Capcom has been so willing to share the ins and outs of Street Fighter 6 for several months, it kind of catches me off guard to realize the full game will be in stores in just a month and a half now. As the launch draws closer, Capcom hosted a showcase event that resulted in a new demo dropping exclusively on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 (XBox and Steam follow on April 26).
This demo serves as the opposite of the Street Fighter 6 closed beta held in December – while the beta sampled a handful of the game’s online features to showcase the Battle Hub, this demo is primer on some of the offline features. This largely revolves around the World Tour Mode that Capcom has put a spotlight on since the game was first revealed.
Capcom’s Street Fighter 6 Showcase stepped in to drop more specific details about a number of features in the game.
The World Tour Mode was shown to have a new environment called Nayshall, which joins Metro City in the locales the player can openly explore. Stat-building elements were discussed, as players can eat food items to recover health and temporarily gain boosts.
Players can level up to earn skill points for a skill tree and also learn from all 18 launch characters to bolster the moves available to their character. Players can then take their custom avatar and participate in the Battle Hub to show off their unique fighting styles.
Capcom also discussed more accessibility features, which includes sound design that provides audio cues for a variety of situations, more tutorials, guides and trials, and an additional control type that features AI assistance.
The single-player arcade mode was shown off, featuring character-based story elements, unlockable illustrations and score leaderboards. A team mode is also available, and more extreme battle features are in play to create crazy fight modes.
Announced during the Showcase, a staple of the early Street Fighter games – seeing the defeated character bruised and battered – sort of makes a return. In certain offline modes, characters get sweaty, get cut and bruised, and show fatigue and wear on their faces and clothing as the battle progresses.
Capcom did acknowledge considerations made to serious competitive players, as the ranked matches now feature a couple of rank-down protection features and those in the rookie level will not lose league points on a loss. Each character is given their own individual rank, which is in play to encourage the use of multiple characters in ranked play.
Those who spend a lot of time online can also participate in clubs, which allows for a custom club emblem and uniform for those enlisted.
Finally, Capcom announced the roadmap for its expansion characters planned over the first year of the game’s release. Rashid from Street Fighter V will debut in the summer, the mysterious A.K.I. joins in the autumn, Ed from Street Fighter V will be added in winter (2024), and legacy character Akuma returns in the spring. It was reported these characters will also be added into the World Tour Mode as they are made available, and these characters are part of the extra content available in the deluxe and ultimate editions of the game.
It honestly doesn’t take much time to breeze through the features included in this demo, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth your time to experience it. The World Tour Mode is placing its bet in attracting casual players to the game, so this is the perfect entry for someone unsure about the game, or even someone who has never touched a fighting game before.
The demo won’t carry the player’s progress into the full game. However, it offers the extensive custom features used to create the base of the player’s avatar, and this base appearance can be transferred over to Street Fighter 6.
The mode starts off with the player joining Luke at the Buckler organization, and there they can take part in tutorials if they wish, and get introduced to the character Bosch. Most of the game’s action takes place in a downtown hub of Metro City, and there is actually a lot to taken in through this slice of the city.
Even though the game’s feature set is limited in the demo, the city looks great, and it is lively thanks to a number of people going about their day. There are a number of nods to Capcom games in Metro City, with the most surprising being a paved walkway that serves as a timeline of games released that even loosely tie into the Street Fighter universe. These specifically mention Ring of Destruction, Final Fight Revenge, Red Earth, Plasma Sword and Tech Romancer, so I guess this considers crossover games and loose bits of lore connecting the games together.
The entry point of the World Tour Mode forces players into the “modern” control scheme, but I found this to be fine for what the demo offers. Being the first hub of the mode, there aren’t exactly a lot of powerful fighters to match up with, so the fights can be finished quickly.
