Over the last few days, Capcom released a Street Fighter 6 trailer. Almost immediately after, a bunch of character design, and probably the majority of the launch roster was "leaked." I say "leaked" in scare quotes, because both Capcom's and the access media's reaction to the "leaks" don't seem consistent with a leak, but rather with a planned promotional stunt. That's obviously very circumstantial, but I think it's more likely. We'll see. Maybe they'll admit to it down the line. In any case, the leaks have been confirmed, pretty much, by Capcom themselves as being real, and they did so without any hint of regret or even "aw, shucks." I think we can count on them. And the access media would never have posted the details of, or even talked about, the leaks if they were genuine leaks that Capcom wanted to suppress in any way. The only other explanation, and I think it's less likely, is that Capcom just decided to roll with the leak and accept it immediately, and even use it promotionally the best that they could. In my experience, there's hardly a company in existence with judgement that good or that quick, and Capcom themselves have demonstrated repeatedly that they don't have it. I still think the "leak" was a planned promotional supplement to the official trailer is the most likely explanation.
In any case, before I talk about the content that we now know of for SF6, let me give a real quick summary of each of the SF subseries, how they were supported, and what they mean in relation to the new material. This will give us some context. I'll even hit SF1, even though it's not very relevant anymore.
Street Fighter [1] The first Street Fighter game, released in 1987, set the stage for what the game series would be in terms of 1x1 martial arts competitions and traveling around the world. It also introduced the main characters, Ryu and Ken--initial main antagonist Sagat, as well as their basic special moves, like dragon punch, fireball and hurricane kick.
Street Fighter II However, it wasn't really until the release of Street Fighter II in 1991 that the series hit high gear. I'll only briefly mention this, because it's kind of obvious by now, but Street Fighter II's building off of the foundation of SF1 is what defined the entire fighting game genre. Multiple characters, with multiple playstyles, an arcade ladder through a progression of characters, and then bosses (or at least a boss. Street Fighter II has three sub bosses, and later in its life-cycle, a secret extra boss too), snappy trash talk between matches, and the brief story endings that actually gave each character some... well, some character development and personality other than just as a collection of moves or as a tactical set of options. SFII was obviously a huge hit; it's credited with, like I said, creating the fighting game genre almost overnight, with saving the arcade business model for at least a few more years, and it sold over 6 million copies on the SNES alone during the 90s. By any standard whatsoever, SFII was a significant success.
While iterative patches and additions seem to be more closely associated with computer games at the time, which you would buy and then also buy expansion packs and expect patches of broken things, SFII tried to pioneer a similar strategy in arcades, releasing iterative updates to the game, starting with Champion Edition which added a second color so you could play two player matches with the same character, as well as making the four bosses playable, increasing the available character selection count by 50%. I suspect an unintended side effect of this was the paradigm at Capcom that they didn't have to get it right the first time; every Street Fighter subseries afterwards, except IV, seemed to have varying degrees of botchedness to their roll-out.
Street Fighter Alpha You'd expect SFIII to follow SFII, but actually it didn't. The Street Fighter Alpha series followed SFII, on the same hardware as the latest SFII iterations, and in the same style as new (at the time) comic book style or anime-like games such as Darkstalkers and X-Men and Marvel Superheroes, which Capcom also made as SF-like fighting games starting in the mid-90s. The first Alpha game was released in 1995. Although super moves had technically debuted (at least on Capcom games; SNK games had developed them first) in Super Street Fighter II Turbo, the Alpha games made them more integral to the experience and were built around the concept that expected you'd use them. A "cool play budget" of sorts was created wherein you'd charge up your super meter, and then spend it on either alpha counters or super moves, depending on what you thought you needed and what made for a cooler play at the time. The first game in the series was pretty bare-bones, but Street Fighter Alpha 2 was meant to "replace" that in the canon, and it perfected the mechanics as well as bulked out the character select roster to an acceptable level. (It also had greatly improved stages.) Street Fighter Alpha 3 added a number of other characters, and did a fairly radical tear-up of many of the Alpha 2 mechanics. Some fans consider this a step-backwards, as they quite enjoyed the Alpha 2 gameplay, while other fans (myself included) consider Alpha 3 as by far the best of the Alpha subseries and possibly the best of the entire Street Fighter series, at least to date when it was new. (Curiously, many people also consider Capcom vs SNK 2 one of the best games of this general era, and it played very similarly to SFA3.)
