Fighting games are like six year olds in a playground. They’re full of energy and fun to watch but the moment you try getting your hands on them everyone beats the shit out of you. I admire them as exercises in characterization but the actual gameplay side of things I group alongside MOBAs under the heading “Completely taken over by the sweaties.” Dip a single toe into online multiplayer and you get instantly mulched by sharks who think that winning the top prize at this year’s EVO will make mummy shark stop nagging them to get a job at their uncle’s Kentucky Fried Harp Seal. I can’t get my head around high level play – first you’ve got to decide which of your current character’s suite of blatantly physics-defying special moves is the best one for the current nanosecond, and then you’ve got to remember what exotic combination of button inputs will crack it off. It’s like trying to operate the Enigma decoding machine in a hailstorm. Tell me this – if fighting games were being invented today, d’you think this would still be the case? Would one designer say “Well obviously we should map every character’s specials to the same simple button inputs so everyone’s on equal footing and it can all come down to reflex and strategy.” And another’d reply “No no! I think we should also be testing their ability to very quickly open bicycle locks while being sodomized.”
So Street Fighter 6 caught my interest when I heard it had a gameplay mode that did that very thing, switch out the complex button combos for a nice straightforward universal system. It’s optional, of course, lest the sweaties get mad and dampen all the guest towels, but I appreciate that it’s called “Modern Mode” when they could easily have called it “Beginner Mode” or “Shitty baby non-serious mode for those with biceps like tiny shrivelled raisins.” Coupled with an extensive single player mode with open world gameplay, no less, I was sold. Finally I could enjoy the energy and spectacle of a one on one fighter without giving myself tendonitis and Street Fighter could be centrally about having fights in streets. The story mode or World Tour opens in Metro City, the place where the original Final Fight was set, at which point it was a gang-infested hell hole but apparently it’s been really turned around now by the ingenious measure of giving every single citizen taxpayer-funded karate lessons. The big selling point is that you can challenge literally any NPC to a quick punch-up. There’s nothing quite so clippable for social media as running up to an old lady at the bus stop and suplexing her into a kerb.
But even after it’s been fully milked for meme potential that’s just a very solid core game mechanic because you can get into and out of a quick injection of high octane fisticuffs action whenever you want, as smoothly as a buttered hot dog through a glory hole, which is very handy if you’ve just learned some new blatantly physics-defying moves from a new trainer and want to quickly try them out somewhere or if you’re just whimsically and momentarily offended by a passing NPC’s number of teeth. And there’s a lot of moves to try out. The plot is, your custom protagonist is a fighter who wants to be better at fighting. I didn’t say it was Shakespeare, but still, fairly universal themes at play. You start off being mentored by Luke, one of the new roster members who’s like Ken and Guile had an off the books bumsex baby and who gets to be your first training master because the generic bastard needed at least one distinct quality. The point then is to explore the world doing quests and getting into an extremely medically inadvisable number of fights, meeting the rest of the Street Fighter cast and learning all their special moves, too.
“Exploring the world” might be overstating things. The only explorable places are Metro City and this other made up city with unspecific south Asian vibes, and even then you only get, like, five streets and a fish and chip shop apiece. Every other global location is one sodding room with the relevant fighting trainer standing around checking their phone. I started to suspect the airlines were pulling a fast one with a hastily rearranged sound stage. So when I say open world, it’s more Yakuza than Grand Theft Auto. Small play space, lots of groups of generic dudes in suits who get really personally offended by people with confident walk animations. Quite a lot like Yakuza, actually, pretty sure the menus use the same font. I might go as far to say that it feels more like a Yakuza than a Street Fighter game. I’m certainly dubious that World Tour helps you learn how to play Street Fighter in the more traditional manner that’s being carefully kept sectioned away from it like the baboon exhibit at the zoo – since by the end my dude had attacks and special attacks from about nine different characters equipped, and that was what my muscle memory had been working with, and when I switched to arcade mode to play as one of the fixed characters I kept getting confused by my tiny willowy schoolgirl’s inability to perform an atomic piledriver. Talk about Mixed Martial Arts.
On top of that, victory tended to come down less to skill and more to having the highest level, or making sure to pause the game and quaff an energy drink in the split second before a fist collides with the bridge of your nose, which admittedly is an impressive skill. But all that aside, I had fun with World Tour. Street Fighter 6 is infused with a wonderful energy and humour, full of larger than life characters, especially in the thigh region, and World Tour offers plenty of chances to appreciate it, but all the same there’s a shonkiness to it; outside the main cast the NPCs all have a generic, plasticky quality that feels like fighting a neverending parade of stunt doubles. Plus the occasional confusing to navigate area, poorly explained mission objective and the fact that the most frustratingly difficult recurring enemy in the game is a sentient fridge betrays a certain inelegance of design. And all the goodwill I built up rapidly drained away when I reached the final tournament of World Tour’s story campaign. In the first round I was the same level as my opponent, but all my attacks did chip damage and he kept spamming a throw that took one third of my bar per pop. Pop being the sound my neck was making.
Still, I got through it by figuring out what special attack countered his throw and spamming that straight back, and when I took care of the next few guys with judicious anti-air usage for a moment I genuinely thought “Huh, maybe I COULD actually Git Gud at this, it’s really the same observation and waiting for an opening of Soulslike combat, just with the fast forward button taped down.” But then I got to the final, final boss, and I won’t mince words, he chopped my soft ass up like avocado for the summer salad. By the end of the second round I was starting to get a feel for his patterns and quietly confident about a rematch, until the game said “Oh by the way if you fail this you have to go back to the start of the tournament.” What? But I used up all my healing and buffing items getting this far! And relatedly, I wish you’d mentioned beforehand that the final round was a supposed-to-lose fight. Do I get all those items back? “No, but you could always eat some of this shit that I found. Why don’t you just buy more healing items?” I BLEW ALL MY MONEY STOCKING UP FOR THE TOURNAMENT. Lucozade’s priced like Gamer Girl bathwater these days. “Well, I suppose the thing you need to do begins with G and ends with IND.” But I don’t WANT to go blind!
