Capcom’s Street Fighter franchise has a unique relationship with Nintendo consoles. Once upon a time in the early ’90s during the original arcade fighting game heyday, Nintendo’s Super NES was one of the prime places to play Street Fighter at home. It was the only mainstream platform to receive a port of the original Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, and alongside the Sega Genesis, would see home releases of Champion Edition, Hyper Fighting, and Super Street Fighter II. From there, it got extremely spotty. There was an attempt made by Capcom to make Street Fighter Alpha 2 work on the Super NES, but it was an extremely flawed port that proved that their arcade hardware had simply moved too far past 16-bit consoles to be viable any longer.
Street Fighter never had a tendency to include guest characters, but Street Fighter 6 makes an exception for Fatal Fury’s Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui. Here, Terry launches the returning Elena with his Buster Wolf super.
That seemed to be it. There wasn’t even an effort to port Street Fighter EX over to the Nintendo 64 under the name “Street Fighter 64” which should have been a gimme based on other things Capcom had going on with the system at the time. Super Street Fighter IV would, much later, make an appearance on the 3DS in what can best be described as experimental, and the Switch did receive a port of the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, but it was abundantly clear that the relationship between Nintendo and Street Fighter that had seemed so strong once upon a time was now cordial at best. This is what made the announcement of a Switch 2 port of Street Fighter 6 a genuine surprise as part of the system’s launch lineup.
Since Capcom took some time to decide what exactly to do with the Street Fighter franchise again in 2009 with Street Fighter IV, they’ve settled into a pretty reliable pattern in both rolling out content and holding events. Every seven years, we’ve gotten a new mainline installment of the game, while releases like Ultra Street Fighter IV and Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition have introduced noticeable changes to each game in the middle of its lifespan. With this Switch 2 release joining the game already in progress, and containing its Year 3 system and balance changes, Switch 2 owners are joining Street Fighter 6 in-progress, with this particular release marking one of those more pronounced changes.
Let’s step back for a moment, though, and talk about what Street Fighter 6 actually is.
Drive Rush is a great way to get in on your opponent quickly while limiting both their time and ability to react. Here, Mai closes the gap on newcomer AKI early in the game in a push to gain a quick advantage.
As perhaps an oversimplification, Street Fighter 6, like most of the series, has you pick a character and fight opponents – CPU or human, up to the player’s discretion – armed with the same set of directional controls and six buttons, while utilizing a unique supplementary gameplay system like Street Fighter III’s parries or Street Fighter IV’s focus system.
This time around we get the Drive system, which is a comprehensive set of mechanics powered by a meter directly below your lifebar that starts every round full, and moves up and down based on your actions. This can be drained by something as simple as blocking or taking a counter hit, all the way up to utilizing mechanics like Drive Rush (an extremely fast dash that covers a lot of ground and locks your opponent’s controls briefly) or Drive Impact (a hard-stun attack that can power through a couple of incoming blows), just to scratch the surface. Draining this meter will put you into a state called “burnout,” where you will suffer increased recovery frames from hitstun and blockstun, and be subject to chip damage on special moves, which Street Fighter 6 ordinarily protects you from.
The Drive system is so comprehensive, in fact, that it might seem overwhelming to someone simply reading about it or watching a tutorial video covering it. Even I had concerns about system creep or feature creep when the game was in development, and although it took me a little bit of time with the game to get over those concerns, it eventually stabilized into something coherent and intuitive the more I got to know it.
The other addition to Street Fighter 6 is the one that’s actually still controversial to some, and that is the inclusion of what is called “Modern controls.” This is an entirely new control scheme that replaces the three punches and three kicks that have defined Street Fighter from the beginning with three attack buttons, a special move button, and a couple of utility buttons for things like attack selection and performing Super Arts. Simplified auto-combos are available and special moves are simplified to a single direction and one or two button presses as opposed to the motions and back-and-forth charges familiar to long-time players, both of which come with a damage penalty for that simplification. Because of that simplification, using Modern controls will lock you out of a good portion of your character’s moveset for lack of enough of those simplified inputs to go around. However, some players find the faster execution time to be worth the tradeoff. Your personal mileage may vary.
