to split this up into a few parts: talking about the actual fighting game, a look into the distinct parts of the package (SF6 is split into World Tour, Battle Hub, and Fighting Ground,) aspects of the game’s presentation and design, and stuff that they’re planning on doing to elongate the game’s lifespan like the Fighter Pass, character season passes, and daily bonuses.
1. The Actual Street Fighter 6 Fighting Game
This game is phenomenal. It’s probably the most fun I’ve had playing a Capcom fighter since picking up Vampire Savior, and there’s a lot in the game that reminds me of VSav’s system. I have some minor gripes with a few interactions and some character balance, but this is an exceptionally fun and well-designed first iteration of a fighting game. [Note: A big chunk of this is a dissection of the Drive system, so if you already know about all of this you can skip ahead a bit to just read my opinion of the system rather than my breakdown for people who haven’t tried the game yet.]
The main draw to the game is the Drive system, which replaces the Stun gauge and provides characters with six pips of meter that can be spent on a handful of options, which I may shorten or refer to with different terms than their actual designation for the rest of this review: Drive Impact, Drive Rush, Drive Parry, Overdrive moves, and Drive Reversals. Each of these tools is a kind of throwback to other systems that have appeared in other SF games- Drive Impact is very similar to SFIV’s Focus Attack (and Drive Rush is similar to FADC and other dash cancels,) Drive Parry is obviously a new iteration of SF3’s parry, Drive Reversals are like old guard cancels or Alpha Counters or V-Reversals or what-have-you, and Overdrives are literally just EX special moves. Each tool costs x amount of pips, and the Drive Gauge replenishes passively (with a little more coming back when you deal damage, and a little more lost when you take chip or are hurt by supers or Drive mechanics.) Most special-cancelable moves can be canceled into Drive systems. When you run out of meter, you enter Burnout, a state where you can’t use any Drive tools until the gauge refills to 100%, the health bar takes chip damage, and you take additional blockstun.
Drive Impact (HPHK) is a universal advancing attack with two hits worth of armor that costs one pip of Drive Gauge. This was the very VERY early divisive mechanic when the game was first out in beta because it was super good. On a successful Punish Counter (a higher-tier counter hit value for when you hit someone at the end of their active frames) or against the wall, the move crumples the opponent and becomes a powerful combo starter, making it very effective at punishing mashers. Beyond that level, though, anyone who knows specific Drive Impact counters can render the tool ineffective, forcing you to learn how to use the rest of the game’s systems. Drive Impact loses to: the third hit (so multi-hits, jabs that chain into themselves, and Target Combos with multiple hits will beat it,) throws, parry, whiff punishes, and delayed Drive Impacts. This means that some common anti-DI tactics are to mash 2LP, or chain a jumping normal into a special-cancelable grounded normal and then DI back. Drive Impact should therefore be used to get out of blockstrings when you know for certain that your opponent’s turn is over or almost over, rather than to bully your way into your opponent in desperation. It’s fun because it gives everyone some kind of armored reversal that also works as a combo starter. It also leads to some of the most dangerous mental stack situations in the game, especially since DI-ing a burned out opponent in the corner stuns them. On the other hand, if used incorrectly or relied on too much as a crutch it can be punished harshly.
Drive Parry (MPMK) is a parry. Tapping parry costs a single pip but you can hold the command to remain in the parry stance for a gradually draining gauge. Parry is parry! It beats all strikes and loses to throws. The main draw of parry is that the amount of pushback received by the defender is instead halved between both the defender and the attacker, which leaves you a bit closer for punishes. However, you don’t earn additional frame advantage on a successful parry, unless you land a Perfect Parry. Perfect Parries occur in the first two frames of the parry animation and result in a screen freeze that eats the opponent’s inputs, allowing the defender to react and punish. This comes at the cost of a 50% damage scaling penalty to your combo, though, so it’s best to keep your punish short. Overall, parry is the low-risk defensive option whereas DI is the high-risk one. Parry loses to throws (which is why command grabs and throw loops on knockdown are so powerful in this game) but beats every other strike option with a tap or press of the MPMK command, and parrying correctly will help you get out of big pressure when you’re afraid of blocking normally. DI loses to a lot but the payoff on a successful attempt is massive.
Drive Rush (66MPMK) is a dash cancel that can also be performed out of a successful parry or even a neutral parry stance. Dash canceling a special-cancelable normal costs three pips, whereas doing it out of a parry stance costs one. Any attack performed out of a Drive Rush will have +4 additional frames of hit- or blockstun, and while a DR midcombo adds 15% combo scaling, a DR starter does not. This makes DR a powerful, albeit committal, combo tool, and it’s very common to see certain characters either perform DR into or out of a 2MK or light button starter. Drive Rush is a very commonly applied tool past the low level as a neutral skip, a way to extend the range of pokes, as a combo starter, out of a parry at full screen to get in on zoners, and so on. The best way to call it out is to have already put out a move that punishes or preempts the DR, jump, or parry or block and then Drive Reversal (which we’ll talk about in a bit.) Learning how to do Drive Rush effectively is extremely important for this game’s combo routing and for navigating the screen.
Drive Reversal (6HPHK when in blockstun) is a classic guard cancel option. It’s fully invincible which means it’ll beat other options like Drive Impact, but it’s -8 on block and the startup is pretty long, meaning it can be baited and punished. For two pips of Drive, it’s a straightforward but (in my opinion) very weak option. When it’s successful, it’s good because it gets you a lot of space and straight-up stops your opponent’s offense, but it seems very easy to punish either by simply blocking it or by using a low-blockstun move and then just jumping or avoiding it and counterattacking, and now the defender is down a ton of Drive. If this mechanic needs to be changed, I don’t really have any suggestions off the top of my head, but it seems pretty difficult to use correctly. In my climb to Diamond, I barely ever utilized Drive Reversal and I successfully punished my opponents’ uses often.
