Street Fighter 6 All Characters Reviewed Part 2

Part 3 of a series and part 2 of another and part 5 of the Roger Loses his Mind arc

Read Part 1 here

Read Part 2 here

Diamonds are Still Forever

I’ll be giving my thoughts on each character overall, talk about how they play and how easy or hard it was to get to Diamond with them. The Creature will make an appearance, too, with the patented Creature Rating, which rates how much control The Creature exerts over you when you play them.

Dhalsim

I’m not going to mince words. Dhalsim is the worst character in Street Fighter 6. By a mile. A lot of tier lists put him in low tier along with Jamie, Marissa and Lilly, but there’s no way I can say they’re on the same level. Dhalsim is barely playing Street Fighter 6. He’s a keep-away character in a game where getting in your opponent’s face is as easy as pressing two buttons. He has to play meticulously to keep control of neutral, and if he loses one interaction, the match swings wildly against his favor. He doesn’t have a way to keep people off other than by using Drive Reversal, which is awful. His only invincible reversal is his level 2 super, and even that is janky and weird, since it hits above him.

The system mechanics don’t do him any favors, either. He has no real use for drive rush. His drive rush is the slowest in the game, and it covers about an inch of distance. Not to mention the fact that he wants to be as far from his opponent as possible, so why would he want to run in, especially when it costs him Drive meter, which is the resource he needs to use Drive Reversal and keep people off him. His whole point is to stay back and poke using his long limbs, but most of his limb attacks can be countered with Drive Impact, which leads to him eating a full combo and losing control of the match. Say what you will about Jamie and Marissa. Sure, they’re not great, but at least they can play the game.

Having said all that, you’d think I hate the character, but I kind of like playing him. There’s something really engaging about taking very measured, deliberate strikes at the opponent. Playing a low-tier is always a challenge, too. Not always a fun challenge, but it makes you think, at least. It’s like trying to do a crossword in a language you don’t speak. It also gave me a lot of time to think about how bad this character was, and I spent a lot of time with him, since I had to play a lot of matches with him.

He was the most difficult character to rank up. He was the only one that landed in Gold after doing his placement matches. Trying to play a slow, patient zoner online is a death sentence. Any stray hit is met with a drive impact, if I miss a single anti-air I have to deal with a crazed maniac mashing on me. Everyone was constantly drive-rushing into me. It was impossible to get anyone to respect my pressure. I had to sit down and really practice. I watched multiple guides and learned how to use every one of Dhalsim’s buttons, so I would know what I could throw out at what range. If I couldn’t write a 300-word essay explaining why I pressed a particular button, I wouldn’t press it. I had to play at a Master level just to get a few wins out of some Gold players. After some horrifying losses and a couple of guides later, I had gotten okay at Dhalsim and started winning.

The thing that helps out the most with this character is that no one plays him, so there’s a 90% chance that the person you’re fighting doesn’t have a clue what to do against you. You can go for cheesy set ups and knowledge checks and get a few cheap wins.

He’s a character that needs a ton of knowledge to use, he has difficult and very situational combos, alright damage and twenty ways to lose a round. I could play him and shave years off my life in every match, or I could pick anyone else and actually win without suffering a migraine. Though I have to admit, beating someone with Dhalsim is incredibly satisfying.

On the other hand, he sucks more ass than a tornado at a donkey farm. I’ve seen a lot of pros put other characters below him on the tier list, and that seems like complete madness to me. How could you say Marissa is worse than Dhalsim? Dhalsim is barely functional. He isn’t playing Street Fighter 6. He isn’t even playing Street Fighter 5, because in that one he could actually keep up with rest of the cast. Getting a win with him is satisfying like winning a bike race by running. Sure, you can do it, but why would you? Pick a character with actual human rights.
Playing against Dhalsim: Throughout my entire journey I only went up against three or four Dhalsims. Like I said, no one plays him. The ones I did find were doing fake teleport mix-ups. That doesn’t work. I would know, since I had to learn Dhalsim the hard way. Whenever I went up against these one-note cheese mongers, they’d start teleporting around, and I would just stand in one spot and smack them out of the air when they appeared behind me. They only knew that one trick, and when that didn’t work, they didn’t have anything else to fall back on, so they’d die.
He isn’t unpopular because he’s bad, he’s unpopular because you can’t play like a creature with him. He’s too slow, and even the button-mashing maniacs you find online can steamroll you with no real plan. He’s the opposite of The Creature, which is why he’s the least picked character in the game, in every skill division.