It’s hard to articulate just how much trouble Akuma is in here. This round is just about over.
One thing Capcom has historically taken criticism for with Street Fighter has been skimping on the single player content, and with Street Fighter 6, they answer those criticisms with World Tour mode (which is incidentally the name they went with the last time they wanted to add a deep single-player experience, way back in Street Fighter Alpha 3). In World Tour, you create your own customized character and travel the world of Street Fighter, from the streets of Final Fight’s Metro City to more remote locales like the fictional nation of Nayshall, which is central to the game’s plot. Through this mode, you experience Street Fighter 6’s main storyline while your character levels up and trains under the tutelage of any of the game’s ever-growing cast of characters. Exposing a slight limitation of the platform, it does run at 30 frames per second compared to the rest of the game’s steady 60, but you’re not going to be landing optimal combos under esports pressure here, either, so better here than in actual multiplayer situations. Because of the expansive nature of the mode tied to the continuing flow of DLC support Street Fighter 6 receives, this should still keep the single player crowd happy for years to come.
Attached to this mode is the online community component, Battle Hub. Here you will take your customized character into a lavish arcade lined with multiple levels of cabinets and just play like you would in a real life arcade. You can line up for an opponent, just hang around and watch, hit up the floor level to match up your customized character against others, or go exploring and maybe check out the retro corner to see what Capcom has running on those cabinets. It’s unfortunate that there’s no online component to those because it would be fun to play games like Street Fighter II`Hyper Fighting, Captain Commando, and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo with other players in the convenient confines of the Battle Hub, but so far that is only a single player experience.
Ken vs Zangief goes all the way back to the Street Fighter II days as a delicate matchup full of high-stakes exchanges that have to be navigated with particular caution. One false move can set up a situation for either character that can be very difficult to recover from.
Even with that particular flaw, however, Capcom absolutely killed it with the Battle Hub. It’s a great way to hang out in a genuine social setting tied to the game, and there have been plenty of times that I’ve jumped into a Discord voice call – oops, I guess I should be saying GameChat now – and just spent the afternoon hanging out with friends, playing each other, watching each other play against randoms, and just having an all-around good time that is hard to duplicate in a largely post-arcade era. If one feature of Street Fighter 6 doesn’t get talked about enough, it’s this one.
Finally, for players who are perfectly fine with Street Fighter’s usual suite of modes, those will be found in the Fighting Ground. This is going to be familiar territory for long-time fans of the franchise. When you want to go into a traditional arcade mode, do some combo trials, spend time in the lab with training mode, or perhaps take in some ranked matches, or set up a lobby without the bells and whistles of the Battle Hub, this is where you’ll find it.
Of course, none of this would matter if Street Fighter 6 wasn’t a solid fighting game at its core, and frankly, this is the best the series has felt since its 2009 resurgence. Street Fighter IV was technically brilliant but also very rigid. Street Fighter V flowed better but still held a lot of counterintuitive elements that threw the overall feel of the game off. While Street Fighter 6 isn’t a full return to the old feel of games like Street Fighter Alpha 2, and even though it still requires veteran players to unlearn a lot of things to adjust to the new system, it does feel a lot more consistent with the classics on a basic level than its immediate predecessors. Once everything clicks, you’ll be navigating the neutral game, weaving Drive Parries into your defense, and sustaining your offense with effective set-play like it’s second nature–which doesn’t take nearly as long as you might think. This is, simply put, the best-feeling Street Fighter in a long time.
Drive Impact a burnt-out opponent into the corner to initiate the game’s stun mechanic.
That’s enough about Street Fighter 6 as a game, generally speaking, though. Now let’s talk about Street Fighter 6 specifically as a Switch 2 game.
