Hogan Reviews

Street Fighter 6, it’s safe to say, overachieves in its debut, a lesson clearly learned from the poor barebones release of Street Fighter V. Not only does it have a good selection of characters old and new, not only does it have arcade mode, versus, online, and other classic modes but it also has a massive and lengthy single player campaign complete with create-a-fighter facilities and open world elements plus an online hub complete with old arcade games you can play and compete against others on. Out of character in a very good way! Let’s take a more detailed look.

Background:

JP schools Luke on how to be an interesting character.

Street Fighter 6 was released worldwide for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on June 2^nd 2023. A good old fashioned arcade version is planned for Japan only sometime later in the same year.

It sees the return of Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Guile, Blanka, Zangief, Dhalsim, E. Honda, Cammy, and Dee Jay (oddly) from SF II, plus the always popular Juri who debuted in the SF IV series, and I guess Luke who was technically a SFV DLC character though he was presented as a SF6 “preview” so it’s hard to really count him. Debuting are Jamie, a drunken fist user; Kimberly, a student of Guy who listens to an old cassette tape Walkman for some reason; Manon, a fighting French ballerina and model; Marisa, a large and imposing Italian woman obsessed with the old gladiatorial days; Lily, a member of the Thunderfoot tribe who fights with two tonfa-like weapons; and JP, the new lead villain who has psycho power similar to Bison but a greater air of mystery around him. Every one of these new characters are screaming with personality and are genuinely fun to play and watch, it’s the strongest cast of new characters I can remember seeing since the very beginning.

I will say though that the exception to this is Luke. Boy oh boy is he ever the Poochie of the Street Fighter series, every part of him oozes “made by a committee of older people who think they know what kids want in a character”. He’s cocky, brash, used to be a soldier like Call of Duty and builds custom PCs in his spare time. He even talks like he’s trying to be a cool older brother but it really… REALLY doesn’t work and makes him extremely obnoxious. It’s funny because Jamie and Kimberly are new characters that actually appeal to a younger generation organically while fitting in with the series’ identity, it shows if they didn’t try so hard they might have pulled it off, instead people were begging Capcom to create a new cover for the game so they didn’t have to look at Luke’s smug mug all the time.

Gameplay:

Dhalsim vs. Chun-Li has come a long way over the decades… You’d think she’d be better prepared by now!

The core gameplay of Street Fighter 6 is extremely varied and satisfying. Beyond your light, medium and heavy strikes, throws, special moves and super combos you have a new bar under your health meter called the Drive Gauge and this controls how often you can use a variety of returning gimmicks. You have a new Parry system where you can hold down two buttons to auto-parry but it doesn’t really leave you with a way to counter, as well as the original SFIII Parry system called “Perfect Parry” that actually allows you to counter after a well-timed parry; the Focus Attack is back allowing you to tank a couple of hits and deliver a big blow but if your opponent sees you coming and does his own Focus attack afterwards then they’ll get the advantage; and EX variations of moves return, allowing more powerful and fancy version of normal special moves for a big chunk of your Drive Gauge. Obviously they have different names but they are returning features from III, IV and V and work really well together, allowing for a great variety in combat. There also a little twist with the Super Moves as each character has three, one they can only do at Meter level 1, 2 and 3 respectively, getting stronger each time (obviously), plus when your health is low they become “Critical Arts” and do more damage.

There are two different control styles you can pick from as well, “Classic” is, well, the classic controls, while “Modern” reduces the standard attacks from six to four and allows simplified combos and special moves done at the push of a single button BUT the moves are weaker and characters don’t have access to all their specials, so it does encourage younger players to eventually make their way to the traditional controls. I mean, I’ve been playing Street Fighter since the SNES/Mega Drive, doing anything other than the classic inputs for the moves would feel wrong at this point, let alone not having a weak, medium and heavy punch and kick, but I’m happy for new players to get a helping hand to start with. I think that does it for the actual 1 vs. 1 core gameplay, but it’s safe to say Street Fighter 6 has more to offer than just that!

Beating up thugs on the Metro City train… Nostalgic!

The game is split into three modes selectable when the game starts up: Fighting Ground, World Tour and Battle Hub. Fighting Ground is your classic fighting game set up, Arcade mode, versus CPU, online versus, training, all that stuff, plus doing fights with weird gimmicks like random falling objects and the like. Battle Hub is an online lobby where players can use their own avatars to fight each other in ranked fights and tournaments, plus buy gear and play arcade machines featuring complete emulations of Capcom classics like Street Fighter II, Final Fight and the like, plus a few more obscure titles.

World Tour on the other hand is the big single player mode I briefly touched upon earlier. You make your own avatar via a creator with amazing body and face morphing but sadly limited clothing choice, including the in-game shops (I wanted to make Axel from Streets of Rage II but there was no way to buy or dye a white t-shirt, despite the fact I had a t-shirt and lots of the white dye item…) and then your thrown into the game as, sadly, the latest student of Luke’s training school. After some tutorials you can then start to walk around Metro City freely, with some areas closed off that open up as you go through the story, all while fighting either hostile gang members or just random members of the public who, for whatever reason, will gladly throw down with you even if they’re some random old woman working in a local grocery shop. As the story progresses you unlock a second large hub world in Nayshall and several smaller locations that are just the standard SF6 stages with a few fightable NPCs hanging around.

Forgot to mention you can play around with the facial expressions in the match up screens again! Hooray!