I’m not going to call them Overdrives. I’m just gonna call them EX moves. Overdrive is what supers are called in Guilty Gear, and it’s a whole segment of the Burst Gauge in Blazblue, and I play those games more than I play Street Fighter, and Street Fighter has been calling them EX moves for years. So they’re not OD special moves. They’re EX special moves. Anyway, EX moves are about what you’d expect, and since the Drive Gauge is a separate bar from the super meter the strategy for the attacker becomes “Should I spend gauge on EX moves or should I save it for my defensive tools? Or should I save meter to prevent myself from going into burnout?” rather than “Should I extend my combo with an EX move or do I really want my Critical Art later?” I think this change is more interesting and I’ve found myself adjusting combo routing on the fly to include Drive or EX or to keep things meterless and let my frugality pay off later.
So that’s the summary of the Drive Gauge. It’s really fun. Playing with it correctly feels like you always have resources to do something cool, and making mistakes (or forcing your opponent to make mistakes) creates a fun tug-of-war that reminds me of Under Night’s GRD meter. Basically every tool (even Drive Reversal, which I still think is kind of underpowered) is useful and plays with a dynamic RPS system between strikes, throws, and Drive. Playing in burnout and punishing your opponent for being reckless is very stressful but there’s a certain adrenaline rush that you can tap into in those situations that is very exhilarating. My one complaint is that, when a player exits Stun (either naturally or after you’re done comboing them) they get their full Drive Gauge back as a mercy. While I totally understand why this happens, it can sometimes feel kind of bad when they make a comeback after I put them in a near-checkmate scenario. This situation kind of reminds me of when neutral gets reset after a meterless wallbreak in GGST, except there at least I get Positive Bonus as a reward.
The character balance and the rest of the systems also feel pretty fun to interact with. Combos in this game are insanely expressive and there’s a lot of different ways to get creative with routing. It also feels easy (with an asterisk… more on that later) to do long combos even if you aren’t skilled at execution. Between Drive Rush, EX moves, and the variety of Target Combos that each character has, there’s lots of different ways to extend combos either by linking moves together or by starting juggles. As explained before, combo creativity changes a lot based on how you’re spending meter, but it can sometimes be totally worth it to burn a ton of Drive and then end in a super (or sometimes even use your super to keep a combo going, like with Chun-Li’s level 2 and Jamie’s non-CA level 3) and do a ton of damage, especially since supers drain your opponent’s Drive. This is also an extremely high damage game, so for all of the slow-paced grounded footsies and deliberation in neutral, one touch with a decent amount of resources can do a clean 50 or 60% off the health bar. It’s probably the flashiest offense that a Street Fighter game has had since maybe the Alpha series, where custom combos and other mechanics could even become real air combos.
Characters in this game all feel pretty strong, and as with most newer games in the genre the balance seems pretty tight, although I would argue there are a few outliers. Luke, Ken, Guile, Juri, and Deejay all seem like they have best-in-class tools for almost every situation, and while Cammy lacks a good fireball game she’s fast enough and can easily travel fullscreen to run basic mix and has strong fundamentals that let her keep up with those first five. Right below the top six or so, E. Honda, Blanka, JP, and Marisa have tools that are incredibly good at running a particularly oppressive gameplan full of knowledge checks, making them difficult to defend against. The remaining eight characters are not weak or uncommon at all, but I frequently ran into three of them during my climb to Diamond: Jamie has a very tricky playstyle revolving around his drinks, and Zangief and Manon can both run a very strong grappling game in a system where strike-throw is the most powerful mixup option. Ryu and Chun-Li are also fairly common, the former being a tried-and-true shoto with a bit of spice in his SF6 incarnation, and the latter having a new unique stance system that lets her run additional mix or re-buy pressure (in addition to one of the best DPs in the game.)
The remaining three, then, are Lily, Dhalsim, and Kimberly, who all clearly lack something the others have- innate defensive tools. Dhalsim can teleport around the screen, but is very slow and floaty, making him weak to characters who have good antiairs or DPs, and the addition of parry and anti-zoning tools across the cast means he’s overall a much weaker zoner than Guile, JP, and Deejay. Dhalsim also does not have access to an invincible reversal (no EX special reversal either) outside of system options until he has level 2 super, which means defensive situations for him are more costly. Lily is a psuedo-grappler who also has the benefits of a powerful strike-throw game alongside big normals, but unfortunately her Windclad stocks are a bit harder to manage compared to the rest of the cast that has unique resources or special installs, meaning it can be hard for her to get in when she wants to. Finally, while Kimberly has a lot of mixup tools and unprecedented okizeme for a Street Fighter game, the game’s systems ultimately mean that if she can’t open someone up she has to play a weak strike-throw game exacerbated by stubby normals and a lack of a special-cancellable 2MK. (Lily and Kimberly both lack a non-super reversal.)
If I was to rank the characters in an uninspired and uneducated tierlist, then, it would probably look like this: (Ordered in tiers)
S: Guile, Juri, Cammy, Deejay, Luke
A. Ken, Blanka, E. Honda, Marisa, JP
B. Jamie, Ryu, Manon, Chun-Li, Zangief
C. Kimberly, Lily, Dhalsim
Full disclosure, I played Kimberly all the way to Diamond and I don’t necessarily think she’s weak. In fact, I think she’s one of the most fun characters in the game, and probably the coolest Street Fighter character in the franchise. I just think that for all of her powerful mixups and long combos and high damage and good oki, she has some clear weaknesses that make the rest of the cast difficult to fight. While she has plenty of anti-airs, they’re all pretty hard to actually use for a variety of reasons, with 236KLK and DR.2HP being the best ones to cash out damage on (but still hard to do on a read) and 214K being the easiest to use (but still prone to whiffing in bizarre ways.) She also lost her EX 214K’s utility as a DP from beta to 1.0, and her level 1 and level 2 supers are not really great, so she has really bad options on defense in a game where nearly everyone else has a real DP. Finally, having a lot of good mixup tools doesn’t mean much in a system where DI and parry both beat high/low and left/right mix, and her stubby normals and difficult to use grounded command grab (236K~P) mean that running regular strike-throw is really tough.
