Street Fighter 6 hands-on: a knockout first impression

June 10, 2022

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If there’s one lesson that sports stories impart, it’s that sometimes you have to get knocked down, or even get knocked out, to get better. It’s the lesson at the core of the world’s most famous fictional fighters, from Rocky to Ryu: every now and then you need to get your ass kicked, and have a good old fashioned montage, in order to get better. It’s a tale as old as time. And it just might be the story of Street Fighter 6.

I’ve always rather liked Street Fighter 5 for what it was and therefore been relatively charitable when writing about it, especially in its later years, but it’s fair to say that SF5 was a misfire. Mismanaged into a launch where fan expectations were disastrously underestimated, the game never truly recovered. In addition, though, it just didn’t feel as good momenmt-to-moment as its predecessor, which was such an excellent game that it helped to revive the whole fighting game genre. But now I believe that SF5 will be recontextualized as the game that humbled Capcom and taught hard lessons, ultimately getting us to SF6. And SF6? Well, despite high expectations, even in the earliest, extremely limited hands-on, it whiffs of a total home run.

Having played a little over an hour of an early Street Fighter 6 build featuring the first four characters revealed for its roster, I’m thrilled by more or less everything about it. You can pretty much instantly tell that lessons have been learned; not just from SF5’s failures, but also from its successes. And not just from past Street Fighter, but from other brilliant recent fighting games, and from esports titles outside of the fighter sphere.

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