Creature Rating: 0 out of 10. The Creature doesn’t understand Dhalsim, and hurt itself in its confusion.

Tier: F. Get this thing off my screen.

Lily

T. Hawk wasn’t too popular among players, so they turned him into a cute little girl named Lily. She keeps his grappler game plan of darting around the screen, grabbing people and slamming them into the ground. Someone at Capcom must have taken a look at that already straightforward game plan and thought it was too complicated, so they reduced her options into a completely linear play style where she just flies at her opponent and makes them guess on a coin toss. Heads or tails. It’s tails, I went for command grab. If you guessed right, congrats, you get to delete half my health. If you guessed wrong, you get grabbed. I fly at you again. Heads or tails?

To me, Lily is a conceptually flawed character. Her play style revolves around three moves: wind stock, condor spire and her grab. Wind stock powers her up and makes her condor spire more powerful. When it’s powered up, she can use it to fly at her opponent. Once she gets there, she goes for a 50/50 strike/throw mix up, making her opponent guess. Repeat.

She has the same flaws as Jamie, where she needs to stack a resource to be useful, but unlike Jamie, she doesn’t get additional tools to work with, she just makes her existing tools usable. Without her wind stock, her condor spire is pretty much useless, so she has to navigate neutral like any other grappler to get in.

That doesn’t sound too bad, but the thing is that her entire kit was designed around her having her powered-up condor spire. Her grab leaves her almost at full screen after it completes. Her drive rush doesn’t reach far enough and it’s slow. The only thing she has going for her are her massive punch normals. Aside from that, she’s a weak grappler with not much else.

I got her to Diamond pretty easily. Her whole thing is to be an annoying gimmick character with an atypical play style, so I managed to cheese people out and knowledge check them. The ones that did know how to play against Lily were absolute nightmares to fight, since you can shut her down pretty easily by not letting her get wind stocks. Not only is she easy to stop thanks to her simple nature, she’s also not very fun to play. She doesn’t have anything interesting going for her.

Playing against Lily: Her reliance on neutral skips and flying around make her a great Creature character. She likes to fly around the screen willy-nilly, which can be stopped with drive reversal. Drive Reversal being useful for once. Imagine that.

All you have to do is play defensively and poke her when she tries to get wind stocks. If she flies at you, use drive reversal to get her away from you. Now she wasted a valuable resource trying to get in and is at a disadvantage.

This little gremlin thrives on knowledge checks and being a complete nuisance. If you can tame The Creature and make her play your game, you’re in the clear and she can’t do anything about it. Other players can also turtle up and go for pokes, which is also incredibly boring to play against, and not many people tried it. It’s too hard to resist using a move that throws you across the screen, even if it’s slow, reactable and unsafe.

Creature Rating: 4/10. She’s annoying, but really easy to stop.

Tier: D. She’s too reliant on one gimmick, and outside of that she doesn’t have too many good tools. I don’t like her.

Marisa

The definition of a gorilla. Massive buttons, and massive damage. Pure ignorance in character form. She can do a ton of damage from a single confirm and she can… uh… that’s it, really. That’s all she can do. She does massive damage. She doesn’t have a good anti-air, her movement is pretty bad, with a mediocre drive rush, so she has to play neutral and inch her way in. Hard to come up with anything else she has other than big, simian damage. Her hair looks like a dumb helmet. She’s got that going for her, I guess.

