Few video games have left as big a mark on popular culture as Street Fighter. The title developed by the Japanese Capcom -and especially its historic second installment- hit so hard that, even today, its famous hadoukens resonate in the collective imagination of an entire generation. More than three decades later, the so-called fighting games have remained a respected genre with very loyal fans, but they have ceased to belong to the general public. Street Fighter 6 just went on sale and wants to make breaking face in a game popular again.
Capcom’s plan to bring fighting games back into fashion has not only consisted of adding new characters, mechanics and an updated aesthetic, but also of learning from the mistakes of the past and, specifically, the failed launch of Street Fighter 5. Unlike the latter, the sixth installment has reached stores with a large volume of content both for those who want to play without connecting to the Internet, and for those who prefer to compete against the entire world online. But there is something else.
Street Fighter 6 aspires to be much more than just 1v1. In an age of games-as-a-service, it also wants to be a meeting place where players express themselves not just on a chitchat basis, but as individuals within a community. In this sense, the possibility that each player can create their own avatar is a key novelty within Capcom’s ambitious plan to turn this historic franchise into a new phenomenon, something that resembles what many of us have agreed on. call –drum roll– metaverse.
And, jokes aside, times have changed. If during the 90s you had to go to the arcades to give yourself cakes in exchange for 25 pesetas, today the fastest way to find a rival to fight is through online games. In this sense, the genius of Street Fighter 6 is not that it is offering a robust and fluid online experience –something in itself to be celebrated–, but rather that it has turned the game’s own lobby into a great arcade in which to meet up friends or strangers, find a free machine, sit down and start fighting.
And we come to the heart of the matter: the fighting. Nothing of everything said so far would have the slightest importance if the famous combat system was not up to the task; but luckily that is not the case. Capcom is still in a state of grace and this time it offers us a polished, well-tuned playable design and interesting news. One of the most relevant additions is the new Drive system, a new mechanic that provides fighters with more offensive and defensive tools from the first second of combat.
The different variants of the Drive system provide a new layer of depth that adds to the entire playable base that the franchise has built over the last few years. Combos, parrys, super arts and other terms, each one more complex, make up their own language, a vocabulary that in Street Fighter 6 is expanded to provide combat with more options and a greater sense of showmanship and forcefulness.
As it happens in good fighting games, each character is a world and in Street Fighter 6 this precept is fulfilled to the letter. The title has a staff of 18 fighters, including a dozen old acquaintances -including Luke, who was the last character added in the fifth installment-, and six completely new ones. Classic characters like Ryu, Chun-Li, or Guile look a little older, but they’re still as powerful and charismatic as ever.
Meanwhile, the additions of Kimberly, Manon, Lily, Marisa, Jamie, and JP bring entirely new fighting styles and greater diversity to the game. Their design is also fantastic and, although they have just arrived, their fit into the series is perfect. This is quite a detail as Capcom has managed to maintain a balance between the two generations to which this sixth installment is directed. On the one hand, those veteran players who return home and, on the other, all those people who are just going to join the franchise. In fact, the fact that Luke is the character on the cover and not one of the most iconic characters is already a statement of intent.
Luke is precisely the character that welcomes the player in the new World Tour modality, a kind of story mode like never before in the saga. In fact, it almost seems like a direct attack on the waterline of all those who criticized Street Fighter 5’s lack of single player content. World Tour allows the player to explore the city of Metro City while learning the basics of the combat system of the hand of the game characters themselves. It is a modality so loaded with content, as ridiculous for how it poses all kinds of absurd situations. In any case, it is neither mandatory nor subtracts from the other modes, where without going into detail we can say that there is everything expected in a fighting game and more.
Thinking of all those people who are entering Street Fighter for the first time, but also those who have been around for a while, but need to refresh their technique -because you never know enough when a fighting game is good-, Street Fighter 6 includes a generous amount of tutorials and character guides. More importantly, it incorporates three control modes (classic, modern and dynamic) designed so that each player can adapt and personalize the experience. All this without counting a large number of accessibility options that allow people with reduced mobility or including people with blindness to play it.
Thirty-five years after its arcade debut, Street Fighter remains the king of fighting games. After a fifth installment whose ill-fated start ended up weighing down the whole of what it came to offer, this sixth iteration has been released with a forcefulness that has not been seen in this genre for a long time. You just have to look at its first figures, because a few days after its launch it has already pulverized the record –held by Mortal Kombat 11– for concurrent users of a fighting game on Steam, and since its release it is also among the most watched titles on Twitch.
Street Fighter 6 feels like a celebration of an entire saga, but also a new turning point for a title that was video game history and now wants to return to the top. Will it make fighting games popular again? The sixth installment has the basis to achieve this, but it will depend in large part on Capcom and how it evolves in the coming years. Also from the community, which thanks to a series of successful decisions has no excuses to enter the rag. It is, in fact, the biggest victory of this sixth installment, that everyone is welcome.