Here’s What’s Wrong With Street Fighter 6 After 100 Hours

Street Fighter 6 has been nothing short of a blast ever since its release a few weeks ago. On launch day, the game was bombarded with negative reviews due to a multitude of reasons. However, as time passed, the game earned a place in the hearts of its fan and has certainly revolutionized the genre by raising the standard of the fighting game genre as a whole.

It is definitely the best addition to the long-running Street Fighter franchise. Street Fighter 6 is miles ahead of what Street Fighter V was like on launch, and everything the game offers is just excellent, except, of course, a few issues here and there. But, overall, the game certainly has lived up to all the hype around it ever since its initial announcement in February 2021.

Putting all the love for the game aside, there are a few things that Capcom could’ve done better, or avoided altogether, to make Street Fighter 6 an even better game than it is currently. The way things are going, it is bound to get worse with Capcom trying to grab as much cash as it can out of this game, which, in turn, will also affect the quality of the game in the long run.

The following are some of the things that I’ve noticed as I made up my way toward the 100 hours milestone. Honestly, I’ve enjoyed most of my time playing the game, and as a fan of the fighting game genre, it brings me nothing but joy to see a game this well-made get the attention it deserves. The game has a few flaws, but that isn’t exactly a hindrance to how fun it is to play against other players in the Fighting Grounds, at least not yet.

The Money-Grabbing Antics

Capcom has certainly made it very clear that it wants your money if you want anything more than the raw game. The base game costs about $60, and if you want anything additional, you’ll have to either grind or spend money. However, there’s a quick shortcut. Get yourself the Street Fighter 6 Ultimate Edition instead, which costs over $100 but saves you from grinding for hours and also grants you access to 4 additional characters.

The thing is, you can get most of the cosmetics, like character costumes and alternative colors, for free, as you could in previous Street Fighter games. But it requires hours and hours of effort. You’ll have to play through the World Tour game mode and increase your bond level to the max with a specific character to unlock their other costume.

For the first run, it can take up to 15+ hours of playtime in the World Tour mode to unlock the alternative costume of one specific character. However, once you’re done with the World Tour mode, things get progressively easy, and you can quickly max bond other characters too to unlock their alternative costume, and it will take a lot less time compared to your first unlock.

At its core, playing through the game to unlock more cosmetic items and rewards is the way it should be. However, the single-player game mode that offers most of these rewards, the World Tour mode, is significantly underwhelming than the rest of the game. We’ll get into it more later on.

You can skip all the hard work by spending a little money via microtransactions and getting yourself some Fighter Coins. These Fighter Coins can be used to purchase additional costumes and colors for your characters. You can also use these Fighter Coins to purchase the Battle Pass, which gives you access to a few cosmetic items for your avatar, music, and stickers.

Other than the underwhelming rewards, the idea of a Battle Pass in a game that costs about $60 by itself is controversial in the first place. And then, we have a Character and Ultimate Pass too. These Passes will give you access to 4 additional characters that are set to release in the next 12 months. It would’ve been a lot better if they had released each character separately in the form of DLC instead of forcing people to buy the Season Passes.

And the way things are going, we know that Street Fighter 6 will feature several collaborations, and it is highly likely that Capcom will come up with more ways to monetize the game in the future. It is a scary thought, but let’s just hope Capcom doesn’t turn Street Fighter 6 into a mess where you either have to grind for days or spend money to get anything you want.

Ranked Matchmaking

The game has just been released, and the ranks will take a fair amount of time to settle down. But, for now, even the bronze bracket offers some tough competitions occasionally. The new additions to the roster are amazing, mainly Manon. The ballerina grappler can be incredibly fun to play and equally annoying to play against. There are ways to avoid getting command-grabbed by her, but if it hits, you’ll lose a big chunk of your HP.

It’s not just Manon; all the new characters that made their debuts in Street Fighter 6 are fairly strong. Though, one character that stands out more than the rest is JP due to his hit-confirmable combos. Hit-confirmable combos are risk-free combos that the player can execute after confirming the hit on an opponent, making sure the move doesn’t get blocked and they can’t be punished for it.

JP’s hit-confirmable combos might be his strongest asset, but that’s not all he has. His zoning capabilities are unlike any other character in the game, and while he may not be as popular as some legacy characters and other new additions, he still is a formidable opponent to face and will most likely get nerfed in the upcoming updates. But, for now, a good JP is a menace to face in ranked.

For good and for bad, Modern Controls has made this game easier for grapplers, allowing them to use command grabs with the press of a button. Command grabs are different from regular grabs as these can’t be teched or broken free from and require complex motion inputs to be executed. But Modern Controls take away that execution requirement, allowing grapplers to throw out command grabs whenever they feel like it.

There are plenty of ways to deal with all that, but the point of the discussion is that, right now, ranked matchmaking is fairly messed up. Not to mention there have been players using the cracked version of Street Fighter’s Closed Beta to play the game and practice for almost a year now, which most definitely gives them an advantage compared to beginners and even some franchise veterans moving on from Street Fighter 5.

In due time, ranks will most likely get fixed. Players will reach their appropriate skill level, and you won’t be encountering a bronze-ranked player with the skills of a platinum every other day. Over-powered characters will also likely get nerfed too in further balance updates, but till that happens, we’ll either have to get good or suffer.

Underwhelming Single-Player Mode

Street Fighter 6 is such a well-made game at its core, but the only part that falls short compared to everything else is the World Tour mode. The World Tour mode is an ambitious open-world single-player mode where you play as your avatar and interact with the roster characters, learning special skills from them and gaining multiple rewards in the process.

The only lackluster part of this game mode is that it lacks the flair and detail present in every other part of the game. It is truly a massive leap compared to the single-player game modes in other fighting games. But, if you put it next to the rest of the game mods, such as the Battle Hub and the Fighting Grounds, it does look slightly underwhelming.

The grinding in the World Tour can also get very tiring at times. The game mode features a lot of rewards that can be used in other game modes, such as avatar clothes, additional colors, and alternate outfits for characters. However, earning these rewards is a slow and tedious task. Of course, you can spend real money to skip past all the hard work, but that ruins the whole point.

Overall, Street Fighter 6 is an incredible game, there’s really nothing wrong with it, and it undoubtedly raises the standard for modern fighting games to new heights. However, let’s hope that Capcom doesn’t turn it into even more of a cash cow and tries to monetize everything besides the raw game, as the game itself costs a fair sum of money.

Takeaway

Street Fighter 6 is easily the best installment in the franchise by a huge margin. Street Fighter 5, its predecessor, was nothing short of a disaster at launch. The game did try to redeem itself with Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition, but the core problems with the game, such as mediocre game mechanics, lots of grinding, and paywalls, held the game back from what it could’ve been.

Capcom has definitely learned from its mistakes from the launch of Street Fighter 5, but the core problems are still present in Street Fighter 6, at least to some extent. Hopefully, Capcom won’t turn Street Fighter 6 into something like a live service game where the player has to pay for absolutely everything aside from the raw game.