I don’t have much to say about her because getting her to Diamond was a snap. I just used her medium punch, medium punch target combo and canceled it into a simple combo that turned my opponent into dust. I didn’t even notice a lot of her weaknesses because my opponent didn’t have time to do anything other than be on the receiving end of chimp violence. You could have told me she had bad anti-airs and I would have asked if she can do something other than medium punch target combo. I was eating so much glue I practically did lasting damage to my brain. Marisa bad for Roger, Roger now stupid.

Playing against Marisa: They do the same, just spam medium times two. Whenever they have to traverse the dangerous lands known as neutral, they short-circuit and throw random Gladius. Gladiuses? Gladii? Her punch. They start spamming her punch special as a means of locomotion. It’s incredibly annoying, since if you get clipped by one of her attacks you lose a third of your health, so you have to play very patient and clean only to get turned into mashed potatoes from someone slapping their controller like a bongo.

Creature Rating: 6/10. Big gorilla ape, but she’s too slow and dumb to be an effective creature.

Tier: C minus. A lot of people say she’s the worst character in the game, and I’m not familiar enough with Marisa to say if she is, but Dhalsim exists, so she can’t be the worst. All I know is she’s a big gorilla with not many tools other than the ability to atomize her opponent, and other characters can already do big damage with better tools.

Kimberly

The inheritor of Bushinryu Ninjitsu. I don’t speak Japanese, but judging from her play style, Bushinryu probably means annoying.

Like Lily, she’s a remake of a previous character turned into a little girl. This time it’s Guy, the ninja from Final Fight and Street Fighter Alpha. Like other ninja characters, she’s all about being really fast and pressing buttons in your face.

She has a lot of interesting tools in her arsenal. She has a command run, which she can use to get in your face. It has three different attacks: a slide which covers the whole screen, an overhead kick and a lowverhead kick that is plus on block. She also has a tatsu, an izuna drop and spray cans which she can use for set ups in the corner. It’s an interesting and varied tool set that perfectly compliments her rushdown style.

Getting her to Diamond was a bit tricky. Even though I play Cammy, I’m not one for rushdown characters, so I had to get used to the archetype along with Kimberly’s moves. She is pretty fun to play, with a lot of ways to keep her opponent guessing. Her movespeed is decent, she has a good dash, her drive rush is good and she has some okay poke attacks. The only problem is that she doesn’t do much damage, and if you ever get the chance to go all-out, you need to spend a lot of resources and do some pretty intricate combos.

I got pretty far into Platinum just by knowledge-checking my opponents with her run shenanigans. Later on I started going up against more experienced players who saw through my cheap tricks and made me regret running around, which was the only thing I knew how to do. Then I took the time to actually learn how she works and some set-ups and I managed to ninja run all the way up to Diamond.

She was fun to play, but I didn’t like her low damage. You have to win a ton of interactions in neutral to get ahead with her, something that’s core to a rushdown character, but I think there are others in the game that do it better, like Cammy or Juri. Her lack of a reliable invincible reversal really hurts her, too.

Playing Against Kimberly: You remember how I said that all I did was do the command run until someone with real brain cells stopped me? That’s how Kimberly players play before Diamond rank. Command run and mash light punch. It’s really easy to stop by being patient, which is how you beat 99% of creatures online. Wait for her to do her completely fake blockstring into a run, and jab her our of the run. No one under Diamond 3 knows her spray can set-ups, so you don’t have to worry about much in the corner. Just watch out for her elbow drop in mid-air. I had my anti-airs baited by that more times than I care to admit.

Creature Rating: 7.8/10. They can play like creatures, but they’re very easy to stop. Just block their full-screen slides and punish them. They won’t stop doing that. Kimberly walks back to the other side of the screen as if she had a plan. Oh, let me guess, are you going to do the slide and try to catch me walking forward? How original. Who could have seen that coming? Not me. Anyways, have this punish combo.

