Street Fighter 6: Road to Diamond Part 1

The dawn of man and... The Creature.

Shine Bright Like a Diamond

Back when Street Fighter 6 released, I decided to do a challenge: Get to Platinum rank. Having just finished grinding to Gold in Street Fighter V, I was ready for a grueling climb. Another hard-fought title for fake internet points.

I was excited for the game, and when I saw there was a pre-release beta, I had to try it out. I spent hours playing around against the CPU, figuring out the systems, practicing drive rush combos, admiring the new moves, just having a grand old time. Then I decided to play ranked against human opponents. I knew I was going to get steamrolled, so I prepared for the worst and dove right in. Ten matches later, I got my rank. I was expecting to go into silver, or maybe gold if I’m lucky, but I got Platinum. In the beta. I chalked it up to beginner’s luck, or maybe no one else knew how to play the game, or maybe Ken was just a really strong character, etc. That didn’t count, really. It was the beta.

Then the full game came out, I played my placement matches on the first day and… Platinum. I had completed my challenge on the first day. I noticed each character had an individual rank assigned to them, so I decided to do take all of them to Platinum.
Then I did it.

Now I was at a crossroad. Do I finish the challenge there and go find more dopamine in another game, or do I try a little harder for a slightly shinier title?

This is the first part of my journey into the world of Ranked Street Fighter 6. A world full of questionable players, strange decisions and evil entities that whisper dark ideas into the mind. In this edition, I’ll go over some of the things I saw online, the kinds of players and the most common mistakes I saw. I’ll also talk a little about how the rankings work, and I’ll introduce you to one of the most important characters in this whole saga: The Creature.

This isn’t an article-long gloat session, either. I think this challenge was easy. I think it was partly due to inflated ranks, which I’ll get to in a bit, but also because I managed to learn to play the game at an adequate level, and I think you can do it, too. I’ll be sharing some simple, but effective tips that will help you skyrocket to Diamond. If Roger Renfro could do it, so can you!

Part two of this article, which will come out in the next edition, will focus on the game’s characters. I’ll give you my opinion on them, their design, how they play and how others play them.

For now, I’ll start by telling you why you should try to go for Diamond.

Diamond is Breakable

Diamond is the seventh rank in Street Fighter 6. It goes: Rookie, Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond and Master, with Legend serving as the gated garden for the top 500 players. Each rank is sub-divided into five tiers, from 1 to 5 stars. 5 stars is the highest in its respective rank.

Source: Cat Cammy on Twitter

According to some stats I found, Diamond represents the top 20% of ranked players. According to some old, outdated comparisons to Street Fighter V’s rankings, Diamond is where the two games line up. Street Fighter 6’s ranks, under Diamond, are inflated, meaning that they’re higher than their equivalent counterpart in SFV, in terms of percentage; a Gold 5 player in Street Fighter 6 would be a Silver 4 player in Street Fighter V.

All this nerd talk is context for why I don’t particularly like the ranking system in Street Fighter 6. There is no real differentiation between the lower ranks. Iron to Gold might as well be the same rank. It’s too easy to rank up and there are no real challenges in the way to incentivize improvement. You can get through to Platinum just by letting The Creature take the wheel. As long as you play, you’ll win enough matches to rank out of the muck and mire. Near Platinum is where people start showing some skill; they’re playing to improve. After Platinum 4, you get more satisfying matches. Not all, but the percentage of players to creatures improves.

This isn’t an indictment on the players themselves. There will always be new players, and they need a place for themselves, I understand this. This game doesn’t do that. By making rank-ups so easy, it spreads the same new players all through the first ranks. They will eventually reach Platinum, where they will start encountering challenging players for the first time, and they will be completely unprepared, which is why such a large portion of the player base is in Platinum 1. They rank up, get there and reach their first competent opponents and get hard stuck. By separating the ranks more, you’d give players more matches with similarly-ranked opponents.

The Beginning

I managed to get to Platinum with Ken easily. A few placement matches, and it was done. I felt confident, strong. I could do anything. I decided not to start the challenge with Ken, as it would be too easy, so I picked another character. Jamie, the drunken kung-fu master. I went in, started a match and got completely flattened.

I didn’t know what I was doing with Jamie, sure. He’s low tier, too. Yeah, that’s it. He’s a weak character, of course he’s going to be tough. I kept on going but the losses kept stacking. I blamed Jamie, I blamed the constant drive rushes, the drive impacts. I wanted to go back to Ken and get easy wins by being ignorant, like everyone else. I kept going up against Juri and Ken. They would press buttons all day and jump around like a House of Pain song and get the better of me.

