Mastodawn

Street Fighter 6’s World Tour sucks

I dropped Street Fighter 6 some time ago when I was done with doing any dailies or weeklies in a game. It turned playing anything into a chore, into work that I needed to do at home. It kicked off a small avalanche, where I effectively quit all the other games that had the same, dull shit. However, I finished the World Tour well before that and had a few good match Online, where I realized how awful the World Tour is.

Its core issue is that it gimps the play it tries to teach the player. World Tour’s theme is that its just the first steps the player goes through before hitting online modes to fight others who went through the same path. Yet, it doesn’t work.

World Tour’s level system, items, and incredible number of non-standard fight scenarios do nothing to properly teach the player to play the game proper. The necessary tutorial sequences don’t help any in this, they’re quickly passed. The few times the game tries to test the player’s knowledge on the systems is rare. In hard fights, you can throw in Life recovering items to get back, completely decimating the need to learn the game’s systems in proper manner. The unique character every player does suffers from this, being an amalgamation of moves, thus being outside the standard table of match-ups. The game doesn’t exactly play with this itself, as presenting NPCs with existing move sets doesn’t make you learn which character works better against who. Sure, you get some idea how a certain move set works, but if the player character is a mish-mash of move sets rather than dedicated to one, you’re getting a garbage lesson.

This carries to the non-standard NPCs, which do things like rolling on the ground to avoid attacks. This is King of Fighters stuff, not Street Fighter. These non-standard fights are constant, taking away from the steady progression that World Tour tries to be in learning the game. Its structure fails its intended purpose.

Soul Calibur and Soul Calibur II did this better in their story modes. All the characters act and move as they are in-game. There are standard and non-standard stages with number of stages with specific challenges. However, the standard method of fighting doesn’t change, keeping a steady flow uprising challenges. Some non-standard stages requires the player to defeat the enemy with a Ring Out or in certain manner, or within a time limit via Poisoning or some such. They don’t take away from the core mechanics of the game, as these hammer a certain element of the mechanics into the player in an active manner, which can then be taken into the next stage and into VS mode.

World Tour isn’t like this, as it plays as if everything is non-standard.

I would respect the mode more if the whole game, at its core, would’ve been all about the custom fighter. Remove the standard roster of fighters, have the player fight with their own unique character against other players. Build whole new moves from some kind of tech three you have to unlock in World Mode by training, but make the decisions matter in some manner, e.g. training to certain kind of direction locks other types moves out. Being a fast aerial combatant would keep you from being a rhino on the ground, or specializing in projectiles that have fire attributed to them prevents from having electricity. Because there is no real limits in making your own character, outside how many moves you can slot in, players either end up making joke sets or try to optimize through some meta. With proper limitations, and truckloads of moves only the player character would have access to, we’d have some actual value in building that character.

All this is moot as you can’t use your own character in tournaments, only the standard roster. Why put the time and effort in making the character, if official play doesn’t allow its usage? Sure, you can fuck around in limited online modes and use your character there, but nobody even remotely serious about playing the game are playing with custom characters. It’s inane to have a mode that steers away from the standard play. The occasional break from it as form of specific challenges would have been a much better option.

World Tour mode would’ve been better if you could’ve fought other players around the Tour’s world the same way you can challenge easy NPCs rather than be restricted to the lobbies. As much as it tries to be a lived in, somewhat realistic world, it lacks proper player-to-player interaction and thus dooms it an empty playground to mess with NPCs. Once you’ve finished the basic storyline, there’s no reason to go back to World Tour to unlock whatever you missed. It’s not worth it in the end.

The story itself is very, very basic. You can tell from the start that the player character is some kind of prodigy in the eyes of the NPCs and the rival will end up being used by the Final Boss through his thirst for strength. This is to contrast the player’s supposedly hard journey to gain more levels and moves. Nothing the story reveals about the characters or the world is new or particularly well written. It has occasional clever writing here and there, but in the grand scheme of Street Fighter story it doesn’t really move things forward. You can snicker at the notion of fighting games and their stories, but when the game puts it into the limelight I do take whatever happened just as seriously as any other. Then again, we can disregard all the previous games from the word Go, as Capcom has a certain particular stance with game continuities; there isn’t one.

Back when Udon got license for Street Fighter comics, they were told that Street Fighter continuity is more or less segmented to their own. Meaning, SFIII is a sequel to a version of SFII, but in idea rather than in canon. The same applies to Mega Man games, where the X series follows the Classic series, but how and why is not important as there is no canon connection between the two outside the idea of one preceding and succeeding the other. In modern terms, considering each SF game their own continuity or alternative dimension from each other is applicable. For Mega Man X, you at one point you skipped from X5 to the Legends series, but then we got X6, X7, X8, Command Mission and all of Zero and ZX that break timeline to some extent. There series are in-series with each other in idea, but as Capcom used to put this, not in practice. This is why Rival Schools isn’t part of the Street Fighter continuity. No, guest characters don’t count. Final Fight is the exception, as it was specifically designed and intended to follow the original Street Fighter.

Continuity really isn’t worth going deep into, as SF games really follow up each other. SF6 is no exception, effectively disregarding its predecessors’ events and works as a soft-reboot of the series. Getting invested in the game’s plot thus isn’t worth it, as the future Street Fighter 7 most likely won’t follow SF6‘s story or setting. It really can’t, as the story is about the player character first and foremost and has a definitive ending. Ken becoming an bum to escape terrorist accusations really didn’t play much role in the game in the end.

World Tour is a waste effort. It has a potential to tell a unique story, but it ends up telling a very safe story and re-using Psycho Power as the Big Bad Guy’s gimmick yet again. It pays some lip service in training the player how to play the game, but undermines it with a Role-Playing Levelling system, Items, and constant battles that break the VS mode’s rules. Because of this, World Tour is necessarily unbalanced and encourages disregarding playing the game in a more skillful and proper manner. Saying Git Gud doesn’t really work the game itself sweeps the rug from under you and isn’t built to support itself.

I would’ve loved World Tour if it had player-to-player interaction, and concentrated on building the player skill with the proper roster rather than with a Build-A-Character. Its story serves its purpose as a framing device for the player’s growth in strength, but its predictable nature makes it a sad fare. There is so much potential in a Street Fighter World Tour, but somehow it always comes short in one way or another. Street Fighter 6 has a great fighting system, but the game has a split personality as a whole due to World Tour and Tournament Versus not meeting with each other in middle, or having a wholesale emphasize on one or the other.

#StreetFighter6 #WorldTourMode