Tier: B minus. The most mid of the mid-tiers. Good but not great, with very obvious flaws and low damage.

Chun Li

Chun was supposed to be replaced by Kimberly as “The girl”, but she’s still here. She has more of a role in the story than Kimberly. In fact, she’s the second main character, overshadowing Jamie. I don’t know what’s going on in this game’s story, but if they’re trying to slowly phase out the main cast to get the new generation in, they should actually show them doing things in-game.

Chun is the original leg-pilled Thigh-maxer who plays a very patient, poke-oriented game. She seems to change in every game she’s in, with different moves and slightly different approaches. She’s not the unchanging rock that is Ryu. In Street Fighter 6, she’s a versatile character that can dominate neutral and do some good damage via some surprisingly technical combos. Technical by Street Fighter 6 standards, mind you. You don’t have to do frame-perfect inputs or anything. Just some stance-cancels.

Getting her to Diamond wasn’t too bad. She has great walk speed, so she can weave in and out of her opponent’s range easily, and she has a lot of good pokes to control the pace of the match. Her back or forward medium punch is great to throw out to keep the opponent in check. Her stand heavy punch, where she throws her arm forward rivaling Dhalsim’s range, isn’t the menace it was in previous Street Fighter games. It’s still good here as a poke, but can and will get countered by a Drive Impact, and that’s never good.

The thing that threw me off the most about playing Chun Li wasn’t her stance or her combos, but the fact that her anti-air is on a down down input. The Devil’s input. I could never get that thing to come out. Inputting that while walking with this game’s 90-year buffer is a nightmare. Not to mention how it seems to miss most of the time. The risk was too high for its meager reward. She has better anti-airs anyways, which lead to more damage. They’re a lot harder to do.

I wouldn’t say she’s unrewarding, since she does a lot with the tools she has, but the amount of effort you have to put into playing her at a competent level is higher than with other characters. You can pick Ken or something else and turn into a threat a with a lot less hassle. She’s still a great character, don’t get me wrong.

Playing against Chun Li: The real creature behavior comes with Hazanshou, which is a move that sends her flying across the screen. It’s an overhead, so The Creature thinks it’s good. It’s a decent move to go over projectiles or catch your opponent off-guard, but if you walk backwards and suddenly throw it out from the other side of the screen, it doesn’t work. It’s unsafe on block, and none of the creatures in low rank know this. They’d throw out the most predictable Hazanshous ever and it was like they express shipped themselves to me to get beaten. I didn’t even have to play neutral to get in, they did it for me.

Creature Rating: 4/10. The Creature doesn’t like to play Chun, since her style is more patient and defensive. They still pick her and walk backwards endlessly, as if that would do anything.

Tier: A plus. She’s really good, even if her Drive Rush is smelly, but overshadowed by some of the more simplistic, ape-like top-tiers like Ken.

Manon

The French bird-lady who uses ballet to destroy her opponents. Her game plan is centered around her grabs, which give her medals, which then make her grabs do a ton of damage. When she’s not throwing you around like a trash bag, she uses her freakishly long limbs to keep you in check.

She was considered terrible all throughout season one, but I don’t know why. I think she’s okay. The fact that her medals carry over between rounds means she can easily become a threat at some point in the match. It’s a little gimmicky and cheesy, since she’s a different character without them at first then she can kill you in three grabs at 5 medals, but it gives her something.

Even if her opponent doesn’t want to get grabbed, Manon still has a lot of tools to play neutral. Her kicks have great range and can be canceled into Drive Rush for scary pressure. She’s the only grappler in the game that can threaten on wake up after a command grab, and she has a way to get medals off a hit confirm with her hit grab. She’s a specialist character with solid tools.