I was at my wit’s end with them. These button mashers, these random drive impact throwers, these… these… creatures.

That’s when I saw the form of the shapeless thing haunting me. It was none other than… THE CREATURE.

The Creature

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, and other great works of literature have wrestled with the idea of man and civility. What separates modern humans from their cave-dwelling ancestors? Is civilization so fragile that, at the drop of a hat, we could revert to loincloths and head hunting? This drive towards brutality, destruction and pure animal behavior. Man’s inhumanity to man. The thing that makes you go for a third EX Shoryuken on wake up after having the previous two blocked.

The Creature is a term I got from Fillipino Champ, a pro player. He uses it to refer to the random, animalistic play style people use online. It can best be described as high risk, low reward, or just high risk in general. Constant jumping, throwing out massive moves, constantly pressing buttons even when at a clear disadvantage, constant Drive Impacts, all these are part of The Creature’s arsenal.

I have to make a distinction between Unga Bunga and The Creature. Unga Bunga/gorilla is a very aggressive play style where you overwhelm your opponent with sheer brute force. It’s not really rushdown, but it’s its stronger, dumber cousin. Rush down tries to keep you pinned down and guessing with a ton of weak, quick strikes and mixups. Gorilla goes for shock and awe, throwing out massive attacks with huge range or getting in your face and pressing. The difference between this and Creature style, is that the gorilla has a time and place. There are characters that use this play style; bruisers like Marissa, Sol Badguy and Leo Whitefang from Guilty Gear. Characters with a lot of ways to be offensive, while being relatively easy to play. The Creature doesn’t care about characters. It will play like a gorilla with a defensive character, it will rush in with a character that prefers to fight at range. A gorilla is low risk, high reward. The Creature doesn’t care for things like rewards.

At first I thought The Creature was a type of player. Online randos who boot up the game to mash buttons for some fun. I was ready to write them off as a kind of subspecies of human, like the ones on Twitter, but then I heard it. It happened when I was playing Blanka. I was doing my best to play with discipline. I was using Blanka ball sparingly to catch my opponent off-guard, playing neutral, going for safe pokes. Then I was winning. My opponent was too busy trying to anticipate a random Blanka ball, and he wasn’t playing right. I was in his head. Then I decided to spam Blanka ball. His fragile psyche shattered and he kept walking forward, getting hit over and over again.

The next round, I forgot all about discipline and kept spamming. When that was working, I started playing more and more random. Backdash into slide, Drive Rush into slide, random supers in neutrals. High risk, low reward. I looked down at my hands, and realized I wasn’t holding the controller. I looked around the room to see where it went. It was still plugged in, and things were happening on screen. That’s when I saw it, in a far-off corner of the room. The Creature. It took my controller. I had heard it whispering in my ear, telling me to go for more Blanka balls, to keep doing random slides. It lulled me into a false sense of security and convinced me to pass the controller over to it.

The Creature isn’t a player, it’s an entity. It’s inside all of us. Those people I fought online, who kept jumping and swinging for the fences, they weren’t some alien being. They were human just like me, they just let The Creature drive.

I have to tell you about The Creature because of how prevalent it is in Street Fighter 6. This game’s mechanics inspire The Creature. Drive Impact and drive rush are like paint and a blank canvas for these players. Why stand around blocking when you could throw out a Drive Impact in neutral and get a huge combo? Sure, if your opponent counters it you can lose half your health, but… what if it hits? Why should you walk to your opponent when you can drive rush across the screen and push buttons on them? I need to paint, and I have the tools.

When I understood The Creature, I could defeat it. If they’re pressing buttons, I could block. If they keep jumping, I could anti-air. If they act random, I act in order and confuse it. Let it make mistakes, and punish them.

Once I figured that out, the game was a lot easier.

How YOU can do it, too

Now that you have a basic understanding of the common beginner pitfalls in Street Fighter 6, you can start improving. Climbing the ranks is incredibly easy. I’m not a professional player. I’d consider myself okay at the game, and I managed to rank up with some very basic things, which I have organized into The 4 Ps:

Patience, Poking, Punishes and Pistance. That last one is distance. I ran out of P words.