I do enjoy how absurd the premise is here. Most of the people in the hub have options to talk or fight, so the player wanders around Metro City and can pick fights with any manner of person by pressing the square button. I suppose the storyline tries to square this away by stating Metro City had long been controlled by the Mad Gear gang and citizens toughened up to defend themselves.
I played on the PlayStation 5 format, and I was pleased at how seamless the transition to fighting was. When you trigger a battle, there is a short animation of the characters stancing up, and there is a brief flourish showing the characters’ names, and then the camera swings around to the fight that starts almost immediately. The quick pace should real help the game not feel like a “grind” when players have everything accessible in the full game.
Much like a role-playing game, players will find the characters they can fight range in stats and abilities. The player will find themselves with low stats to begin with, and likewise, a level one opponent will have virtually no health or abilities in combat. Things start to change a little, though, when the player encounters opponents in the area of level 10.
When you boil it down, this demo is essentially just the tutorial for the mode as it acclimates the player to fighting, navigating the city, talking to people and establishing a few of the mode’s basic mechanics and story elements. Once you are in the middle of a fight, it operates just you would expect from a Street Fighter game.
However, the player can pause the fight and use items, and this demo introduces the player to a food truck and clothing store. I’d have to imagine these features become much more fleshed out in the full version of the game, so it will be interesting to see exactly how much the player will be able to customize.
There was one feature I did not expect, and it honestly has me quite excited at its potential. At one point in the demo, the player and Bosch are rushed by aggressive opponents, and it rolls into a two-versus-two battle – a dramatic battle!
I absolutely loved this mode in the Street Fighter Alpha games, and it is a household staple for us in Ultra Street Fighter II. The simple command mode and dramatic battle feature in Ultra Street Fighter II is how my kids found their way into enjoying fighting games, so, yes, these accessibility features do work in the games’ favor.
Maybe it’s too much to ask that the dramatic battle feature be openly accessible to four-player gameplay in the final product, but it’s got my hopes up. The thought of multiplayer dramatic battle mixed with the extreme battle toggles would be amazing for offline session gatherings.
You can linger around in Metro City, but there are only a handful of missions that can be completed before the story progression is cut off and the demo ends.
I would call the demo brief, but I believe this sample amply did its job. It shows how serious Capcom has taken efforts to make the game more appealing to a wider audience, it displays how much potential this game mode has and, most importantly, it has me even more excited for the game’s release. I figured World Tour Mode would be interesting to check out, but this quick taste of the mode really has my brain kicking around how a fleshed-out experience will be.
Outside of the World Tour Mode, this demo has brief samples of other items the player can check out while offline. While only Ryu and Luke are selectable, players can fight in a standard versus mode, but there is also a sampling of the extreme battles. In this demo, the extreme battle settings toggle a win condition of knocking the opponent down five times to win a round, but a secondary toggle also triggers a bull running in from the side of the stage to trample any players who are not paying attention.
Lastly, players can also participate in the tutorials that were introduced in the beta version. This has Ryu giving players the rundown of the basics, but this also includes the new drive mechanics introduced in Street Fighter 6, so these sections at the least are worth checking out.
When it comes to this free downloadable demo, I’ll get the joke out of the way here: My biggest complaint is that the arcade cabinets featuring classic Capcom games aren’t included in this sampling of the game.
In seriousness, though, each time Capcom has something new to share about Street Fighter 6, I anticipate the release of the game even more. That’s how promoting is supposed to work, so mission accomplished.
At this point, the only thing that has largely been withheld from players, outside of maybe for those being able to play at specific events or trade shows, is having access to the full range of the game’s characters. I highly recommend checking out this demo, but it does revolve entirely around Ryu and more specifically Luke.
Still, Capcom has seemingly been very proud of introducing this World Tour Mode, and this glimpse of the mode makes it appear this has been warranted. I’m not sure if we’ll see a final beta period before development of the game wraps up, but we’ll finally see how all of Street Fighter 6’s game offerings tie together on June 2.
GemuBaka 
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