With three months left to go, we have seen every single character in Street Fighter 6 in action. Getting done with the roster build-up this far ahead of release is a different feeling than past games, but it’s also good to get that part out of the way—they actually have quite a lot of other game content they can still go over in for the time being (and also DLC in the future, but I’m sure they won’t start talking about that for a while…probably.) As an inverse of the last post, this final trio is mostly returning characters and one more new one, and I get to go over many of the recurring themes in these character discussions one more time.
It’s been a few months, so let’s get back into the thick of Street Fighter.
Despite there still being a decent gap of time between then, now, and release, the pre-release strategy seems to be to drop a whole load of things on us at once rather than distributing them on a regular basis. This actually reminds me a lot of how they did things back in the Super Street Fighter IV days, which was so long ago that remembering them is all the proof you need that I’m a skeleton at a keyboard. It does mean I have more to write about in each post, and in this case that includes most of the remaining new characters that SF6 is introducing.
It was surprising to suddenly have them show off four additional characters all at once , including all but one of the original World Warriors, after only a month-long wait—I’m just so used to these sorts of things to be staggered out. But we are no longer in the days of monthly character reveals, and every announcement is meant to serve a clear purpose in the march towards the game’s release—in this case, the four returning characters here were shown off so they could demonstrate how your custom character in the World Tour mode can learn from the masters and use their iconic moves, sometimes to solve mundane problems like cleaning the roads of excess oil drums. This makes it pretty clear that the roles of the classic characters are being defined in more of a mentor capacity, old hands passing down their gravity-defying nonsense abilities to someone new…but beyond that, there’s still much to dig into.
(While I’m here, I’d also like to link to these twoarticles by Drew Mackie investigating where the names of the original SFII cast came from. Fascinating stuff that often goes where you don’t expect.)
Now that you know my entire history with the Street Fighter series up to now, it feels like a good time to stop looking backwards and start taking stock of what’s up next. It may surprise you to learn that I’m just as capable of writing about the cast of upcoming Street Fighter games as I am about the new monsters in upcoming Pokémon games, so in this little mini-series, I’ll be doing just that, from now until the release of Street Fighter 6.
Surprisingly, or maybe not so much, considering the massive Internet goings-on concerning this game, we are only a little over three months since the official debut of SF6 (although it was announced back in February), and we already know all the characters in the game—it’s all happened so fast, it’s a bit staggering. It was smart of Capcom to just officially put that information out there considering said Internet goings-on and the possible confusion that could have created, and now we can simply look forward to seeing more of the actual game rather than anticipating which leaked details were right or wrong. However, even though we know all eighteen playable fighters that make up the starting line-up, names and artwork don’t tell us nearly enough about what these characters are about—this is Street Fighter, after all, so we still have to see many of these characters in scenarios that involve streets or fighting before we can draw any conclusions about them. With that in mind, for these posts, I will only be talking about fighters when they have official gameplay footage.
Once again, I’m returning to ground I’ve covered before on this site, and what new perspective have I gained in the two years since I covered it? When I last wrote about Street Fighter V, it was still a going concern, technically, although they hadn’t announced its final season of content yet—who knows, Capcom might not have even known they were doing a final season of content at that point. We still have one more EVO tournament for the game before it’s set to retire as a headliner—the very weekend after this goes up, most likely—although I have a hard time imagining it will carry the same emotions the final Street Fighter IV EVO tournament had*, which ended with the announcers in tears. For reasons both related and unrelated to the game itself, the community that has kept playing SFV will likely be feeling a sense of exhausted resolution—not a definitively good or a bad thing, but something you’d feel after a long and draining road trip, full of bumps and diverting scenery in equal measure. Now that we’ve reached the end, I can say that V ultimately did all it could to right itself after a number of rough patches, and it will certainly have its place in the series’ history—but it is also forever attached to one of the worst times in the history of its publisher..
