This past weekend gave the fighting game community its best look at the potential depth of Street Fighter 6 yet thanks to IFC|YipeS and BC|Sabin getting the chance to stream the upcoming game for around 4 hours with some of the East Coast crew.
Javits Ariaswho you may recognize as a lab wizard for Street Fighter 5, was among those present to play SF6’s demo, and he created a long list of all the discoveries made and interesting details noted during that extended session.
Some of the first things Arias wrote considered aspects of the game like whiffed specials not building meter, no corner cross ups and Punish Counters granting more frame advantage over standard counter hits, which had been discussed previously, but he went much further than that.
Javits put together an entire section dedicated to information about Ryu, answering dozens of questions about the character like confirming his aerial Tatsumaki Senpukyaku can cross up in SF6 and combo into Supers after like Street Fighter 4.
– all versions of Ryu’s DP’s are true anti airs not just MP DP
– you can interrupt normal cancel to drive impact with your own drive impact, parry, or throw but can’t jump out if it’s from a heavy
– you can walk out of tick throw attempts AND punish counter for huge damage…— Javits Arias (@jav1ts) August 27, 2022
Ryu’s old bread and butter low medium kick into Hadoken apparently is not a true blockstring in the demo, but using light Hashogeki instead after the kick is.
What’s perhaps his scariest discovery though is that characters are put into a Punish Counter state after whiffing an attack in the air including during the landing frames.
If that stays for the final release, jump ins are much more dangerous on offense and spacing is going to be even more important.
Javits also spent some time answering people’s questions about SF6 on Twitter where he confirms that all versions of Shoryuken-like reversals are full anti-airs unlike SF5.
There’s an interesting response too that canceling into Drive Rush from any normal apparently provides the same frame advantage, so any Drive Rush combo that works off of a heavy punch should work from a light punch too.
The strength of button that was canceled into DR does not affect the properties of the normal you do during the DR.
— Javits Arias (@jav1ts) August 27, 2022
As noted before, the EC guys were playing a demo version of SF6, and at least some of these mechanics will probably change before the game’s actual release sometime in 2023 (or maybe even in an updated demo).
You can check out Javits’ full list of notes on Street Fighter 6’s gameplay below, and it’s worth taking a look at the original Twitter thread too where he answers more questions not covered in the original text.
Click images for larger versions
.