Now… there’s a few minor issues with the game’s system, most notably the input parser. This thing fucking steals inputs or gives you shit you never wanted so often it’s silly. The most common misinput you’ll probably see is a DP coming out as a quarter circle or vice versa even when you’re trying to keep the input clean, due specifically to how long the 6 part of the input is being ‘saved’ by the parser. Sometimes when I’m moving forward while trying to buffer something like a 214 input, it will retain each buffered motion for an incredibly long time, which resulted in a lot of supers that I never once intended to press. Some Twitter brainlords who have dug into the code insist that the input parser on paper should be less lenient than the parser from SFV, but in mine (and many others’) experience that does not seem to be the case. This feels pretty bad in a game where combos primarily rely on tight links or when you’re trying to save or spend meter and get the opposite effect. Overall, though, the game feels pretty good when you keep everything in mind and try to keep your inputs precise.
2. Street Fighter 6 As A Video Game
A lot of people have said that SF6 feels like the first fighting game in a while that has shipped as a full, complete video game package, and that’s probably true. SF6 consists of three ‘chunks,’ two of which are even separate downloads if you don’t intend to play those modes: World Tour, the singleplayer beat-em-up canon story mode; Fighting Ground, the main offline modes you would expect from a fighting game (Arcade Mode, offline Versus, training modes, and the like) alongside Custom Rooms and Ranked and Casual queue-based matchmaking; and Battle Hub, the touted online lobby mode. I’m going to split this second section into three subsections that go over each mode, but I’m also going to go on a tangent about the Avatar creation because that’s a major component of two out of three of these modes and I have some longer thoughts about it.
Making an Avatar is forced and necessary before interacting with Battle Hub or World Tour, as your Avatar is how you’re perceived in the former and the main character of the latter. It revolves around you creating a fairly robust player model in the RE Engine, adjusting most of the variables you would expect to edit in modern character creators. I don’t play a lot of games like Elden Ring or whatever that allow you to customize your avatar this deeply, so SF6 is the most in-depth character creator I’ve played in a while, but I ran into a few frustrations that can all be summed up in one statement: It is remarkably easy to make a weird freak of nature and remarkably hard to make a guy that Looks Like Me. I keep seeing a lot of avatars on Battle Hub that run the gamut from “loving recreation of my favorite anime character” to “Monster Factory reject” to “vaguely racist or transphobic caricature.” With sliders for nearly every feature that go from 0 to 100 and a weird skin palette editor that lets you glow like a lightbulb, it’s pretty easy to make a weird-ass guy. But with a lack of variety of hair types (I couldn’t get curly hair like mine, there aren’t a lot of ‘anime’ or goofy hairstyles, and most of the Black hairstyles correspond to popular street fashion rather than less-seen styles or the way it may naturally grow) and a difficulty with making skin and body hair look realistic and not weirdly fuzzy or gross and full of pores, it was hard to make a realistic kind of guy that I felt comfortable identifying with. That being said, I don’t actually know how much that matters to most people interacting with the system, but it was something that bothered me so I’m talking about it.
2a. World Tour
Just as a heads up, I’m going to post major spoilers for World Tour here, as well as for the Street Fighter 6 prequel e-manga. World Tour takes place after the SF6 arcade mode, which itself is a sequel to the SF3 series, with Third Strike being the canonical, chronological final entry in the franchise prior to this game. The story goes SF Alpha, SF1, SFII, SFIV, SFV, SF3, SF6. Thanks, Capcom.
World Tour begins in the aftermath of the SF6 e-manga. Ken has gone into hiding in Metro City, on the run after being framed by JP for a terrorist attack involving cryptocurrency in a fictional pseudo-South-Asian-Middle-Eastern third-world country called Nayshall. Ken and Luke confronted each other in Nayshall, but Ken won the clash and escaped. Now, Ken is estranged from the family he fought hard to rescue, Luke has mellowed out and is spending time coaching a new generation of street fighters in Metro City, and JP is plotting in the background. One of the new fighters that Luke is coaching is the player character, who quickly strikes up a rivalry with a hot-headed Nayshalli trainee named Bosch. Bosch is dismissed from the story just as soon as he arrives, and after sharing a pizza with you, Luke tells you to go find Chun-Li and the other capital S capital F Street Fighters so you can find the answer to the question of “What is strength?” Which is a recurring question that keeps getting echoed every few minutes as you play through the game.
World Tour is roughly 20 hours long and mainly consists of an open world beat-em-up action RPG that has a lot of throwbacks to Final Fight and older Street Fighters. The Mad Gear gang and obscure NPCs like Carlos Miyamoto are recurring elements, and you spend a lot of time roaming around Metro City (and later Nayshall) beating up NPCs, doing sidequests that involve beating up NPCs, texting the Street Fighter characters, doing minigames that involve beating up cars, and progressing the story whenever possible. The gameplay is pretty fun. It gets repetitive after a while and you’re locked out of some customization based on story progression since you only meet some mentors after a certain amount of playtime, but it’s a decent beat-em-up. There are eventually longer sequences like the Metro City and Nayshall tournament arcs where you play against a bunch of NPCs in a straightforward fight, so there’s also a bit of variety in the kind of fights you have.
Eventually, though, the story mode falls short for a variety of reasons, some story-based and some gameplay-based. For one thing, while World Tour has a good chunk of fanservice, there’s a lot of stuff missing that I would have expected for a chronological sequel to Third Strike. There’s no mention of any of the SF3 new challengers at all and they have no bearing on the plot. In fact, even the SF6 cast barely has any impact on the plot! Ken’s story with his family is never resolved; Juri shows up very early on to disrupt your progress and then bails just as quickly; Kimberly says she’s doing some ninja work regarding JP’s organization and then also bails; JP doesn’t show up until the end of the story, which is a whole other mess that I’ll get into; neither Luke or Chun-Li, both of whom are mentioned as being directly influenced by this Neo Shadaloo plot, ever take any action at any point. A majority of the SF6 cast is only ever encountered on dioramas of their battle stages (Deejay’s Jamaica is just a little walk-around of Bathers’ Beach, for instance) and so the rest of them never show up and have any major involvement at all either. In fact — !