In that previous post, I laid down just a few of the problems that plagued Capcom’s fighting game follow-ups to the success of Street Fighter IV, but that was really just a subset of all the problems that came the publisher’s way in the middle of the 2010s. From my perspective, Capcom made a strong entrance into the HD game era, confidently continuing most of their established series like Resident Evil and Devil May Cry, creating some new ones that seemed to resonate like Dead Rising, and, of course, bringing back Street Fighter. What’s amazing, looking back, is how quickly that all seemed to collapse, with the first ominous sign being the departure of longtime Capcom producer Keiji Inafune in 2010, using his exit interviews to lambaste the state of Japanese game development (as for how his own post-Capcom game projects went, well…you know the story.) The other dominoes fell soon enough: Resident Evil 6 underperformed in sales (despite selling just under five million copies), the rebooted DMC developed by critical darling developer Ninja Theory was met with instant fan controversy, the Mega Man series was in limbo, sequels to early HD hits like Dead Rising and Lost Planet saw diminishing returns…and then there was Street Fighter X Tekken, a game I still contend is an interesting spin-off that was undermined by a small handful of bad decisions, never given the chance to improve its standing among players. They still had a solid pillar in Street Fighter IV and its updates, but their fighting game business wasn’t really expanding after support for Marvel vs. Capcom 3ended before it even really started (likely due to licensing disagreements) and SFXTK proved to be a nonstarter. The botched launch of Street Fighter V in 2016, and the botched everything of Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite in 2017, were just more missteps in what seemed to be a half-decade of missteps—maybe Inafune was on to something after all.
If you weren’t there, you can’t imagine the emotional rattle of living in a world without a new Street Fighter for close to a decade and then suddenly having a new Street Fighter. As far as I can remember, there were absolutely no rumours or leaks about this beforehand—or at least none that were remotely believable after years and years of false whispers and baseless speculation—which seems to take the surprise out of most new game announcements in the Internet age. So, just try to picture how much my reality was shaken when, on an undoubtedly chilly evening in October 2007, I went online and saw that there would be a Street Fighter IV. The fourth Street Fighter. The fabled game that would never be. It was happening.
Since I already wrote about my history with SFIIItwo years ago, I’ll try to make a long story short: I first played III (specifically Third Strike) a few years after it was new, well past the point where the true, uncontested sequel to Street Fighter II had to be heavily scrutinized and its impact on the genre given incredible weight (it was only five years old by that point, but once upon a time five years felt like an eternity.) My knowledge of its reputation was based on both game magazines and the Internet—Third Strike was often given the highest of praise (see its placement on Electronic Gaming Monthly’s Top 100 games list in 2001), but the subseries as a whole was still characterized as a misstep that may have done permanent damage to the Street Fighter brand, and potentially to fighting games as a mainstream game genre, leading to a quiet period in the early two-thousands. None of those discussions really leaked into my evaluation of Third Strike, which from the get-go seemed to me to be among the best fighting games I had ever played—as with all things, though, it was a complicated subject, one where the online hyperbole was still online hyperbole, but was definitely coming from somewhere.
For many years, Street Fighter and 3D graphics were like oil and water to the wider fanbase—this seeming incompatibility was a bit of received wisdom, but it was also widely accepted up until it no longer could be. The SF series had made such a mark for itself through its sprite-based artistry, even in the face of 3D competition from Sega and Namco, that the idea of a SF game not using sprites was simply inconceivable, wrong on a Platonic level. Well past the nineties and into the Internet-stranded days of the new millennium, fans of the series would not even entertain the notion of a Street Fighter with 3D graphics—and unlike many preconceived notions among creatively conservative fans, they had an example they could point to if they wanted to make their case.