Patience: Know that you don’t have to do anything. If you’re Diamond or under, you’ll be going up against Creature-controlled opponents. The Creature only goes forward, and it only attacks. If you are patient, The Creature will come to you and you can fight it on your terms. This doesn’t mean you should walk backwards forever, it means you should wait your turn. Don’t mash immediately after blocking. You can’t out-mash the creature. You need to hear it, understand it, and tame it.

Poking: Know your buttons. You have six buttons, and they all do something different. It’s overwhelming at first, I know. What you need to do is simplify it down to one or two important buttons. Find your character’s best buttons and concentrate on using those.

The first thing you want is a good poke. A quick, safe attack with good distance. This would be something like Ryu and Ken’s crouching medium kick, Luke’s crouching medium punch, etc. They’re not all crouching medium kicks, but a lot of them are. Find a button that’s fast, has okay range and, most importantly, CAN CANCEL INTO A SPECIAL MOVE. What you’re going to do is use that button when you’re near your opponent. If it hits, use your special move. If you want to get more advanced, you can drive rush and do a combo after you poke. This is going to be the button you’ll use most of the time when on the ground.

The next poke is your anti-air. It’s always best to use something like a shoryuken to anti-air, but for now you can use a button. Find an attack your character can use to hit someone when they jump. For a lot of characters, this is crouching heavy punch. Something that gets you out of the way of an aerial attack, and puts out a hit box that stops your opponent near your head. Low-ranked players will jump 80% of the time, so this is extremely important. There are a ton of players you can beat just by being patient and swatting them out of the air when they come at you.

Punishes: New players think combos are the end-all be-all of fighting games. They go into training mode and practice combos over and over. When the real match comes, they can’t get in to do their combo, and all their training goes out the window. I’ve fought against dozens of players who could do massive combos once they land a hit, but they could barely land a hit because their neutral was stinky. You need combos, sure, but improving your neutral will get you further.

This isn’t about whiff punishing or anything technical like that, but about punishing your opponent’s mistakes. You need to learn a combo for when you hit with a punish counter Drive Impact. Something simple, but effective that leads into a knockdown. This is your combo for when you block an opponent’s shoryuken, super or any other huge mistake. You can learn other combos, too, but the focus should be on punishing your opponent’s mistakes, which they will constantly make.

With these little adjustments, you’ll see quick improvement. Once you start climbing the ranks, you can implement more advanced things, like drive rush combos and such, but you can get up to Platinum just by doing these basic things.

Pistance is distance. Not just spacing, but a very specific distance which I call the magic jump distance. Whenever someone walks towards you and enters your safe zone, they’re probably going to jump. Don’t press buttons there. Wait for them to jump. If they don’t, you can press buttons to poke, but if you’re playing against someone in Platinum rank or below, assume they’re going to jump. Don’t let them into your safe space.

If they enter the green, they fly to the top of the screen

Bonus P

Uh oh! You didn’t shake enough, there’s some more P left: PLEASE STOP JUMPING.

You already know how easy it is to stop a player who thinks they’re in a bouncy castle, so you know you shouldn’t jump. If you ever hear The Creature telling you to jump, just picture SMUG in your head asking you “What you jumping for, boy?”. What are you jumping for? Unless it’s to jump in on a hard-read projectile or to escape Zangief’s grabs, you’re better off on the ground.

Some more resources:

Fararjeh has a few videos with good, general tips. They’re slightly more advanced, covering topics such as neutral, but they’re easy to understand and have good advice.

Punk also has a great lesson on neutral.

Chris_F has guides on all aspects of Street Fighter 6. His guide on how to stop The Creature and spacing traps are good for intermediate players.

Conclusion

The road was steep and rocky at first. I was constantly attacked by The Creature, and I was unable to stop it. I was like those guys in those videos where the animals get tired of their handlers and attack them. Then I learned how to deal with it, and became the one mauling. I was the handler getting mauled by the animal and then I… became the animal and bit the other animal? Wait, no, I defeated The Creature by being a human so I was the man biting the dog? This metaphor isn’t working.

The point is, with patience you can stop the chaos and scrubbiness in Street Fighter 6 and skyrocket to diamond.

In the next issue, I’ll be going over every character in the base roster. What I think of them, how hard or easy it was to complete the challenge with them, some thoughts on their strategy and some needlessly personal attacks on the type of person who plays them. You know there’s gonna be some words said about Juri (hint, I’ll need to look up synonyms for easy).

Join us next time in part 2 of this mess.

This will be you in a few days.