Okay, so, spoilers for the entire World Tour mode, I guess. Bosch disappears quickly because he’s a Nayshalli freedom fighter and he and his family are leading an insurgency against JP’s organization, which is revealed to be remnants of Shadaloo and SIN (Seth’s whole thing from SFIV, if you forgot.) Bosch returns again in a brief visit to England, only to immediately be kidnapped by Juri, who… also disappears from the plot just as fast. You go on a quest to figure out where the hell Bosch went up to, which involves you participating in a Metro City tournament that is quickly canceled due to a bomb threat, which was issued by the same group that Bosch was a part of. Eventually you travel to Nayshall and find out that Bosch has been infused with Psycho Power by JP and his scientists, and his sister is planning on bombing a tournament that JP is putting on by booby-trapping the champion belt in an attempt to kill JP. You fight Bosch in the tournament finals, but his character stats and AI are cheating and it doesn’t matter whether you win or not, because the following cutscene plays out the same. JP reveals that he’s caught onto the bomb plot by handing the belt to a little girl, Bosch’s little sister, who’s been hired as part of the tournament’s stage hands. In trying to save his sister, Bosch is killed by the bomb, and you have a climatic revenge fight against JP. You win, but JP says some dumb shit about how none of what you’ve accomplished matters because your friend is still dead and you’re incapable of arresting JP, and then it smashes to credits after a close-up of Bosch’s smoldering corpse. Grim. Right after credits, if you want to unlock JP’s moveset and story costume then the first canonical action your avatar takes is to return to Nayshall and become JP’s next student.
So the story is fucking wack. There’s no continuation of the story from SF3 with Alex, Gil, and the Illuminati; the World Warriors and the new SF6 characters have basically no role in the plot other than to train you, text you cat emojis, and give you sidequests; your own character development (what little of it there could have been) is immediately undone because of the design constraint where your avatar HAS to be a student of every martial artist in the game in order to unlock their movesets. And it wouldn’t matter if the story was or wasn’t wack if it wasn’t a major hyped up part of the game, or if you had to play through the whole thing to unlock Juri and JP’s movesets and costumes. The whole game was touted as being a sequel to SF3, nearly two decades after that storyline had been introduced, and yet we get zero followup to it and basically nothing happens.
There’s also the major fact that if you want to unlock everyone’s current alternate outfits without spending money you need to unlock them through World Tour by improving your relationship with each of your mentors. Each mentor has two gauges, style and bond, and you need to level up the latter by giving each respective mentor souvenirs. Most of these souvenirs can be bought and distributed en masse from shops (prepare to visit Jamaica a lot) but a handful of them can be earned from sidequests, and there’s guides online for how to grind money and which items go well with each mentor. The issue is… this is still a lot of menial grinding, and, again, since you don’t get certain characters until certain parts of the story, with Juri and JP not showing up until the very end, it means that you do have to suffer through a good chunk of this story in order to unlock costumes for your characters to use in the other two-thirds of the SF6 product, which is a big deal, because… I will be talking about that later.
The other final issue with World Tour is that playing World Tour is the only way to grind experience for your avatar, which is a big deal because Avatar Battles are a mode that you can play in the Battle Hub. I’m skipping around a bit, but even though you don’t have to play in Avatar Battles, the game occasionally wants you to participate in them in order to earn Drive Tickets as part of your daily quests, and Drive Tickets are important because… again, I’ll be talking about that later. The game is at least forgiving about this; you don’t have to win five Avatar Battles per quest, just play in five of them. It’s still kind of annoying because Avatar Battles carry over your World Tour stats and don’t forcibly even them out Pokemon style, so if you want a remotely competent Avatar (or if you want to complete the style meters for more than one mentor) you have to grind a ton of World Tour, which is hard because the only NPCs you can really fight after a certain point that will provide meaningful amounts of experience are the handful of superbosses hidden around the world.
The ultimate verdict is that World Tour is fun for a bit but exhausting once it has run its course. Once the story mode becomes necessary to play in order to unlock certain features or participate meaningfully in others, what is initially a goofy and fun beat-em-up game ends up feeling like a chore, especially as you’re forced to sit through a disappointing story with a mediocre level of fanservice.
2b. Battle Hub
This is where the game anticipates you’ll spend most of your time, and it’s certainly where I’ve ended up doing a majority of my matchmaking. Battle Hub is the first selectable thing on the middle of the in-game launch menu. As soon as you load it up, you’re prompted with either a recommended server, or a server of your own choosing. Servers are located in big multi-regions for North America, South America, Asia, and Europe, and from there you can pick a lobby depending on population and whether you see your friends in there.
There’s several options available in the lobby. You can see other players’ avatars and chat with everybody; the main cabinets allow you to play casual sets while waiting in training mode; you can play Extreme Battles, a kind of special party mode with other players; you can play one of the handful of classic Capcom arcade games that get rotated out every now and then; you can shop for goods for your avatar with Drive Tickets or Fighter Coins (we’re building towards a discussion about this…) and edit your avatar’s body with the same (even though you can also do it from within World Tour using the RPG currency instead,) you can sign up for in-game tournaments (this booth currently doesn’t have anything to do at it) and then there’s another booth that is also just empty. You can also futz around on a turntable for funsies. If you don’t want play with people in the lobby, or if you want to take a break from cabinets, you can also join the global ranked and casual matchmaking queues while idling, but you cannot do training mode matchmaking for those queues while in Battle Hub. There’s also adverts for SF6 crossovers with real-world products, and you can see winstreaks and notifications about player clans on the big TV on the main wall.
This is probably one of the game’s strongest points: selling people on the idea of avatar-based lobby matchmaking. The 3D lobby can be a bit hard to navigate at first if you’re on a controller that doesn’t have a right analog stick, but otherwise it’s mostly functional and a good social experience. GGST’s 2D voxel lobbies that were riddled with bugs throughout three betas and suffered from major downtime after the implementation of Xbox/Windows crossplay soured a lot of players on the notion of interacting with matchmaking outside of a queue, but I think SF6 did a lot to win people back over to that idea. A big part of that success, I think, is that there’s a lot to do in the Battle Hubs besides just cabinet matchmaking. There’s a variety of other game modes, the graphics and prominent chat mean it’s easier to see players emote or talk with each other between sets than it is in GGST (your mileage may vary on whether this is good or not, considering this also means there’s a lot of ScrubQuoting going on at any given time) and the experience is mostly functional. I have to say mostly because I do experience cabinet bugs or disconnects or desyncs about as often as I do with GGST, and the Battle Hub has some other issues that I’ll explain in the following paragraph, but again, for the most part the Battle Hub is a holistic and charming experience.