Getting her to Diamond was easy. I like her play style, and she has ways to make her opponent react and make mistakes. Her command grab has a deceptively long range. I could poke with her long, spindly kicks and then go for a throw and it would still connect, catching my opponent completely off guard. It was a matter of getting a few medals and going for the kill. I had a lot of people quit or refuse to rematch because they got me to low health, got greedy, then they ate three grabs in a row and lost.

Playing against Manon: After she was branded one of the worst characters in the game, she completely disappeared from ranked. The few people I did play against were always throwing out her target combo, the one that drags you in, to try to force a mix-up. If that didn’t work, they’d resort to old reliable: walking backwards and throwing out a neutral skip. They’d go for full-screen high-low mix-ups with her quarter circle back kick that sends her flying forward. This is incredibly unsafe, and as with every other creature, you can beat her with a little patience. If the Manon player knows what they’re doing, you’re in for a tough time.

Creature Rating: 4/10. She can play like an ape, but it’s easy to punish.

Tier: B. She’s good.

JP

He’s the bad guy for Street Fighter 6 because he shoots ghosts and looks evil. What is his mission? Where is he from? I don’t know. He looks cool, at least.

JP is a zoner, which means he stands in one spot and fills the screen with projectiles and other nonsense. Street Fighter has had multiple zoners before, but JP is more in line with the ones you’d find in an anime game, with ways to lock an opponent down and some oppressive set-play.

He can summon ghosts that can hit high or low. If you block those, he can shoot one that grabs you. If that’s not enough, he can also spawn a spike on any position on the screen, and it hits you if you’re in the air. Once he scores a knockdown, he can set up fissures in the air to make you guess on wake up, or teleport out of them and cross you up.

Wait, why would a zoner want to teleport to their opponent? Good question, hypothetical reader. JP excels at range, but he’s no slouch up close. He has great buttons that hit from far away and can start combos easily. He can also confirm his lights into his Stribog special, which sends his opponent across the screen, giving him space to set up his ranged offensive.

His level 2 super lets him create situations where the opponent just loses with unblockable strings and massive damage.

He’s an extremely strong character who excels at everything. His only downside is his drive rush, which is kind of slow.

Getting him to Diamond was a no-brainer. Not many people know how to deal with zoning, so that alone carried me across to high platinum. If someone did manage to navigate the Dodonpachi-like web of bullets on screen and got close to me, I’d do crouching jab into Stribog and send them back where they were, completely undoing their hard-earned progress.

I had a lot of fun playing as him. Not just because I was winning. Winning is fun, but even when I got to Diamond I kept playing him for fun. At that skill level, it gets a lot harder to get cheesy wins, so I had to play like a person, and it was still fun. His tools are all strong and fun to use. He can be an annoying zoner, he has complicated set ups if you want to be a chess mastermind and he can even play up close really well.

Playing against JP: Most people don’t know how to play against a zoner, and most people don’t know how to play as one, neither. JP players would spam their ghosts all day, but the moment I managed to jump over one and get into their personal space, they’d panic and fall apart. They like playing as the cool, confident bad guy, but they can’t emulate his patient demeanor. They want to throw out the spooky ghosts because they keep losing to them, only to realize that, hey, maybe it’s not that easy to win just with ghosts.

Creature Rating: 5/10. The Creature likes how flashy JP is, but it can’t do much against a semi-experienced player. They can get a lot of free wins off other creatures. He’s like a weird anti-creature creature, because if you play like an idiot against him, you’re going to get hit with more ghosts than a house on an Indian burial ground.

Tier: A plus. He’s good at everything.

Blanka

The original, true creature. The personification of unhinged chaos. Multiple ways to skip neutral, constant knowledge checks, massive buttons, all creature, no human.

Sure, he has the Blanka dolls for cool set-ups, and his level 2 super lets you do interesting stuff, but all that matters is the ball. A free, safe neutral skip. Sure, it has counter play, and it’s not as good as I’m making it out to be, but honestly, who cares? The ball is all.