Street Fighter 6 was one of the more impressive ports on display during the April Nintendo Direct, showcasing remarkably similar (and in some cases superior) graphical fidelity when compared to its PlayStation, Xbox, and PC counterparts, and World Tour mode struggles aside, that otherwise certainly holds up in the final release. In fact, most of the time I was playing, I had completely forgotten that I was playing it on a Switch system at all, apart from seeing the Switch 2 logo under my lifebar during online play as a cross-platform indicator. This is huge because I mainly play this game on the PlayStation 5, and it gives the Switch 2 immediate bonafides as a legitimate destination for present day game ports.
Getting thrown into an established competitive pool with those PlayStation, Xbox, and PC users who have had the game for two years at this point might be a bit of a harsh experience for players just coming in with the Switch 2, but cross-platform play can be disabled in the matchmaking menu if you want to stick to playing with a fresher audience for the time being.
One big feature the Switch 2 port of Street Fighter 6 lacks from other versions really hits the system where it hurts, and that is the ability to uninstall the World Tour mode data in order to save storage space. With the Switch 2 having a meager 256 GB of onboard storage (less than a third of the PlayStation 5), and with SD Express cards being expensive and hard to come by, this would have brought some much needed relief to Switch 2 owners who are already feeling the crunch of storage limitations, either by the system’s dedicated software or legacy Switch games they brought along with them in a system transfer.
Still, the unlikely addition of the best version of Street Fighter in years actually landing on a Nintendo console is a great aspect of the Switch 2 launch that genuinely elevates the system’s profile. With Virtua Fighter 5 REVO waiting in the wings with a yet-unannounced release date, and Soul Calibur II sitting there on the NSO GameCube app right from launch, Street Fighter 6 is the centerpiece of the best start a Nintendo console has ever had for fighting games.
With Virtua Fighter 5 REVO waiting in the wings with a yet-unannounced release date, and Soul Calibur II sitting there on the NSO GameCube app right from launch, Street Fighter 6 is the centerpiece of the best start a Nintendo console has ever had for fighting games.
Capcom’s Street Fighter franchise has a unique relationship with Nintendo consoles. Once upon a time in the early ’90s during the original arcade fighting game heyday, Nintendo’s Super NES was one of the prime places to play Street Fighter at home. It was the only mainstream platform to receive a port of the original Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, and alongside the Sega Genesis, would see home releases of Champion Edition, Hyper Fighting, and Super Street Fighter II. From there, it got extremely spotty. There was an attempt made by Capcom to make Street Fighter Alpha 2 work on the Super NES, but it was an extremely flawed port that proved that their arcade hardware had simply moved too far past 16-bit consoles to be viable any longer.
Street Fighter never had a tendency to include guest characters, but Street Fighter 6 makes an exception for Fatal Fury’s Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui. Here, Terry launches the returning Elena with his Buster Wolf super.
That seemed to be it. There wasn’t even an effort to port Street Fighter EX over to the Nintendo 64 under the name “Street Fighter 64” which should have been a gimme based on other things Capcom had going on with the system at the time. Super Street Fighter IV would, much later, make an appearance on the 3DS in what can best be described as experimental, and the Switch did receive a port of the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, but it was abundantly clear that the relationship between Nintendo and Street Fighter that had seemed so strong once upon a time was now cordial at best. This is what made the announcement of a Switch 2 port of Street Fighter 6 a genuine surprise as part of the system’s launch lineup.
Since Capcom took some time to decide what exactly to do with the Street Fighter franchise again in 2009 with Street Fighter IV, they’ve settled into a pretty reliable pattern in both rolling out content and holding events. Every seven years, we’ve gotten a new mainline installment of the game, while releases like Ultra Street Fighter IV and Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition have introduced noticeable changes to each game in the middle of its lifespan. With this Switch 2 release joining the game already in progress, and containing its Year 3 system and balance changes, Switch 2 owners are joining Street Fighter 6 in-progress, with this particular release marking one of those more pronounced changes.