Not everything is perfect. Battle Hub has some issues that I share with the rest of the matchmaking modes in the game, but they factor in pretty prominently here, so I’ll try to divvy it up between them as I go. The biggest problem with Battle Hub is that there’s only four regions for each set of servers- NA, SA, EU, and Asia as explained previously. This means that Oceania, the Middle East, and Africa don’t get their own servers, and to a lesser extent, Mexico does not get its own servers and South American servers are underpopulated. (SA servers being empty is not necessarily a Capcom problem, but the SA playerbase is incidentally small due to regional pricing for games there trending towards being insanely expensive. It’s a huge reason why Skullgirls and +R are so popular there- they’re cheap.)
This in turn means that the players from these regions have to go into the next best ‘continental region’ for Battle Hub play, and you will often run into awful connections from distances that SF6’s admittedly sublime rollback solution cannot parse. SoCal to North Mexico is one thing, but as you go deeper and deeper south these connections are untenable, and eventually you begin running into Brazilian Wi-Fi Ken players who refuse to use the forfeit feature and you’re stuck playing awful matches. GGST has already solved this problem by simply dividing up their server list into a bunch of different regions, for US West, US East, Mexico, and so on. Properly splitting up the different matchmaking regions into smaller subregions for Battle Hub would probably guarantee better matchmaking experiences for each area. We can already choose our matchmaking to an extent anyway, and the game seems to always want to send me to an EU or Asia server via Quick Join, but there’s an abundance of servers and it seems like it would be easy to just split them up between additional countries and continents.
The cabinets also have a few issues when it comes to casual matchmaking. In GGST, Tower and Park cabinets only support two players, so no one can spectate or rotate on. In SF6, multiple players can lock onto the same cabinet, which includes spectators AND people who want to play winners-stays format. The first big issue is that, while you are idling on a cabinet playing training mode matchmaking, you cannot screen whoever hops onto the other side of the cab. This means that you are potentially forced to play at least one game with the aforementioned Brazilian Wi-Fi Ken who refuses to accept your no contest pleas even as you mash the Start button because it’s good on their end. (P2 always has the privilege of checking out the full details of P1, including character, connection quality, wired or Wi-Fi, rank, and more, before they even sit down.) The next issue is that the cabinet does not alert you when someone is spectating, nor does it allow you to set up rotation rules. So, if someone gets onto your cabinet while you’re playing against somebody in a deep set, or if you’ve met a friend and you wanted to play them for a while, they may end up just kicking off the loser inexplicably and you won’t be able to back out of the next game. You’re also locked into single-game rotations when this occurs. Now, to give Capcom a bit of credit, I think they intended the Fighting Ground-based Custom Match rooms to be where you would play your friends and avoid all of this, but from my personal experience, no one’s using Custom Rooms for that outside of tournaments and some streamers who may want a password protected lobby to play viewers. So on top of the fact that cabinets are still prone to breaking or desyncing or bugging out, you get this weird rotation queue system and inability to screen matches that can make the Battle Hub casual cabinets feel pretty clunky.
This is a different type of issue, but obviously any chat service implemented in a fighting game will lead to some amount of toxicity. That being said, an avatar lobby where you can be forced to see some weird logos or fucked up custom character on top of verbal harassment can be kind of rough on the social experience. There are obviously features that allow for muting, reporting, and blocking problem players, but my point here is that I want to give GGST credit where credit is due- chat is hidden by default and the voxel paper dolls aren’t customizable to a degree where you could see something potentially offensive. In general it’s also just annoying seeing people complain in the chat all the time. Sometimes it’s funny to see someone act like a scrub, but most of the time it’s not.
So that’s Battle Hub. Like most social experiences on online games, you get what you put into it. I think it can be pretty hit-or-miss but it fortunately has a pretty high batting average. There’s still a lot of quality of life missing from it, and the fact that some features come and go currently make it feel a little lacking two months after launch, but there’s a ton of stuff to do and it knocks a lot of it out of the park.
2c. Fighting Ground
This is the other game mode with a majority of the ‘traditional’ fighting game content in it. Fighting Ground has five submodes in it: Versus, where you can play traditional offline sets in either a 1v1 or gimmick King of Fighters-style 3v3 format; Special Match, where you can play Extreme Battles, Online, where you can once again make a Custom Match room or join the Ranked or Casual matchmaking queues; Arcade, where you can play each character’s Story leading up to World Tour, and Practice, where you can do Training Mode, SF6-generic Tutorials, Character Guides, or Combo Trials. A lot of this plays like how you would expect if you were familiar with the genre, so rather than go over everything tediously I’m going to explore what’s working and what doesn’t. (Before I continue, I just want to mention that you can do matchmaking from Training Mode while in Fighting Ground, which is good… but not from Battle Hub, which is weird? That should just be seamlessly in both subgames.)
Capcom, this is THE best fighting game training mode I’ve ever played in my life, or at least a top 3. I have not played a training mode or tutorial content in general this good since maybe Them’s Fightin’ Herds. GGST’s genuinely comes close but it doesn’t have frame data or hitbox viewer, and while SF6 also doesn’t have a hitbox viewer it DOES have the best frame data visualizer I’ve seen since, again, TFH. It also has some nifty-ass features I didn’t even know I wanted. If you’re like me and you play on a stick or leverless device that is lacking some buttons that a pad may have, like, say, a right analog stick or an additional R3 button, you’ll be happy to know that SF6 has a shortcut binding feature where you can designate a button to use in training mode and then assign several multi-button scripts to said button in order to set up useful training mode commands that you frequently need. I have all of the different dummy record features bound to my Victrix’s L3 plus a directional input, which makes labwork a breeze when I don’t have to finesse how to set up my keybinds. Also, this isn’t directly accessible in training mode, but did you know that while viewing replays or spectating, you can toggle on frame data viewer? There’s loads of stuff in here that I wish more fighting games had. I hope SF6 adds hitbox toggle in a future update, and replay takeover would be fun albeit ambitious, but this is like, a near-perfect feature set otherwise. All of the other tutorial content- for systems, for characters, and for combos- are also really good and amazingly practical as well.