That this comparison was mostly unfair shouldn’t be surprising. As someone who never had a chance to experience the polygonal Street Fighter EX series firsthand, I only had to accept the evaluations of those with much more experience with them that they were indeed blasphemous abominations unto our Lord Street Fighter, but at least Skullomania is pretty cool (to my surprise, the actual at-the-time reviews of the console ports of the games seemed fairly positive.) There is a bit of exaggeration in play there, as the tone I got from online opinions were oftentimes more dismissive than outright hostile, maybe because those players were no longer under the illusion that EX represented the “future” of the series—it was simply one of many options that Capcom experimented with in the mid-to-late nineties, when Alphacommingled with the EX games and even the Mortal Kombat-inspired game version of the Street Fighter movie, all of which at one point or another could have become the “direction” for SF, and in some cases could have even sported the name Street Fighter III before the actual Street Fighter III appeared after evolving from a project that had nothing to do with Street Fighter (the development of these games is highly convoluted, as you can tell.) The brand, and fighting games in general, were in such a strong place at the time that Capcom was willing to throw all sorts of things at the wall…some of those things stuck and some didn’t, and the ones that did strike a chord with hardcore fans often made the ones that didn’t look worse than they actually were. I mean Street Fighter: The Movie is not good, but at least it’s hilarious.
So, yes, Street Fighter EX was always in a weird place: a subseries made by an outside developer, trying to show how Street Fighter could adapt to the innovations brought about by Virtua Fighter and Tekken, featuring a bunch of new characters, and releasing alongside the pinnacle of the series 2D art in both Alpha and III. Even though it was ultimately better suited to be released on the increasingly omnipresent Playstation without the compromises of Capcom’s 2D games (or, in the case of III, the inability to be ported at all), it was destined to be seen as lesser. If you were to have a casual glance at it and compared it to the 2D games, you would probably come to the same conclusion. But, like I said, it’s not an entirely fair assessment.
It probably did seem pretty strange at the time that while the competing fighting games released in Street Fighter II‘s wake fully established themselves as series with multiple sequels over as many years (between their debuts and 1995, Midway published three Mortal Kombat games, and SNK put out three Samurai Shodown games, two-and-half Fatal Fury games, and two King of Fighters games, alongside numerous others), Capcom had only released a series of revised editions. Even when their arcade game capabilities were upgraded thanks to the introduction of the CPSII board, they debuted yet another revision of SFII alongside it—a substantial one, with improved animations and music and brand new characters, but still the same game at its core. Were they milking that game in place of innovating further in the newly-established fighting game genre? Possibly, for at least the first few years, and it remained a stigma attached to Capcom and Street Fighter for years afterwards. But as we quickly learned, patience is a virtue, and within three years of their breakout hit (which, as I’ve harped on in many posts, likely seemed like an eternity then but looks like nothing to adult eyes), the company re-entered the fighting game race in a big way.
Looking at Darkstalkers and X-Men: Children of the Atom, Capcom’s first two completely new fighting games (both released in 1994), compared to what came before (SFII included) is like night and day: even SNK’s artful spritework is pallid next to those games’ fluid animation and colours (oh, the colours, children!), and Capcom’s developers only improved as they iterated on them. The CPSII era Capcom fighters were made to pop out to people in the middle of a bustling arcade (back when such a thing could exist), with attract modes that promised pure cartoon eye candy that the games were all fully capable of delivering on. When I saw Marvel Super Heroes and X-Men vs. Street Fighter at my local mall arcade, they were in those cabinets with the wall-enveloping screens separated from the controls, a big presence for games whose over-the-top presentations demanded it (even with the encroachment of 3D fighters at the time.) All of Capcom’s 2D arcade games in the mid-nineties have a distinct aesthetic (which even encompasses the music as well), giving this period one of the most cohesive “identities” of any I can think of for a video game publisher, with their fighting games at the head of it.
Importantly, this was also an era where the pumped up arcade games could, at least theoretically, find their way to home consoles, with the Sega Saturn (and to a lesser extent, the Playstation) seemingly built to properly handle these ambitious titles. There was nothing restraining what they could do, and the games reflected it. This is the point where Capcom went from The Company That Made Street Fighter to The Company That Makes Great Fighting Games.
So, how did Street Fighter fit into this? Considering it was not the first one out of the gate, one could make the argument that it didn’t establish itself as the standard-bearer of this age of fighting games. One could also make the argument that making the first brand new Street Fighter game in four years a prequel rather than a sequel was a sort of regression. These are arguments you could make, but if you did, you’d be wrong.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 