Let’s step back for a moment, though, and talk about what Street Fighter 6 actually is.
Drive Rush is a great way to get in on your opponent quickly while limiting both their time and ability to react. Here, Mai closes the gap on newcomer AKI early in the game in a push to gain a quick advantage.
As perhaps an oversimplification, Street Fighter 6, like most of the series, has you pick a character and fight opponents – CPU or human, up to the player’s discretion – armed with the same set of directional controls and six buttons, while utilizing a unique supplementary gameplay system like Street Fighter III’s parries or Street Fighter IV’s focus system.
This time around we get the Drive system, which is a comprehensive set of mechanics powered by a meter directly below your lifebar that starts every round full, and moves up and down based on your actions. This can be drained by something as simple as blocking or taking a counter hit, all the way up to utilizing mechanics like Drive Rush (an extremely fast dash that covers a lot of ground and locks your opponent’s controls briefly) or Drive Impact (a hard-stun attack that can power through a couple of incoming blows), just to scratch the surface. Draining this meter will put you into a state called “burnout,” where you will suffer increased recovery frames from hitstun and blockstun, and be subject to chip damage on special moves, which Street Fighter 6 ordinarily protects you from.
The Drive system is so comprehensive, in fact, that it might seem overwhelming to someone simply reading about it or watching a tutorial video covering it. Even I had concerns about system creep or feature creep when the game was in development, and although it took me a little bit of time with the game to get over those concerns, it eventually stabilized into something coherent and intuitive the more I got to know it.
The other addition to Street Fighter 6 is the one that’s actually still controversial to some, and that is the inclusion of what is called “Modern controls.” This is an entirely new control scheme that replaces the three punches and three kicks that have defined Street Fighter from the beginning with three attack buttons, a special move button, and a couple of utility buttons for things like attack selection and performing Super Arts. Simplified auto-combos are available and special moves are simplified to a single direction and one or two button presses as opposed to the motions and back-and-forth charges familiar to long-time players, both of which come with a damage penalty for that simplification. Because of that simplification, using Modern controls will lock you out of a good portion of your character’s moveset for lack of enough of those simplified inputs to go around. However, some players find the faster execution time to be worth the tradeoff. Your personal mileage may vary.
It’s hard to articulate just how much trouble Akuma is in here. This round is just about over.
One thing Capcom has historically taken criticism for with Street Fighter has been skimping on the single player content, and with Street Fighter 6, they answer those criticisms with World Tour mode (which is incidentally the name they went with the last time they wanted to add a deep single-player experience, way back in Street Fighter Alpha 3). In World Tour, you create your own customized character and travel the world of Street Fighter, from the streets of Final Fight’s Metro City to more remote locales like the fictional nation of Nayshall, which is central to the game’s plot. Through this mode, you experience Street Fighter 6’s main storyline while your character levels up and trains under the tutelage of any of the game’s ever-growing cast of characters. Exposing a slight limitation of the platform, it does run at 30 frames per second compared to the rest of the game’s steady 60, but you’re not going to be landing optimal combos under esports pressure here, either, so better here than in actual multiplayer situations. Because of the expansive nature of the mode tied to the continuing flow of DLC support Street Fighter 6 receives, this should still keep the single player crowd happy for years to come.
Attached to this mode is the online community component, Battle Hub. Here you will take your customized character into a lavish arcade lined with multiple levels of cabinets and just play like you would in a real life arcade. You can line up for an opponent, just hang around and watch, hit up the floor level to match up your customized character against others, or go exploring and maybe check out the retro corner to see what Capcom has running on those cabinets. It’s unfortunate that there’s no online component to those because it would be fun to play games like Street Fighter II`Hyper Fighting, Captain Commando, and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo with other players in the convenient confines of the Battle Hub, but so far that is only a single player experience.