Here’s where I’ll get into my gripes with the Ranked and Casual matchmaking systems. I’ll start with Ranked because some of the issues overlap and Ranked is probably the queue I’ve played in the most.
Ranked in this game works similarly (but not identically) to SFV’s ranked system. The most obvious difference is the tier delineations. Whereas SFV started you in Bronze, and would then advance you to Silver → Gold → Platinum → Diamond → Master, with three subtiers of Master leading up to Warlord, SF6 changes this up quite a bit. After telling the game a recommendation based on your previous experience with fighting games, you are assigned a placement from Rookie → Iron → Bronze → Silver → Gold → Platinum → Diamond, with Master being the highest tier possible with no subtiers. Unlike before with each subtier being designated “Super” or “Ultra,” subtiers within each rank are designated with a 1–5 star rating, with 5 being the highest. There are some other crucial differences as well:
- It is impossible to demote in Rookie. You can literally only promote up into Iron, even if you lose.
- From Iron to Gold, you can never be demoted back down into the lower tier (i.e. you cannot be sent back down from Gold 1 back to Silver 5.) You can be demoted from each subtier (from Gold 5 back to Gold 4.)
- From Iron to Gold, if you go on a winstreak you earn a substantial amount of bonus LP (League Points, your MMR.) This means you can potentially advance to Platinum remarkably fast.
- From Platinum to Diamond, you can be demoted back down to lower tiers (i.e. from Diamond 1 back to Platinum 5.) You also do not earn winstreak bonus LP.
- Through the whole ranked bracket, you will only lose a flat 40 LP per loss and you will always gain more per win. How much varies depending on the opponent’s rank but you will always earn at least 50 LP. This means that as long as you have an even or positive win ratio you will continue climbing.
There’s some good, some bad, and some weird in this system. The good, I think, is that if you’re genuinely very skilled, then the ranked queue will do its best to adjust accordingly and advance you up to the higher tiers. I got placed into Iron because I wasn’t used to the game’s system, but after a short amount of grinding I quickly hit Platinum 1 and it didn’t feel like much of a chore. The weird is that, if this system works as designed, then basically everyone playing ranked consistently is more or less guaranteed to get placed into Platinum at some point, meaning the ranked queue will be very top heavy and it will be harder to find matches for lower-tiered players as the game’s lifespan progresses. GGST already has a similar issue with how it prevents players from being demoted all the way down to bottom floors in the Tower. The bad is that it feels like the closer you get to the top tiers, the more skewed and non-competitive the rankings become. If you’re a newer but unskilled player who happened to advance quickly into Platinum, you might feel out of your element for a while, and the lack of winstreak bonuses will also make ranked feel like work or a frustrating grind rather than a system that accurately responds to your skill level.
The other thing that I personally think is questionable (and I acknowledge that this is a hot take) is that ranks are assigned per-character, not per-account. For instance, my Kimberly may be Diamond 1, but I still need to do placements and grinding as Luke or Cammy before I get my ranking assigned as those characters. Many players have celebrated this change, since obviously individual skill can differ from character to character and it doesn’t feel good to jump into ranked on a character you’re not practiced with and get bodied, losing precious MMR points. On the other hand, I’ve already run into the opposite issue- players skilled with the game smurfing on an alternate character matching against me in a lower tier where I proceed to get mollywhopped. I don’t know what the solution here is, but I know that running into a Master-ranked player when I’m queueing in Platinum 4 or 5 probably shouldn’t happen.
In general, I’m just not a big fan of ranked queues where losing points implies that I’m a worse player for having played a set, especially because that implication is totally false. I know that losing LP is supposed to put me against players of around that skill level, but when the variance in skill in practice already feels really lopsided between the three subtiers I’m stuck in the middle of, it feels less like a correction of the game’s MMR for me and more like a punishment. A big reason why I was a fan of the GGST Tower system in spite of everything was because it hid your MMR from you and instead used floors as a way to assign you against players of similar skill, and used the bounty levels as an indication of playtime and wins rather than an explicit ‘rank.’ Once you got to Celestial, ranked also was explicitly a tool where you could fight and learn against strong opponents, rather than a system where you gambled points constantly, and that was overall a much better environment for me to improve in. It’s incredibly hard to tell if I’m actually improving or not in SF6, especially because I’m Diamond 1 now but I was never that good or ranked that high in SFV, so I have no frame of reference for whether it matches up or not.
There’s some other issues with the queues that are almost the opposite of the issues I experienced in Battle Hub. Once again, in matchmaking queues you cannot totally screen your matches when the queue pops- instead, you can only see connection strength measured by the vertical network bar logo (indicating a LAN player) or by the Wi-Fi logo. You cannot see the actual connection strength measured in ms, nor can you see details like character, rank, username, region, etc. What’s more, the matchmaking queue strongly prioritizes connections close to you, rather than prioritizing good connections. (You can obviously tell the game to just connect you to any connection, or to only 4–5 bar connections, or what have you, but in spite of that I seem to only get matched to local players regardless of if the connection is good or bad.)
These two aspects combined mean that I can get randomly matched against extremely non-competitive matches who are unplayable for reasons besides skill level, even if I would have liked to dodge said player. It also means that despite there being roughly 2 million total players for the game, it’s totally possible (and happens frequently!) that I run into the same person in the queue multiple times in a session, or even over a long day of play. In GGST, this was an intentional design choice, since matchmaking was almost purely lobby-based (there IS A QUEUE IN GGST, in point of fact!) and you would simply select the lobby with players in it from the region that you wanted to play against- thus, since it was deliberate, it didn’t feel bad. In SF6, this feels like an unintentional design flaw, and it also doesn’t even get you good connections a good part of the time, so it ends up feeling really grimy. This is a major issue that I hope gets corrected in some future patch.
