All things considered, Street Fighter 5 had an excellent roster to begin with. There was the obvious batch of Street Fighter 2 characters taking up half the roster, then a mix of great newcomers (and FANG, who stunk) plus four classic fighters who hadn’t been in a non-crossover game since Street Fighter Alpha 3 launched eighteen years prior in 1998. But where Street Fighter 5 really sang was in its DLC lineups.
Year One buffed the roster out with characters from Street Fighter 3 (two of whom hadn’t been seen since the late ‘90s either), Street Fighter 4, and brought those last Street Fighter 2 stragglers. Year Two, on the other hand, took the unprecedented move of making five of the six characters completely new, and Capcom cooked with Menat, Kolin, and Ed. The final three seasons mainly brought back fighters who appeared in Street Fighter 4 while introducing some newcomers (including a wild Rival Schools crossover) a couple of times a season, but overall Street Fighter 5’s DLC took it from a mid fighting game to having arguably the best roster in the series.
But Street Fighter 5 isn’t anywhere near as good as Street Fighter 6. Capcom’s latest effort is so good I’m willing to call it the greatest fighting game ever made. And despite that, the roster is kind of terrible. In fact, I was already complaining about it a year before the game even released.
The World Warriors (Again)
Aside from the (admittedly excellent) batch of newcomers, every character in Street Fighter 6 – barring Street Fighter 2’s Dee Jay – had appeared in Street Fighter 5. Not only that, but aside from Juri (who is the worst), the returning roster was entirely from Street Fighter 2. But of course there’s always DLC to buff up the roster; that’s what made Street Fighter 5 shine in the end.
Except the first year of the game only served to follow the same mistake as the core roster. There was the newcomer AKI with three characters who were in Street Fighter 5, including a Street Fighter 2 character, Akuma, who has become the series’ ‘make him DLC, it’ll sell’ character from the looks of things.
Not only that, but DLC season passes now only feature four characters a year as opposed to the six of Street Fighter 5’s. Granted, each character does come with an expansion of the game’s single-player World Tour mode, but it means if you’re not keen on any of the four new fighters (like I was with Year One), you’re out of luck until next June rolls around.
Which brings us to Year Two, where Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui from Fatal Fury will be joining the game alongside Street Fighter 3’s Elena and the return of M.Bison. I have some issues with the latter from a lore standpoint, but that’s for another time. Not only has Capcom finally added a character from Street Fighter 3, but guest characters are being brought into the series for the first time ever.
Terry Bogard Joins The Party
Full disclosure, I’m a massive Terry Bogard mark. He was a character I’ve wanted in Street Fighter since FGC crossovers popped off in the late 2010s, and his appearance in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the highlight of that game’s DLC for me. So Street Fighter 6 finally added a character I was excited to see and gave Street Fighter 3 some representation. All is well, right?
Well, no. I love Fatal Fury; I think these new additions are incredible, with Terry reigniting my love of the game. But what about people who don’t really care for Fatal Fury? Now they’re in a situation where at least two characters for the next year offer nothing to them. This would be less of an issue in the Street Fighter 5 era where you got six fighters a year, but now that’s half of the Season Pass.
Plus, Capcom Producer Shuhei Matsumoto recently said he wants to see more guest fighters later down the line. Not that I imagine two guests per season will be a standard (especially since there are no newcomers this season otherwise), it means we could run into this same situation again and again.
Expecting Capcom to suddenly start pumping out two extra fighters a year on top of the World Tour content is unreasonable, so the only real solution I can think of is to make more obscure DLC picks as much as it can. But people want to see Sagat, Sakura, and other popular faces return too. It starts to feel like there’s no winning.
You Look Ridiculous
Another area where Capcom cooked with Street Fighter 5 was the character costumes. While a tad pricey, there was a steady stream of different looks for the fighters, with each DLC fighter launching with four off the bat. It’s been a year and a half since Street Fighter 6 launched, and Capcom has offered just one batch of extra costumes for each character in that time, after each character came with two at launch.
Street Fighter 6 has so many cool costumes. Geese Howard, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Jon Talbain from Darkstalkers – it absolutely rocks. Except these are all costumes for your Avatar fighter… who you aren’t going to be seeing much of, outside of the World Tour story mode… which you probably beat in a few sittings at launch.
With how fantastic the character models look in Street Fighter 6, the lack of extra costumes feels like a massive missed opportunity. I was more than happy to drop money on an (even more overpriced) costume for Zangief because it looked incredible. If Terry Bogard’s Garou outfit hadn’t been included in the Season Pass, I know for a fact that I’d be buying it day one. There’s an audience here for these extra costumes to take into the main mode of the game, so it’s disappointing to see so much go into the cosmetics for what is, at its core, a side activity.
Street Fighter 6 is still the best fighting game on the market right now, and it’s doing a hell of a lot better than Tekken at its DLC output. But it could be so much more if Capcom focused its efforts in other places. Yes, I’m still salty about the lack of Alex two and a half years later; why do you ask?
- Top Critic Rating:92/100
