Even though there is still stun in the game, how rarely stun is triggered means this exhausted state feels like your greatest enemy. If you accidentally use your entire Drive Gauge, you enter a sort of ‘exhaustion’ state that makes characters slower and more vulnerable. There’s a low tick of constant passive restoration, and it also rebuilds as you successfully land attacks. You have to spend its six bars wisely, though, as it’s slow to replenish. For one, it starts full every round, meaning you can rip off Overdrive moves and other powerful techniques from even the first moment of the first round. The Drive Gauge is interesting for a few reasons. The separate, traditional blue super meter now governs supers alone - removing the trade off and making it more likely you’ll see those flashy moves in any given match. The Drive Rush is a special canceling forward dash that can catch an opponent off-guard, and as previously mentioned Overdrive can give any special move a beefed-up version, like old EX moves. The Drive Parry is reminiscent of Street Fighter 3, and can either be timed for a quick parry if you’re skilled enough or held to parry continually at a more heavy meter cost while leaving you vulnerable to throws. The Drive Impact has shades of SF4’s Focus Attack, for instance, able to absorb an opponent’s attack, while a variation called the Drive Reversal channels SF5’s V-Reversal to strike back with a crumpling blow. It’s in these various uses that shades of other SF titles come into play, too. The Drive Gauge governs all other unique mechanics, however, including the powered-up specials previously known as ‘EX’ moves, now called ‘Overdrive’ moves.īecause core actions beyond normal attacks and basic special moves are tied to the Drive Meter, the entire combat system of SF6 revolves around use and management of that meter. While there’s still a Super Meter in the bottom of the screen, that is now strictly used for Super Moves, and can fill up three times, allowing access to three different ultimate moves. The headline new feature in Street Fighter 6’s combat is the ‘Drive System’, though what this really refers to is a range of different mechanics all unified under one new banner - a six-segment meter directly beneath the life bar known as the Drive Gauge. Most crucially, the new mechanics seem to ruminate deeply on the best aspects of Street Fighters 3, 4, and 5 - and then tries to bridge them by mixing new mechanics with elements from all three games. Character designs move the cast forward while retaining what made them truly iconic. And not just from past Street Fighter, but from other brilliant recent fighting games, and from esports titles outside of the fighter sphere.Īt a glance, its presentation is crisp, fresh, and a lot more modern-feeling than the last two 'series' of SF games. You can pretty much instantly tell that lessons have been learned not just from SF5’s failures, but also from its successes. Having played a little over an hour of an early Street Fighter 6 build featuring the first four characters revealed for its roster, I'm thrilled by more or less everything about it. And SF6? Well, despite high expectations, even in the earliest, extremely limited hands-on, it whiffs of a total home run. But now I believe that SF5 will be recontextualized as the game that humbled Capcom and taught hard lessons, ultimately getting us to SF6. In addition, though, it just didn't feel as good momenmt-to-moment as its predecessor, which was such an excellent game that it helped to revive the whole fighting game genre. Mismanaged into a launch where fan expectations were disastrously underestimated, the game never truly recovered. I've always rather liked Street Fighter 5 for what it was and therefore been relatively charitable when writing about it, especially in its later years, but it's fair to say that SF5 was a misfire. And it just might be the story of Street Fighter 6. It's the lesson at the core of the world’s most famous fictional fighters, from Rocky to Ryu: every now and then you need to get your ass kicked, and have a good old fashioned montage, in order to get better.
If there's one lesson that sports stories impart, it's that sometimes you have to get knocked down, or even get knocked out, to get better.
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