(Incidentally, another reason some connections probably feel bad is that some players may be playing SF6 on a low-end PC or on a past-gen console like a PS4, and will experience high ping or severe rifting as a result of their system overheating or being unable to maintain 60FPS. There is a benchmark tool on the Street Fighter 6 website, but I don’t know if it’s included in the PC release of the game, and unfortunately SF6 Steam also has Denuvo as part of its validation package, an anti-cheat suite notorious for causing performance issues.)
Casual queue also doesn’t seem to adhere to the ranked queue’s MMR system, which means that you can again run into heavily lopsided matches and not get a whole lot of learning done. It seems that a lot of players have realized that its lack of MMR combined with the existence of Battle Hub has made the queue redundant, and in my time trying it out the casual queue has been substantially less populated than ranked. Again, another feature not working like SFV to its own detriment, since SFV casual queue did at least try to stay within your skill level when matchmaking.
3. The multimenu, UI/UX issues, live service bullshit
Hey, this multimenu thing kind of sucks.
So the multimenu is where you would normally go on a game’s options or menu screen in order to toggle certain features or navigate from mode to mode, but this game’s UI is shockingly badly designed. Only parts of the multimenu can be accessed from a given screen at a time and a lot of that depends on whether you’re in World Tour or Battle Hub or Fighting Ground. For instance, from the literal main menu, you cannot access the multimenu icons for Player List, or Servers, or Custom Room. Player List makes sense, but why not let me log into the Battle Hub servers or make a Custom Room from this menu? Some aspects of your profile are also tied to your character rather than, you know, your profile, so hitting the Profile button doesn’t actually let you customize everything like you’d think it should. Instead, you have to go to the matchmaking menu in either the Battle Hub or Fighting Ground and then select your character and then customize that part of your profile. You also have to go to CFN to navigate replays, rather than go to somewhere like Fighting Ground → Replays, which means all replays are saved online, which is still baffling that they even do that, because you can just make an input history file and have that saved/available offline!
There’s even some baffling shit that can only be toggled from the multimenu and not from any other similar, readily accessible menu. Like, okay, apparently Negative Edge (you know, the mechanic in most fighting games where releasing a held button counts as a press of the same button?) is a toggled mechanic and is turned off by default, but you can’t turn that on or off from, say, the Character Select menu when you’re binding your controls. Instead, you have to go to the multimenu → Options → Controls → P1 (or P2) Controls and toggle Negative Edge from there. That shit is insanely bizarre. Similarly, Modern controls are enabled globally as the default control scheme and you need to navigate the Controls tab in the multimenu to just turn that off… but in World Tour, there are a few missions where you need to be in Modern controls, inexplicably, and there’s no easy way to toggle that without going all the way up to the multimenu. It’s aggravating. The gallery is also only accessible from the multimenu, but going into the gallery closes you out of whatever other game mode you were just in, so it doesn’t make sense for it to not be included in Fighting Ground instead.
Oh, also, the CFN profile only shows players you’ve added through SF6, not players you may have added to your CFN from SFV. This means I only have two CFN friends displayed even though I know for sure I have a dozen or so players directly added to my CFN. SF6 still shows you friends that you have added on CFN, though, which makes this truly bizarre- they just don’t appear in my friends list or CFN profile. Instead, I’ve seen and sniped old CFN friends by using the Battle Hub to show me where they are and in which lobby. So there’s a lot of really weird features- or lack thereof- that largely come about as a result of Capcom not really thinking a whole bunch about how they’ve set up their menu design and UI.
Okay, now I think I’m ready to talk about the Big Thing that has been frustrating me to no end. I’ve been alluding to it for a while and it’s probably going to sound silly when I finally explode about it, but this is probably the absolute worst thing about this game and it’s been driving me up the goddamn wall.
Do you remember when I was talking about how you had to play through World Tour in order to unlock your characters’ alternate outfits, which was really important for some reason? I also mentioned Drive Tickets and Fighter Coins as two different freemium currencies that are used to buy goods from SF6’s digital shop. This is probably not surprising to anyone who ground out Fighter Points or outright bought cosmetic DLC from the SFV ingame shop, but SF6 works a bit differently this time around.
To start off, this game has a Fighter Pass system, which is basically a battle pass that you pay into and get some goodies. The SF6 battle passes seem to run once a month so far and mostly offer avatar cosmetics, but there’s a few goodies like retro Capcom titles that you can play in the gallery’s emulator and some music from the older games. (That being said… you can’t even use the music you unlock in battles, but whatever.) The Fighter Pass costs about five bucks’ worth of Fighter Coins, and at the end of the pass you earn those coins back in full. There’s also a free version of the pass, and if you buy the premium version at any point your progress on the free one applies to the premium one. You grind Kudos (an arbitrary value that measures playtime on your character) to earn progress on the Fighter Pass, and by doing dailies or by grinding sets on golden Battle Hub cabinets (of which there are many, often, especially on every 10th and 20th day of the month) you can earn more Kudos. I was initially pissed off by the inclusion of a live-service limited run content system in a game I had already paid a lot of money to play, but ultimately the Fighter Pass has no content in it that I would feel FOMO for, it’s easy to grind, pays for itself, and the money earned back can be used immediately on the next pass, so I got over it once I learned more.
Instead, my main ire is drawn towards Drive Tickets. Drive Tickets are the free currency that can be used to purchase cosmetic DLC that you would normally spend Fighter Coins on (they cannot be used to buy the Fighter Pass.) Most of the cosmetic DLC is, again, useless avatar crap, so none of it really matters, but some of it is content for the playable roster. More specifically, the default costume colors 3–9 for all characters are locked behind a paid or Drive Ticket purchase, while the alternate costumes are locked behind World Tour bond gauge completion or a paid or Drive Ticket purchase. Unlocking the alternate costumes provides colors 1–10 (yes, an additional color) for said costume automatically.