Another interesting aside is that the Alpha series, which was a prequel to Street Fighter II, brought in a number of both Street Fighter I characters and Final Fight characters, as well as a number of stages that represent Final Fights setting of Metro City, clearly establishing that both games take place in the same continuity. It also had a number of unique new characters that were Alpha only characters added, like Karin or R. Mika, for instance.
Street Fighter EX in 1996, game company Arika, under license from Capcom, created some 3-D polygon games for the arcade, but especially geared towards porting to the PS1, which was the most popular game console in the world at the time (actually, that's still true today.) Frankly, I think the polygon-based fighters from this era are really ugly and haven't aged well, but SFEX never seemed to really catch on at all, when games like Virtua Fighter, Tekken and Soul Edge did. But even those are ugly in their early iterations. This is probably best viewed as a strange dead-end spin-off rather than a part of the series overall. The characters that were unique to the EX series do not belong to Capcom anymore, and have popped up more recently in Arika-produced games like Fighting EX Layer.
Crossover Titles In 1996, Capcom also released X-men vs Street Fighter, which combined sprites from the X-men game with those from the Alpha games, but which ramped up "superhero-like" mechanics, including much flashier super moves, super jumps, and character tag-teams. This series, or perhaps family of related series, continued for some time and likely distracted Capcom from its core Street Fighter titles. There were four games in a vs. Marvel crossover titles, and two in a vs SNK series. While the vs SNK titles retained a very Street Fighter like feel, tone and roster of characters, with Capcom vs SNK 2 in particular playing very much like Street Fighter Alpha 3 in many ways but with better graphics and many redrawn sprites, the vs Marvel games always had a very different feel and honestly gradually migrated away from Street Fighter in many ways, instead adding tons of characters from other Capcom games.
This sub series, after lying fallow for the better part of a decade, was rebooted after the successful launch of SFIV, including three more Marvel games, vs. Tekken games, and more. Of course, by now, character crossovers are pretty commonplace. Ryu appeared in Super Smash Brothers. Terry Bogard seems to be making the rounds all over the place, appearing in Fighting EX Layer, another Super Smash Brothers iteration, and more. There's even a girl version of Terry who popped up in weird spin-off SNK game.
Street Fighter III Talk about a botched launch! In 1997, Capcom put out the first Street Fighter III game. In a YouTube video I made a year or two ago, I pointed out that while Street Fighter II sold over 2 million copies to home consoles, SFIII only sold 100,000 across its home console release (which was limited to the Dreamcast.) It has since, especially in its third iteration, Third Strike, had a bit of a renaissance, selling in decent (although unknown) numbers since in compilations and in other "retro" guises, and it has some fans, certainly. I do not however, believe that it has pulled in casuals; I think the community of fans around Third Strike are more competitive and online players, and I think the numbers are still woefully behind what II and IV sold. There's a number of reasons for III's relative failure: 1) crappy characters that nobody liked, and the elimination of almost all classic characters. Even in Third Strike, we only had four legacy characters, and of the III unique characters, only a few have managed to stand out as keepers from all three iterations of the game: Dudley, maybe Yun and Yang, and maybe Elena and Makoto and Ibuki. 2) the villain/boss was absurd, and is nothing at all like the classic iconic-ness of M. Bison. True; M. Bison has been used enough that he needs to be retired, but Gill was a joke. 3) the game play was quite technical and focused on fundamentals relative to Alpha 3. While I can understand why its fans think this is a good thing, even they, if they're honest, have to admit that that's poison to casuals and broad appeal. One of the greatest features of SFII was that anyone could sit down and play it and do... OK, at least, even with no experience at all. Capcom focusing on the hyper-fan and the competitive "fighting games community" is a major mistake. I've seen guys make the sensible point that using trophies as proxy for data, we can infer that ~85-90% of people who've bought the game do not play any online or competitive content. That was a vast mistake on the part of Capcom to assume that that's where the customers were, and they've made that mistake more than once (see below.) 4) The look and feel of the game is very dated. Now, personally, I like 2-D animation, and I'm glad to see that it's made a come-back. There's a kind of timeless quality to good animated 2-D games that polygon 3-D games (especially from the mid to late 90s and early 00s) simply do not have. Nowadays Tekken 2 or 3 looks incredibly dated, while Streets of Rage 4, which is even more cartoony than SFIII, admittedly, looks amazing, but Streets of Rage could, with a little bit more pixelation, have been made 25 years ago. I think there's now an appreciation of some of what SFIII did visually, although at the time, I think it was under-rated and under-appreciated. Certainly by games journalists and professional reviewers, if not necessarily by the fans. But the fans probably did too (I think Tekken leapt to the top of the popularity charts for the genre because of its accessibility to new players more than its graphics, though.) But, 5) presentation-wise the rest of SFIII isn't very good either. The colors aren't nearly as bright and often look strangely muted or grayed out and the music is absolutely terrible. Not only did it sound terribly dated almost as soon as it was released, but it only appealed to a niche market even in the mid/late 90s.