I got Blanka to Diamond in about half an hour. I didn’t have to learn anything, engage with any mechanic, or use my brain. It was 30 minutes of pure chimp behavior. A complete disregard for my opponent. I didn’t even consider them, it was like playing a single-player game. All I did was spam ball. On the rare occasion someone knew how to deal with ball, I played a bit more calm, then when they got complacent, I unleashed the ball again.

It got to a point where I wasn’t the one playing. It was The Creature. At first I heard it telling me what to do. “Go for another ball”, or “throw out a slide from full-screen”. I thought those were my ideas, I thought I was the one in control, but I was mistaken. After a few matches, I saw what was happening on screen and recoiled in horror. I looked down at my hands, and they were green.

I looked to my right and I saw a tiny Blanka Chan doll sitting next to me. It said “You look tired. Here, let me play for a bit”. The more it played, the less human I became. I was about to shed the last vestige of my humanity just as I hit Diamond rank and used my last bit of willpower to pry the controller from The Creature’s hand and banish it to the darkness. I stayed a man, but I was irreparably damaged. According to the game, I reached Diamond, but in reality, I had demoted my skill level down to silver. It took a few days for the brain fog to lift, and I could re-integrate into society. I’m okay now, but once The Creature is unleashed, putting it back in its box is impossible. It still calls, and I can’t ignore it. I also lost like, 20 IQ points. Playing Blanka made me forget algebra.

Playing against Blanka: Block and DP the Blanka balls. What if your opponent knows what he’s doing? He doesn’t. No one under Legend rank plays Blanka like a human.

Creature rating: 15/10. Man’s dark heart beats uninterrupted.

Tier: B. I don’t know. This isn’t a real character.

Ken

Blanka might be the original creature, but Ken is its final stage. A hideous chimera formed from a soup of horrid beasts and mythical beings. He does gorilla damage, cheetah speed, corner carry like a- like uh- like an animal that carries things to a corner a lot. He can do everything, anything and all. Except stay married, apparently.

Ken is the best shoto in the game. He doesn’t have Ryu’s damage, but he’s better in every way. He has way better corner carry. He can get you into the corner from any confirm mid-screen. His standing heavy punch and crouching medium kick let him take over neutral quickly and easily, and destroy his opponent. He has Jinrai kicks to tangle his opponent and knowledge check. He can skip neutral and land in a 50/50 with his Dragon Lash. He can use EX hadouken to start a combo from the other side of the screen. He has an invincible reversal with his DP, his supers are invincible and can be comboed into from anything. He is the pinnacle of shotos, and possibly the best character in the game.

I’m not just saying that, Ken’s tournament performance backs it up. He’s the most played character in tournaments. He’s in the top 3 most played characters in every rank until Diamond, where he drops all the way down to fourth place.

Getting Ken to Diamond was so easy, it was negative effort. The only reason I didn’t get him from unranked to Diamond in one go was because he started in Platinum. When the game released, on day one, without practicing anything, I hopped on ranked and placed in Platinum 5 with Ken. Back then, I thought I’d only do all characters to Platinum, so I left him there. Then when I decided to do Diamond, I left him for the end, since I knew he’d be the easiest, and he was easier than I could ever imagine.

From the time I left him in Plat, on the game’s release, to about a year and a half later, I never picked him up again, nor did I watch any guides or learn how to play him. I didn’t even warm up with his combos. I started the session, and got a 15 win streak and flew all the way up to Diamond 2, where I kept going undefeated until Diamond 3. I stopped because I wasn’t having any fun.

Playing against Ken: You block and wait for him to stop pressing buttons. That never happens, so block forever, I guess. There are some tricks to beating his Jinrai kicks, which are just knowledge checks, and you can outplay any player, in theory, but any advice I can give you on how to beat Ken boils down to “Play better than your opponent”, which is non-advice.

The Creature doesn’t control Ken players. Ken players are The Creature. Other, lesser characters like Juri and Blanka can only hope to be vessels for The Creature. They can influence whoever plays them, or take over for a bit, but Ken is the direct line to the primordial chaos.