So this is why it’s so important to play through World Tour, because otherwise you straight up do not have any alternate colors for any of your characters. This system is patently ridiculous. It would be one thing if I had to pay for colors, characters, or costumes released in the future, and it would be another if I could grind the Drive Tickets easily. But Drive Tickets are not distributed readily by Capcom- you can usually only earn about 500 Drive Tickets a week, and it costs roughly 6300 to buy the full color suite for a single character’s default costume. There is also no ‘neat’ pricing for the colors via Fighter Coin, meaning you have to spend something like $10 per color pack and be left over with some change after using them. It costs roughly $130 to purchase the default colors for every character in a $70 full price fighting game, OR it takes roughly three years to grind enough freemium currency to unlock said colors. This is absurd. KOFXV, GGST, DNFD, MBTL- all of these are games where the full set of default colors were simply available from the start. GGST introduced purchasable colors within season passes, and MBTL even added 20 additional colors for free and has custom color editors. Capcom should not be forcing players to grind forever or spend so much money on a basic feature that most other games just give you.
There’s a lot of people who I’ve seen are saying that people upset by lack of default colors are complaining about gamer first world problems or that we’re unreasonable for demanding that Capcom give us free content, but frankly, the colors are already in the game and being able to differentiate yourself from others using colors is extremely important, especially in fighting games. In +R, I can recognize a player by their palette first and playstyle second. The Daigo Parry features white Ken and white Chun-Li and you would recognize those players by their 3S colors as well. Right now, there’s no personality in tournaments because only a handful of players have colors or costumes unlocked and everyone is forced onto colors 1 or 2, and mirror matches especially become hard to delineate. There are legitimate reasons from a visual clarity and spectator perspective for us to have at least the default set of colors unlocked, and for Capcom to lock them behind a cash grab is absurdly scummy.
4. Style
My complaints about colors is a perfect segue into SF6’s visual and audio presentation- and for this I’m probably going to get a lot of raised eyebrows.
I’m just going to come out swinging- I don’t think SF6 looks bad, but I think it could be a lot better. SF6 character design is innately exaggerated and kind of goofy looking. Everyone has big hands and feet as part of a trick to visualize the physical range and size of each hit- and hurtbox, and some characters like Zangief have freakish proportions. Others, like Luke, have partially exaggerated visual design to help them stand out. I don’t innately have a problem with this, and the RE Engine is capable of some very visually appealing realism, but I think that realism starts to clash with said exaggerated proportions. Like I mentioned before, there’s also just elements of certain characters that the engine is just incapable of making look good, and it comes through a lot here too. Most of the characters do look good and they’re certainly glowups from SFV. Ken, obviously, is the poster boy here, but new characters like Kimberly look amazing, Deejay’s redesign is perfect, and icons like Chun-Li also look really good. But then you get into, like, Marisa’s hair, which looks way prettier in the highly stylized cut-ins or concept art than it does on her model, or Luke’s forearms which aren’t much better than his design from SFV, or Guile’s lack of neck, or Wide Ryu. It’s also clear that in World Tour the models are different between their NPC representation and their playable build- WT Luke has weird fish eyes and WT Cammy has a big-ass forehead.
The stage and environment design is also something I’m kind of iffy about. The Metro City stage is really dark and looks kind of bad, and its layout is very same-y and generic when you consider the Nayshall stage that looks almost exactly like it. Metro City in World Tour also doesn’t have a lot of character to it, looking way different than either the Metro City from SFV or the NYC from SF3. Not all of the stages look bad, but some of them don’t really feel like they have a personality. Personal favorites include Ryu’s stage, Jamie and Chun Li’s stage, and JP’s arena stage, but everything else feels like a miss, or at least not impressionable enough in my mind to stand out from previous ‘iterations’ from older games.
Then… there’s the soundtrack, and I’m going to come out again and say that if you unironically think the SF6 soundtrack sounds better than the GGST soundtrack then I don’t trust you on a fundamental level. The absolute best track in the game is from the World Tour fast travel menu and nothing else comes remotely close. As far as character themes go, Jamie’s and Ryu’s are probably among the best, with Kimberly’s install song coming in a close third, but Ryu’s doesn’t really feel like it fits him and the rest are middling to downright bad. Everything sounds uninspired or like a bad riff on a previous version of that character’s theme, and some of the rap is downright atrocious.
Overall, the visual and audio design for this game feels like SF6 is trying to wear an SF3 costume or appeal to the least common denominator rather than hone in on what motivates hip-hop and graffiti culture in 2023. I don’t have much else to say because it’s not really a major issue I have, but whenever I go back to GGST I’m in awe of how good a highly stylized game can look and feel, and I wish that Capcom did better with SF6.
5. Conclusion
So, that’s basically it. Peaks and valleys, highs and lows. SF6 is probably the most fun Capcom fighting game I’ve played, but that core is surrounded by a lot of stuff that either bothers me but can be tweaked or outright frustrates me. The World Tour is an incredibly weak mode and its flaws exacerbate the issues that I found with the game’s freemium content grind, since playing through it was mandatory to unlock some element of character customization. The Battle Hub is great, but is missing some quality of life that would make an otherwise unified experience much less clunky. The tutorial content is nearly perfect. Ranked matchmaking is incredibly baffling, filling me with imposter syndrome when I’m doing well and turning me into a horrible little beast when I’m doing poorly. Matchmaking on the whole has a lot of little issues that build up into a messy pile, and I’m unsure of how to properly address those since many of them seem endemic to the design. There’s a ton of mindboggling issues with the multimenu and miscellaneous UI that drive me up the wall, and the freemium content bullshit isn’t doing the game many more favors either. The visual and audio style are a personal miss for me, but this is also entirely my own personal preference and I kind of just miss when Capcom did clean, ageless, hyper-stylized comic book/manga art, like 3rd Strike and VSav or UMvC3. At the end of the day, though, the game is insanely fun to press buttons in and I’ve already found myself playing and growing a lot in it. It’s a great first version of a fighting game and the explosive engine keeps drawing me back in even though I’m frustrated with a lot of the other stuff in it… which honestly maybe makes me even more upset, but I should probably just get over it.
