My Impressions of Street Fighter 6: A New Era of Fighting Games

Accessibility. Single-player content. Casual appeal. These are three core tenants necessary for the success of a fighting game.

Yet they’re three things that most modern fighting games struggle with. Most of them focus purely on their more competitive players. Some just settle for making a decent combat system, then adding characters until the season passes stop selling. Others don’t even bother with single player content and focus exclusively on versus multiplayer.

None of these are necessarily bad. Games like that have their audience, and the developers focus simply on making them happy. It works, but it isn’t especially enticing for anyone who isn’t already a massive fan of fighting games.

Why do I bring this up? Because it’s those three core tenants that Street Fighter 6 aimed for. And it nailed it on all three points!

Let’s start with accessibility. Fighting games are notoriously hard to get into. Motion inputs, six punches and six kicks, and don’t even get me started on actually doing combos. It’s not so bad once you learn, but the actual learning part has always been intimidating for new players.

Street Fighter 6 offers three control schemes. You’ve got the classic layout for returning fans, and you’ve got the new modern controls for newbies. These modern controls somewhat limit what your character can do, but they more than make up for that in ease of use. Within just a few matches, my little brother started whooping my ass with this control scheme.

Oh yeah, there’s also the dynamic controls where you just mash buttons and the game plays itself.

But what if you want to level up your skills and learn the classic controls? Not to worry, because this game has a plethora of tools to help you out with that. More importantly: those tools are actually helpful and fun to use! They turned charge motions into a minigame that actually teaches you the timing!

And, of course, there’s the game’s single player mode. Which will serve as a nice transition to the second point: single player content. In this case: the World Tour mode.

Arcade Mode is still here, too.

In terms of actual storytelling, World Tour is… fine. Like, it’s not an especially compelling story, but it isn’t painfully terrible like the story mode back in Street Fighter V. As a weird fighting game RPG, it’s actually pretty fun!

The real fun comes from seeing your created character hang out with the cast. Failing to flirt with Cammie over the phone, doing squats with Zangeif, helping Ken get his groove back, it’s delightful! Especially when you’ve got the most bizarre, nightmarish creature doing it!

Oh yeah, there’s also an insanely in-depth character creator. So if you just wanna fuck around and build a monstrosity, there’s that. Which brings us to the final point: casual appeal.

Street Fighter 6 doesn’t just focus on the hardcore competitive scene. If you just wanna mess around with your friends for a bit, there are plenty of options! You have the option to create some really wacky rule sets, from filling the stage with rampaging bulls or Mega Man robots. In the online lobby, you can play classic Capcom arcade games like Final Fight or even Street Fighter 2! You don’t need to compete, you could just sit around and play a fun game!

I could go on and on and on about how much I enjoy this game. The music slaps. The style is incredible. All of the characters are stupid fun to play. As a fighting game, it’s one of the most solid I’ve ever played!

Unfortunately, it isn’t perfect. Because, of course, Capcom had to include microtransactions. Now, they’re not as egregious as some. No loot boxes or battle passes, nothing like that.

Still, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If you want the alternate costumes for the characters you’ve got two options. Option one: grind for several hours in World Tour mode for one character’s costume. Option two: fork over fifteen bucks worth of in-game currency to get them all in one go. And that only gets worse if you want the alternate colors, by the way.

You can’t win ’em all, I guess.

Street Fighter 6 is an incredible game. It’s by far the most content rich fighting game I’ve ever played, and it does an amazing job of introducing new players to the genre and easing them into it. If you’re a hardcore fighting game fan, it’s an absolute blast.

And if you’re someone who wants to give the genre a shot, I’d highly encourage you start here. I’ve played tons of fighting games, but none of them have been even half as beginner friendly as this one. Whether you just wanna have fun or you wanna learn how to fight with the best of ’em, this is the perfect place to start.

I’ll be seein’ y’all on the streets.