If you look at the raw numbers, Street Fighter 5 looks like a huge success. It’s in Capcom’s top ten best-sellers, after all. But in reality it took several years to get there. At launch, Street Fighter 5 was rushed out the door to line up with tournament schedules. The idea at the time was to add features over time, to treat the game as a platform or service. Several new versions, Capcom departures and massive tweaks later, it’s still kind of hard to pin down how the fighting game community truly felt about Street Fighter 5.

Street Fighter 6 is, in comparison, a home run swing the moment the doors opened. It feels like Capcom is trying to rewrite the narrative, showing that it can launch a fighting game striving to make everyone happy on day one. This is a game for everyone, not just participants in the Capcom Pro Tour. It’s also a game more interested in giving players room to experiment and get creative in a fight, rather than fully planning out what does and doesn't work. Splash some color and vibes designed around the words “Street Fighter” on top and you have an experience guaranteed to soak up attention and good will.

Street Fighter 6 is built with a fascinating, three-pillar structure split between three modes: World Tour, Battle Hub and Fighting Ground. By choosing a mode you are essentially choosing the way you want to play Street Fighter 6 almost at a high level. World Tour offers an experience resembling a Yakuza game, which is what Capcom went for instead of a Mortal Kombat-style story mode. Battle Hub is where the multiplayer happens, but it’s also, well, a social hub with way more to do than just fight friends. Finally, Fighting Ground is where players who just want to play normal-ass Street Fighter go.

This game isn’t notable for offering different modes, but what’s remarkable is how dense, fleshed-out and crammed with content each one is. World Tour is a super goofy RPG with extra systems on top of the core gameplay. Battle Hub includes things like an in-game structure for tournaments, other Capcom arcade games to take a break with, and a whole bunch of customization options for your avatar. And it’s not just a bunch of menus or arcade machines, it’s an entire place with unique characters to interact with. And Fighting Ground has everything you would want in a complete fighting game in a traditional sense.

There’s so much happening in Street Fighter 6 it’s almost overwhelming, but Capcom made it a real pleasure to dig into this thing because of how much flavor and personality everything has. Capcom has gone for an aesthetic that invokes Street Fighter III: Third Strike, but does its own contemporary version of that vibe. Everything is super colorful in a “street art” way, which along with the “placeness” of World Tour and Battle Hub actually produces a sense of community in a strange way that combines the external (players/audience) with the internal (in-game). It isn’t something I’ve really experienced in a game before, and I didn’t have words for that feeling until just now!

This idea of having expanded spaces for players to hang out and do their thing extends to Street Fighter 6’s core mechanics. And I’m not talking about the different control styles. Capcom went a little wild in the previous game by giving each character their own hyper-specific functions, but this time the big gimmick is a large bag of universal tools. This “Drive” system has its own bar, separate from the traditional super meter. What’s wild is the super meter is literally only for supers now, while the Drive meter governs everything else. And by “everything,” we’re talking dash cancels, EX moves, parries and even a returning focus attack-like maneuver from Street Fighter 4! All of that uses one bar, and if you use up the bar you go into a vulnerable state while it cools down.

The end result of this system, or at least the intended outcome (we’ll see how it goes in the metagame) is moving far away from having right answers. There’s so much creativity enabled by this system that at any given moment a player can reach into the bag on some Felix the Cat ish and pull out something that probably works. This is a level of creativity that I would say hasn’t been in a core Street Fighter game before. And frankly, it rules. Especially since it feels (at least early on) that if one tool doesn’t really click with you, you don’t necessarily need to learn it to win fights.

That might sound overwhelming, and with the constant tug of war between fighting game depth and appeal to casual players, it’s understandable. Aside from the easier control options, Street Fighter 6’s World Tour mode seems designed for that player who isn’t interested in esports but is interested in the world and characters of Street Fighter. This is a mode that higher-skilled players like myself might breeze past, but it’s a neat idea that’s way more productive than a series of cutscenes interrupted by random fights. This is more of a playground, but it’s also a space that tells a lighthearted story and lets you interact with various Street Fighter characters in fun ways.

It’s weird to run around as a player avatar and start fights with random pedestrians, but when you realize the whole thing is just trying to be silly it all comes together. After all, most enemies that act aggressive with you are gang members who wear cardboard boxes on their heads. You can also run into arcade machines like in the Battle Hub, and see all kinds of fun easter eggs as you wander around Metro City. It’s a fun, totally unnecessary mode that still feels like a whole game by itself.

There are a few issues with World Tour mode, like fights dropping the frame rate to 30 frames per second. It’s jarring since the rest of the game is so smooth, but it makes practical sense due to all the custom characters running around. It’s also super grindy, taking a while to even flesh out a full move set for your character. The upside of that is being able to make your ultimate Street Fighter avatar though, with the basic moves of a chosen fighter and slots for specials and supers open for mixing and matching your favorites. It’s a solid payoff, even if the road there is a slog at times.

Even with my figurative shrug at World Tour mode, it’s easy to see Street Fighter 6 as an achievement for Capcom. There was so much up and down with Street Fighter 5 that sucked the joy out of having a new one, and really only people who showed up years later got the full package. The esports vibe was an understandable experiment, but not one that fully landed. Street Fighter 6 on the other hand is like smashing open a pinata. It’s bursting with energy, style and content in a way very few fighting games have ever managed, even ones praised for single-player offerings. It not only feels like there’s something for everyone here, but it feels like there’s a genuine foundation for a community to grow and thrive. And I definitely plan to stick around and see how that shakes out.

Pros:

• Tons of features, bells, whistles, kazoos, etc

• Core mechanics that favor creativity over hardcore finesse

• Feels genuinely community driven in a fresh and unique way

Cons:

• World Tour is kinda weird and janky, albeit far from a problem

• Controls settings and overall menus are messy and hard to navigate

Score: 9/10