To me, the poster child of the mistakes of this sub-series is the parry. While there's nothing wrong with the idea on its face, the reality is that there was a fairly steep learning curve to figuring out how to be any good with a parry, and it was designed to be a move the converted fights of the more traditional mold into something that resembled a fast-paced chess match. Again, I can see why people who love it do so, but I don't know if the people who love it can see how it reduced the gameplay to something that only a relatively tiny niche were ever going to find very intriguing. But it did. And both Capcom and this niche exist sometimes in a bit of an echo chamber, where Capcom caters to that niche, and only hears their voices, and then wonders why the vast majority of their would-be customers are getting turned off and put off.
I'm very concerned that with SFV and (possibly) SFVI, Capcom seems to be reliving the same mistakes that they made with SFIII. With SFV, they kinda/sorta fixed it, but also not really.
Street Fighter IV After SF3 had a botched launch, the Marvel license expired so the popular Marvel vs games had to end, and SNK went bankrupt so that the SNK vs games also had to end, Capcom seemed to put very little effort or attention into fighting games, which of course meant that their early 00s efforts after those series were poorly received because they were poorly made. The entire genre, at least with Capcom, went dormant for a number of years until one passionate middle management employee's personal crusade came true and he was put in charge of developing a sequel. This was 2008's SFIV, which is widely credited with reigniting the entire genre again. Coming out on the PS3/XBox 360 generation, the games used 3-D models (much improved from the early Tekken or Virtua Fighter days) but with a very traditional 2-D Street Fighter-esque gameplay. SFIV eschewed the overly technical gameplay of SFIII and feels much more like a spiritual successor to the Alpha series, although I don't mean to imply that it played exactly like them, of course. In addition to many other improvements, it had pretty cool remixed "techno" versions of classic musical themes, it had much more colorful and "Streets of Rage 4" like looks to the characters and their stages, there were quite flashy additions to the special and super moves to make them really look like they had some weight, but not the crazy spastic feel of the Marvel vs. games. Some of this was very stylized, like the appearance of brush ink-strokes or splashes in the air briefly when certain moves are performed. And the roster! Admittedly, because I missed the PS3/Xbox 360 generation, I only picked this game up relatively late when it was on Steam with almost the final update already available, so I've only known it with a roster in the mid-40s or more, but even at launch, it had a decent amount of characters available. Many characters were new to this iteration, and while those were pretty hit and miss (El Fuerte and Rufus being the biggest misses; Juri and C. Viper being probably the biggest hits--unless you count the Oni and Evil Ryu versions from this game, which were significantly different than what we'd seen before), and I think every iteration needs to stretch out beyond the classics and try to add something new.
In short, SFIV was familiar to old hands, and yet fresh and new. It was accessible to new players as well as offering depth to returning players. It was everything a SF game should be, and its sales numbers attest to that. It was a resounding success, it kicked off an entirely new generation of fighting games in its wake, both within and without Capcom. As far as I'm concerned, it's the best SF game of the entire series.
Street Fighter V Even with the best of intentions a launch can be botched. 2016's SFV was a game that seems to have been botched not because Capcom had a bunch of bad ideas (although it did have some) but because they simply weren't able to meet their timeline. SFV launched without any real single player content, with an impoverished roster, and with a gameplay that was more of a spiritual successor to SFIII than to Alpha or IV. Even now, I feel like it gets too caught up in wondering what the "fighting game community" is doing while forgetting that roughly 85-90% of sales go to people who don't belong to any such community. With a defensive "watch your opponent for an opening" flat gameplay that's more technical than IV, while being different yet again from III, it took many iterations and several years before Capcom had a game that would have any appeal to the big market of SFIV players, and by that point, they'd probably already lost most of them. As they say, you only get one chance to make a first impression, and three years later is way beyond that chance.