What’s really fun though is the entire SF6 cast can be found in the game and you can become the student of any or all of them, learning their moves which you can then add to your own character, mixing and matching any number of them leading to a very unique fighter by the end (if you want, anyway). You earn XP for trainers by either fighting with their style as your chosen stance or defeating characters who have that trainer’s stance. Thankfully once you reach max XP with a trainer any XP you earn through using their stance can be transferred to other teachers, meaning your male character doesn’t have to do 100 fights with the very clearly female Cammy stance, which is nice. The actual story is split between main missions and side missions as well as mini-games and collectable objects found by destroying barrels (it is Metro City after all!) and other objects, or by defeating the random thugs, and some of the objects and fighters you have to reach by using classic moves, like the shoryuken to reach a higher level, or the spinning bird kick to reach across a large gap. You level up yourself as well as your chosen style and you can use experience points to get stronger kicks, more special move slots, that sort of thing. The higher level you are the less likely the lower-level thugs will try and attack you, so it’s great fun returning to the Mad Gear hangout for example and seeing the weirdly-box-headed thugs run towards you, stop and start shaking in fear.

I think that about covers everything, but for a fighting game that’s a hell of a lot of content. If it were like a regular VS fighter I would’ve ran through the arcade mode with everyone, done a few other things and then just dipped in and out from then-on, but this I was plugging away at this for weeks after work, 90% of which was World Tour mode. It’s a fun mix of my childhood love of scrolling beat ‘em ups with really strong VS. beat ‘em up mechanics. Perfect… well, apart from the lack of a white t-shirt, anyway… I ended up with an Axel that looked like he’d sold out and replaced Mr. X as head of the syndicate… *shrugs*

Graphics and Sound:

Crazy that this is mid-battle yet looks like some fancy artwork.

Graphics are great, unsurprisingly. Not only are the backgrounds sharp, detailed and well lit but the character models are full of detailed textures and bulging and flexing muscles, plus the special effects are great, especially the paint splash effect when you hit a Focus attack. Even the free-roaming locations are good, even if not as well detailed as the smaller 2D stage backgrounds, but that can’t be helped. I wasn’t expecting a GTA-level detailed city from Street Fighter 6!

Sound is good too, the voice work and sound effects get the thumbs up and the soundtrack suits the mood CAPCOM went for with the game but I’ll admit none of the character themes stand out at all, and not to sound like an out-of-touch old guy (because I’m actually a never-been-in-touch adult guy) but they all sound the same to me, they just blend together. I won’t be walking around humming any of the tunes like I’ve done for decades with the original SFII tracks, let’s put it that way. You can also have “real time commentary” delivered by several different people, but honestly I can’t think of anything more distracting and annoying, so I’ve never turned it on…

Story:

Damn’D makes his big return! … As a pretty easy to beat character in the World Tour mode, but hey. Better than nothing!

There actually isn’t that much to talk about here as a lot of the story is only partially told through arcade endings and a few conversations during the World Tour. Ken has gone off the grid after a mysterious incident in the emerging country of Nayshall caused him to be accused of terrorism. The man behind this incident is the equally mysterious “JP”, and his actions in the past have had a negative effect on the lives of Luke and Kimberly. That’s about it for the traditional Arcade storyline, anyway… There’s a prequel comic that was released that might fill in the gaps more, plus I assume we might get more actual plot via an free expansion like we did with V?

As for World Tour, well as mentioned your character joins Luke’s school and on your first day you meet fellow student Bosch, who is takes things extremely seriously but has some fun with you out on the town during the early phases, but he soon vanishes. A good chunk of the story is you trying to track him down, encountering the remnants of Mad Gear and other villains along the way. Lots of fun nods to SF lore can be found as well, including Retsu from Street Fighter 1 and Carlos from Final Fight 2, two characters I certainly never thought I’d see in any official, fightable capacity again.

*Spoilers for the end of World Tour Mode*

Pro-Wrestler Tazz oversees another tournament match in Nayshall.

You end up finding out that Bosch is a member of the Nayshall resistance movement opposing JP’s modernisation of their homeland and that he learned how to fight and stole Mad Gear’s money in order to help the resistance. He was captured and experimented upon with Psycho Power, causing him to lose his mind for long stints (and wear a box on his head, which is just the style world-wide for some reason…) You eventually enter a big tournament in Nayshall and defeat Bosch, you hope stopping him from detonating a bomb he’d planted in the title belt being presented by JP, but instead JP activates the bomb and hands the title belt to Bosch’s little sister to give to you (complete git!), leading to Bosch sacrificing his life to protect his sister. You fight JP for revenge but even after you beat him he lays on the ground and laughs because your victory means nothing… Oh. Oh well…

*Spoilers for the end of World Tour Mode end here*

It’s a fun little story, more for the use of so much SF lore, but it’s not going to win any awards for creativity or storytelling.

Downloadable Content:

I’m afraid very few people even know who you are, let alone know what happens next…

Season 1 has already been announced, comprised of the returning SF legend Akuma, Rasheed and Ed from SFV, and new character “A.K.I.”, who looks closer to FENG from SF V than AKI Man from the N64 wrestling games, which disappointed me personally…

No doubt over the years we’ll get a Season 2, 3 and possibly beyond. You can also get in-game currency either through the game slowly or via brought packs, but thankfully its only for bonus outfits and the like. You can also get special tokens that will allow you to play as DLC character for free for a limited amount of time, which is fun (though not as good as SF V’s system where you can buy DLC characters outright with in-game currency, but hey-ho…)

Thoughts Now:

Hitting a big fancy finisher on some random civilian is always a good laugh!

Street Fighter 6 not only delivered a really varied and fun versus beat up engine with great graphics but also threw in a free roaming, open world-like single player experience that lasted a good long while. Just one of these would’ve been good, getting both on top of stuff like online play (if that’s your bag), old arcade games and other extras makes this one hell of a package and an easy five stars.