Street Fighter 6 Aims to Conquer Your Fear of Fighting Games
Street Fighter 6 may not be a horror game, but you’ll find many monsters to battle in the game and online. There’s no shortage of dangerous foes to fear. Fighting games have quite a reputation for being filled with skilled players who will beat you so badly it hardly feels like you’re playing at all. That skill ceiling kept me from playing fighters for many, many years. I imagine it’s keeping plenty of other people from playing, too. That fear is very real. Very powerful. I am genuinely afraid of some of the one-sided beatings I might receive online in most fighting games. Except this game is taking some incredible steps to counteract that fear and create a welcoming fighter for new people.
Much of my own fear came from the complicated inputs. Fighting games usually need you to press several directions and a button to do their flashy moves. You know, the ones you come to the character for. Nobody picks Scorpion in Mortal Kombat because they like his punch. You choose him for his harpoon. The cool teleports. Killing people by breathing fire on them. You’re here to use those incredible special moves. They’re a core piece of what makes the characters compelling.
It’s hard to input down, down/forward, forward, then punch to throw a fireball when you’re getting slapped around, though. When that fear and panic kicks in, it’s all you can do to try to keep yourself from dying. That’s a common experience in most fighting games, but Street Fighter 6 offers a couple of ways to still do cool moves despite your terror. For starters, the game offers different Control Types. Classic uses the inputs as they have always been throughout the series’ history. The others will open up the game for a variety of skill levels.
For anyone who wants things a bit easier, there’s Modern Control Type. Modern assigns your special moves to a single button. Want to throw Ryu’s fireball, which I mentioned above? Hit Triangle on the PS5 controller. Want to do one of the other neat moves the character can do? Hold one of the directions and hit Triangle to toss out some spinning kicks and speedy flying uppercuts. It’s designed to let players do these moves far more easily. You can even do Ryu’s most devastating super moves by holding a direction and hitting Triangle and Circle. So, tap two buttons and a direction and you do the coolest moves in the game.
This is a massive change for anyone who’s found their hands locking up during match. Anyone who’s forgotten which directions you need to hit. No matter how much I’ve panicked in a match, I’ve always been able to smash the punch button, at least. It often didn’t do much since it was just a punch, though. Now, Street Fighter 6 lets you toss out special moves that just might turn the tide on your opponent. All without having to also remember which buttons to press. Or pressing the right buttons all in a row without making a mistake.
Yeah, but powerful opponents usually beat you by doing combos. You get hit once, and suddenly you’re flipping around until you die. It’s something else I was always frightened about happening, which would leave me blocking in a corner. And if I did hit back, it was always a single blow with nothing to follow it. If you’re worried about those combos, this control style also lets you hold R2 and tap one of the buttons to do an assisted combo. They’re not as crazy as the best players online, but they do a good job of getting you a good turnaround for mashing a button and landing a strike.
Street Fighter 6 goes a step further, though. If you still think you’ll find yourself locking up as your opponent approaches, there’s the Dynamic Control Type. This style basically chooses cool, appropriate moves based on your distance from the opponent and what they’re doing. All you have to do is hit one of the buttons. It will even set up combos for you if you keep tapping away. The only thing you need to do is to hit SOMETHING and your character will start doing useful, neat attacks.
It sounds like stuff that could break the game. There’s limitations, though. Modern Control Type doesn’t give you access to all of your basic moves. You normally have three types of punches and three types of kicks. With Modern, you get a light attack, medium attack, and heavy attack. Could be a kick or a punch. Depends on the character. So, you don’t have access to all of the character’s moves when using this style. This cuts down on the possible ways of hitting your foe, so you don’t have quite as many options. It also simplifies things, too. If you’re nervous about playing online or against live opponents, not having so many attacks to keep track of isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Dynamic Control Type makes Street Fighter 6 fairly unpredictable. I honestly didn’t know what was going to come out when I hit a button. This makes it really hard to plan an approach. You might not care since the AI is going to choose something that’s likely useful, though. It’ll probably be enough that you could really enjoy yourself and get to do some cool moves, though. Might not be the most optimum thing, but at least it will look impressive. The bigger downside is you can’t use it online, though. In local matches against your friends at a party, though? Or just getting together to play for fun. You’re good to go!
That’s honestly why I wanted to like fighting games for so many years before I really started playing them. The characters and moves looked so neat. Doing those moves under pressure was just too hard, though. I’d worry too much about goofing them up. So, I ended up walking away from the genre. I just didn’t see any point in making a big purchase for a game I was genuinely too scared to play. I really wanted to, but my fear held me back.
Modern and Dynamic Control Types really change this up, though. With these systems, Street Fighter 6 lets players have an easier time getting those special move inputs down. There’s less to keep track of. More chance you’ll do the fantastic moves that make the game look so compelling. With Dynamic, you don’t even have to worry about hitting the right buttons. Just tap something. These two styles really open the game up to more players, and go a long ways to making some of those monstrous opponents, in-person and online, seem a but more beatable. I really think it’s going to go a long way towards making people less afraid of the genre.
