Quick Background

Street Fighter started off as an arcade video game in 1987 by a Japanese game developer and publisher at Capcom, Takashi Nishiyama. It was the company’s first competitive fighting game and was released before Mortal Kombat. Now, Capcom introduced its new game, Street Fighter 6 on June 2nd, 2023.

Street Fighter 6 is a continuation of their past games and storyline. It’s regarding the events after the defeat of M. Bison and Shadaloo. For those who don’t know who that is, Bison is basically the antagonist and main villain of the Street Fighter trilogy. Not much is known about this character, which I think is cool because it adds to the mystery and psychological questioning of why he is committing horrendous actions. His use of psycho power, teleportation, astral projection, telekinesis, flight, energy manipulation all makes him difficult to defeat. However, his psycho power is killing him, so he wants to find a new body that will host the power and not destroy it. This causes him to make a clone, Cammy White, codename Killer Bee. Later, Cammy gets away from Bison joining Guile and Chun-li to stop him. Both Guile and Chun-Li have personal beef with Bison because he killed Guile’s friend, Charlie Nash (Guile and Nash are American Air force officers) and killed both of Chun-Li’s parents (killed because Officer Li got to close to stopping Bison). Members that work under Shadaloo are Grandmasters Balrog, Vega, Sagat, F.A.N.G. and the Dolls.

With this in mind, Street Fighter 6 explores the future for the original characters and has fans questioning who the next villain is. It’s speculated that J.P. (a new character), is the master mind behind the tournament because his powers are similar to that of Bison. I am not sure if that’s true though because Bison made many clones that have his ability’s but ended up escaping him. Some of these clones include Cammy, Abel, Ed, and Falke.

While each character in the game has their own unique background, the main character would be Ryu. Ryu is best known for his white ripped cloths, red bandana, and red gloves. He was an orphan, but was found by a marital artist named Gouken, in which he raised Ryu in the same fighting style. Gouken has a brother, Akuma who would later become Ryu’s enemy. Gouken also trained his best friend’s spoiled son, Ken Masters. At first Ken and Ryu did not get along, but later would become best friends fighting side by side.

Once Gouken was killed by his brother, Akuma, ken left for America and Ryu seek to become stronger to avenge his master. Once he was beating master by master, he fought an old foe, Sagat. Sagat was embarrassed that he lost the first fight he had but this time he won against Ryu, and with Ryu’s strong ambition he unlocked the Satsui no Hado, the same power Akuma uses to kill his brother. This left Sagat with a big scar on his cheat and got the attention of Shadaloo. But alas Ryu learns he could stop the evil energy that corrupts him with the power of nothingness.

Game Information: 

Like previous mentioned Street Fighter 6 has a lot of new features compared to that of Capcom’s past games. Some of those features include The World Tour, Battle Hub, and Fighting Grounds modes.  It also offers 3 control types modern, classic, and dynamic. This allows players to play at their own skill levels.

Fighting Ground: Is the basic modes Street Fighter 4 and 5 have. Arcade, online, training, and local verses. It offers the option to fight the CPU, with levels going from 1-8, or multiplayer. Within the Fighting Ground you can give yourself a challenge with “Extreme Battles.”  With this you can add features like “Bull Run,” which when fighting a bull will run across and attack you. The training features shows you step by step instructions on how to use a parry, special moves, unique attacks, combos, throws, and ultras. The Drive Mechanics is also taught, it teaches you about is the use of the drive parry, drive rush, dive reversal, dive impact, and overdrive.

World Tour: Gives players the open world experience where you can customize your own fighter. To unlock certain skills, you get to train with the fighters on the roster. Doing this allows you to obtain some of their moves, for example, if you train with Chun-Li, you can unlock her spinning bird kick. In this mode you can even pick a fight with the NPCs!! Doing the world tour, you get to do missions that fit the storyline, and fight in the arena’s you see in the Fighting Grounds.

Battle Hub: is the social space you can roam around in your avatar, as well as interact with other players. This mode is mainly directed to online matches, but you can also experience minigames.

You can play Street Fighter 6 on PC game pass, Xbox games, PC, and windows games.

Review 

While I am a big fan of the arcade game Street Fighter, I will be honest, I did find this game a little confusing because I am more used to the older versions. The first game I had of this was street fighter 4, and man was it my favorite. Once street fighter 5 came, I was so sad that it could only be played on the PlayStation, and I don’t own that. You see I have an Xbox, and they did not make the game for that console. But regardless, when I found out that street fighter 6 was going to be on the Xbox, I was super excited. This could be just on me, but when I got Street fighter 6, I was super confused because it had similar elements of the street fighter 5 game, which I never played.

Even though before starting the game it would give you a guide on how to work it, I was still a little puzzled. So, for new players I don’t think that they would enjoy the new features as much as others will. However, if you understand what the guide says than I think you are in good hands. Speaking of this, I did like that it gives the players the option to change the language setting so they can play the game in the language they are more comfortable with.

I guess what my main complaint was that the features were a bit overwhelming. Other than that, the game runs very smoothly and I think the new animation is what really caught my attention. I mean I don’t have a lot of issues, but I did not like the character roster. Don’t get me wrong the characters are great however there was not much of them. They did bring back a lot of the old ones but in total there was only 18 playable. What I did found disappointing was that you had to purchase some of the characters like Rashid and A.k.i.

On a more positive note, the animation did improve a lot. For example, on the fighting ground when you get to select your character and you’re about to enter a fight, the game makers made the characters facial expressions more human like. I found it very silly that they made their faces like this because it shows how their characters personalities are.

Well, I do love this game and do recommend it to people, but I don’t think I’ll give it a high rating solely because of how confusing it could be. Obviously, you can always learn to understand how to use certain features, but I think my favorite would be the older games only for nostalgic reasons. 8/10 great game, but I think you should play the others to be more comfortable with it.

Not all of the features are bad, but I think the main one that’s confusing would be the world tour, I think it’s because I never played a game like that before. Features like the option of control settings, is really cool in my opinion. In the fighting ground, the arcade, like previous games, showed a preview of the character story; and it was more of a comic animation then the Street Fighter 4, which executed it better in my opinion. I also saw that Street Fighter 5 had that same comic animation, so I think that’s where they got that from.

Now this might apply to the animation as well, but the new costumes they did for the characters, at least the old ones, look great. I know some people might not like it, but I think overall it really suits the theme of their storyline. Also, something that I forgot to add was the use of neon lights and graffiti, I think these two together really embodies the Street Fighter concept because people forget that these characters fight in the streets (not really but like you get the idea).