In addition to a botched launch with almost no meaningful content and a focus on only a small niche of their potential market, SFV had other problems as well. The migration of console generations should have ushered in a much better-looking product, and yet in most respects, the game is considerably uglier than its predecessor. Some of this is technical; extremely plastic-looking models and really bad clipping and janking issues with hair and clothing in particular, but most of it was simply art direction and style. The characters looked like strange clay-shaped caricatures or cartoon characters rather than the rather attractive and cool looking comic-bookish look at SFIV had had. Some of the designs almost looked like the designers hated the character and hoped to sink him into obscurity (Ken, Alex, Akuma, etc.) They also rolled out, although later than it should have been rolled out, a fairly lengthy story mode, and while the idea was actually a really good one, the dialogue, plots and "acting" were so stupid as to be embarrassing, and the game focused on characters that often were not fan favorites and yet we were subjected to long, long stretches of being exposed to them. I've seen enough of Karin after a few playthroughs to last me a lifetime.
SFV also significantly tweaked the roster, and some popular characters never made a reappearance, while other new characters were questionable additions, at best (F.A.N.G. being the most absurdly egregious here.)
While I kinda sorta made my peace with SFV (as I did with SFIII) after a time, it's not my favorite SF by a long shot, and I consider it mostly a very rough and ill-advised step backwards from SFIV.
Street Fighter VI It's too early to see what Street Fighter VI will be like, although just based on my gut-feel from watching the trailer video, I'd say that it looks more like SFIV, including using stylized "paint" spray which looks a lot like the ink from SFIV. The "drive engine" subsystem may or may not be too complicated, and looks to add a variety of stuff that you can do, including bringing back parrying in a different form. Because of this, some others have thought it looked an awful lot like SFIII, which I hope is not to be the case, because if they can't pull in casuals and make the game accessible to the non-hardcore "fighting game community" then it's going to flop harder than SFV did.
There seems to be some belief that maybe a good portion of the game takes place within Metro City (instead of all over the world, as they usually have been) although this is kind of speculative and may not be true. It does seem to finally take place chronologically after SFIII, and makes no reference to Gill or any of his ridiculous group, or to Bison and Shadaloo, which has been defeated at least three times now, and it'd be nice if they stayed defeated for a while. Some "leaked" (see above) artwork purports to show most of the launch roster. It is pretty heavy on the original World Warriors—none of the bosses are there, but otherwise the entire group makes a return. Although they have new, improved looks for the most part; reminiscent of their original look in many cases, but improved. Ryu, for example, takes after his popular "hot Ryu" alternate costume, and Ken looks like he's trying to imitate Terry Bogard.
Dhalsim also looks older (although he did in SFV too) and Chun-Li looks... maybe not older, but more mature, if that makes sense, while the rest of them seem to mostly just be sporting costume changes. Given that starting with IV, alternate costumes have been commonplace, that's not so shocking anymore at this point.
The next wave is a collection of classic characters, but not quite as classic as the original eight world warriors as well as some newer characters that seem to have been among the possible keepers from IV and V. As you can see, it includes Cammy, Dee Jay, Rashid, Juri, Ed and Akuma. Cammy's redesign is pretty cool, while Akuma's seems to undo the damage done by "dandelion" SFV Akuma while still keeping true to the spirit of that hairier redesign. I don't know how popular Rashid really is, but I think because the Middle East is a growing market for this kind of game, they probably feel they need him for regional appeal. I'm sure he's popular in Arabian countries, at least, even if I don't really see the appeal in him.
Dee Jay looks a little bit insane, but otherwise, this isn't a bad collection of redesigns.
This last group is the collection (so far) of new characters, although the first one, Luke, was actually released recently as a season 6 character for SFV, although it was clear even then that it was a "pull-ahead" sneak peak at SFVI character.
After Luke we have the absolutely masculine unit Marisa, from Italy, which might be an OK design if it were a man, but is super off-putting as a woman, Jamie from Hong Kong, which looks like a slightly "streeted up" remix of the Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves character Gato, Mimi from France, who has very strange pink hair with a short cut but insane sideburns, who looks like a modern bizarre King of Fighters character more than a more down-to-earth Street Fighter character. Lilly is a little Mexican girl, and for some reason, going back to T. Hawk, Capcom thinks that Mexicans are identical to American Injuns. Mysterious and aristocratic-looking JP is from Russia (as well as somewhere else based on the mystery flag), Kimberly, the little black girl with an old-fashioned Walkman, who on first glance looks like she's likely to be very annoying, but I'll withhold final judgement for the time being. If Capcom were an American company, I'd suggest that she's the super annoying "diversity" inclusion that they'll really drop the ball on designing and then call the fans racist when they don't like her, but being a Japanese company, I have no idea what to make of her. Probably a Japanese interpretation of what American "street" culture is like, so highly caricaturized. A.K.I. is the last one, and allegedly she's Chinese. If so, the best thing I can say about her so far is that at least she's not F.A.N.G.
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