His entire game plan revolves around rushing forward like a crazed wendigo, scratching and biting at his opponent, pressing buttons and attacking with no real plan or thought. And it works. That’s how you play Ken. When The Creature pilots the other characters, you can tell they’re being controlled by an otherworldly force of malice, but not with Ken. Peak Ken gameplay is indistinguishable from Creature Ken.

After getting Ken to Diamond, I felt invincible. I was the god of fighting games, and if I’m a god in fighting games, that must mean I’m a god elsewhere. I scampered out of the house, running on all fours. My lower jaw jutted out, giving me a terrible underbite. I had grown fangs, my skin was green and a coarse carpet of fur covered most of my body. I ran across the city, howling and drooling, looking for something to destroy. I picked a fight with some hoodlums and beat them into unconsciousness. Then I climbed a building and broke into an apartment. I ate all the food out of some guy’s fridge and marked my territory in his living room. He could only stare in disgust at the thing that was in his house. That unspeakable thing we left out in the wilderness in ages past. The thing we buried deep and entombed in asphalt and brick, under power lines and skyscrapers. We’ve evolved. We’re a different species from our ancestors, who hunted with spear and slept under the stars. We don’t have to kill mammoths to eat, we can go to the grocery store. We don’t have to strive against the elements, we have air conditioner. We wear clothes and walk upright, none of us can use a spear, and yet there it was. That thing was in his living room, staring at him with big, familiar eyes.

Then he called the cops and they tazed me for ten straight minutes.

Creature Rating: 9999999999999999999999999999/10.

Tier: S. Ken down-players need not apply.

Conclusion

There you have it folks. The story of how I lost my humanity and got arrested. Also something about getting every character in the base roster to Diamond. It was a lot easier than I thought, but also kind of tough at points. I learned a lot about the game, about fighting games in general, and about myself. Not the part about being a gremlin, I already knew that. I found that I could complete a completely pointless challenge in a videogame if I set my mind to it.

I don’t recommend taking every character to Diamond, but I do recommend trying to go for a high rank. I had fun with most of the cast. There were a few stinkers, like Dhalsim and Lily. Two characters I didn’t like, not just because they’re weak, but because they kinda suck and don’t fit into the game very well. You do learn a lot about the game doing this, and I recommend you try every character in any fighting game you play.

I originally did this to see if I could do it, but also to find someone to main. Back when the game first launched, I tried everyone, and kind of liked them all, but didn’t find one that really stuck with me. After this challenge, I still have a similar problem, but at least I narrowed it down to a few choices. I thought Manon was a lot of fun with her grappler game plan and weird alien-limb pokes. Even if everyone says she’s garbage, I still enjoy playing her. Cammy was another I found fun, but I’ve been a Cammy enjoyer since I used to mash buttons in Street Fighter 2, so that’s nothing new. JP was great, too. I never thought Street Fighter would get a zoner like the ones in other anime games. Since I don’t have a main, you can’t accuse me of bias in the tiers.

I did notice that there is a lot of homogeneity in the cast. Most characters can be played by fishing for stray cancelable pokes then going in for a drive rush. A lot of their pokes are similar with the same frame data and very similar ranges. The only differences being their special moves and how good or bad their drive rushes are, and even then there’s not much of a range. Except for Dhalsim, who has a truly reprehensible Drive Rush.

In fact, I gave each character a tier ranking but in reality, they’re all okay. Even Dhalsim can get a few wins. That’s good, I suppose, because the game is balanced, but there’s not much individuality. Things like character specific quirks were sanded down in order to make a more “balanced”, competitively-viable product for the masses.

It was fun, at least, and I got to experience what it’s like to revert to a primal state and do a little breaking and entering. That last part I would not recommend.

Join us next time when I get the DLC characters to Diamond. At some point in the future.