I imagine there are some more traditional players that might cringe at the thought, but Capcom is being deliberate about what they modernize versus fixing what’s not broken. The mantra of “ Street Fighter 6 should be more modern” seems to permeate all aspects of the game’s development. “Part of that is making things like match intros more interesting and exciting.” “We wanted our audience to know that Street Fighter 6 is a modern game with modern sensibilities,” Simmons said. Street Fighter Senior Brand Manager Jaclyn Simmons explained that Director Takayuki Nakayama and Producer Shuhei Matsumoto made it a priority to really bring those aspects up. To some extent, that feel is aided by the visual flairs that litter the screen before, during, and after a match. It feels right in a way not every game - or even every Street Fighter - does. In my experience with this demo, Street Fighter 6 is one of those games. But there are some games where you just touch them and know they feel correct. There’s an artistry to making a game feel good - one everyone thinks is a science, something that can just be tuned and replicated with known values, and that a failure to do so is a dereliction of game development. I did not expect to be quite so blown away once I finally did play it. Strike two was that the Street Fighter 6 demo did not feature some of the game’s more exciting features, like that new lobby system or the single-player world tour mode that the State of Play trailer made so much ado about.

I mean, that’s kind of on me, but that was unfortunately strike one.

To begin with, when I made an appointment for a secret Capcom game at Summer Game Fest, I kind of expected it to be Resident Evil 4. You can’t really expect to be disappointed, I suppose, but the game had a number of things working against it from the outset. I approached Street Fighter 6 this weekend expecting to be disappointed.

Street fighter 6 hands