Ken vs Zangief goes all the way back to the Street Fighter II days as a delicate matchup full of high-stakes exchanges that have to be navigated with particular caution. One false move can set up a situation for either character that can be very difficult to recover from.
Even with that particular flaw, however, Capcom absolutely killed it with the Battle Hub. It’s a great way to hang out in a genuine social setting tied to the game, and there have been plenty of times that I’ve jumped into a Discord voice call – oops, I guess I should be saying GameChat now – and just spent the afternoon hanging out with friends, playing each other, watching each other play against randoms, and just having an all-around good time that is hard to duplicate in a largely post-arcade era. If one feature of Street Fighter 6 doesn’t get talked about enough, it’s this one.
Finally, for players who are perfectly fine with Street Fighter’s usual suite of modes, those will be found in the Fighting Ground. This is going to be familiar territory for long-time fans of the franchise. When you want to go into a traditional arcade mode, do some combo trials, spend time in the lab with training mode, or perhaps take in some ranked matches, or set up a lobby without the bells and whistles of the Battle Hub, this is where you’ll find it.
Of course, none of this would matter if Street Fighter 6 wasn’t a solid fighting game at its core, and frankly, this is the best the series has felt since its 2009 resurgence. Street Fighter IV was technically brilliant but also very rigid. Street Fighter V flowed better but still held a lot of counterintuitive elements that threw the overall feel of the game off. While Street Fighter 6 isn’t a full return to the old feel of games like Street Fighter Alpha 2, and even though it still requires veteran players to unlearn a lot of things to adjust to the new system, it does feel a lot more consistent with the classics on a basic level than its immediate predecessors. Once everything clicks, you’ll be navigating the neutral game, weaving Drive Parries into your defense, and sustaining your offense with effective set-play like it’s second nature–which doesn’t take nearly as long as you might think. This is, simply put, the best-feeling Street Fighter in a long time.
Drive Impact a burnt-out opponent into the corner to initiate the game’s stun mechanic.
That’s enough about Street Fighter 6 as a game, generally speaking, though. Now let’s talk about Street Fighter 6 specifically as a Switch 2 game.
Street Fighter 6 was one of the more impressive ports on display during the April Nintendo Direct, showcasing remarkably similar (and in some cases superior) graphical fidelity when compared to its PlayStation, Xbox, and PC counterparts, and World Tour mode struggles aside, that otherwise certainly holds up in the final release. In fact, most of the time I was playing, I had completely forgotten that I was playing it on a Switch system at all, apart from seeing the Switch 2 logo under my lifebar during online play as a cross-platform indicator. This is huge because I mainly play this game on the PlayStation 5, and it gives the Switch 2 immediate bonafides as a legitimate destination for present day game ports.
Getting thrown into an established competitive pool with those PlayStation, Xbox, and PC users who have had the game for two years at this point might be a bit of a harsh experience for players just coming in with the Switch 2, but cross-platform play can be disabled in the matchmaking menu if you want to stick to playing with a fresher audience for the time being.
One big feature the Switch 2 port of Street Fighter 6 lacks from other versions really hits the system where it hurts, and that is the ability to uninstall the World Tour mode data in order to save storage space. With the Switch 2 having a meager 256 GB of onboard storage (less than a third of the PlayStation 5), and with SD Express cards being expensive and hard to come by, this would have brought some much needed relief to Switch 2 owners who are already feeling the crunch of storage limitations, either by the system’s dedicated software or legacy Switch games they brought along with them in a system transfer.
Still, the unlikely addition of the best version of Street Fighter in years actually landing on a Nintendo console is a great aspect of the Switch 2 launch that genuinely elevates the system’s profile. With Virtua Fighter 5 REVO waiting in the wings with a yet-unannounced release date, and Soul Calibur II sitting there on the NSO GameCube app right from launch, Street Fighter 6 is the centerpiece of the best start a Nintendo console has ever had for fighting games.
by Patrick Mifflin
