Reed C

I'm a SF legacy player. Every Street fighter game has things in it that every high-level competitive player or community hates. Yet we continue to play them because we love Street fighter and there's an excruciating amount of " tolerance" because we love the games even with the flaws or mechanics we hate. (Legitimately every street fighter game has something like this) Street fighter 6 unfortunately goes a step beyond by adding in numerous and sometimes contradicting mechanics that makes the baseline fundamentals of playing a fighting game miserable. Let's take a look at the 4 mechanics this game has. Drive Impact Drive Parry Drive Rush Modern Controls This game has "mechanic" overload, often in lower levels abusing these and higher levels being virtually non-existent. Drive Parry is one of the most situational and least used mechanics due to there being no chip damage on block, meaning your better off blocking for an opening than risking Parry is most matches. Drive Rush is cool for doing big combos and benefits some characters more than others, however this mechanical allows you to do bigger combos and follow ups you normally couldn't. Drive Impact is a single button, armored, crush counter comeback/get off me move that provides a HUGE comeback if landed and also can reset or give space if blocked or not followed up on. It is extremely good when abusing it and extremely good if you barely use it or use it sparingly (if anything it becomes stronger.) Modern Controls, a system that allows all characters to be used with "easy inputs" (ie no dp inputs for a dragon punch, just one button or direction) which allows new players to use the essentials of their characters moves and combos while dealing marginally less damage. This is allowed across the board including Ranked. Pair all of this with the baseline street fighter learning curve and base mechanics and I found everything in this game to be extremely counterproductive and extremely frustrating. Because instead of playing against just a match up with an understanding of the game. I felt myself consistently only learning how to play against the mechanics and most of the matches boiling down to understanding those mechanics and using them as opposed to the actual knowledge of the character or combos or matchup. Oftentimes, going against someone with modern controls I've had to completely change my mindset to how they play in order to beat them because they're not going to play like a classic control character, drive Impact spam and catering their play style to utilize that as much as possible for punishes is infuriating and just a chore to be on the look out for. My issue isn't the fact that I don't know how to play the game or how to counter these things but more on terms with not wanting to deal with these mechanics or continually have to deal with countering them. It makes the game very uninteresting and unentertaining when having to deal with a smorgasbord of handicaps and comeback mechanics that barely have penalties behind them. Overall, I feel I had my fair share of the game and won't be returning to it. In summary, I think this is a very good fighting game that made overcompensations to make this game more approachable for newcomers, which fundamentally is great, but I feel it was too far of a step in a direction that is counterintuitive to the game itself and the franchise.