Final thoughts about SF6’s story mode:

It’s goofy af.

The basic premise is that since the events happen in Metro City, that used to be run by gangs, then everyone knows martial arts. So you fight everyone from regular people passing by to cops and old ladies and gang members wearing cardboard boxes on their heads. It’s like Pokémon, except that instead of people being obsessed with cute creatures, they’re obsessed with martial arts.

Still, they managed to make the story serious at times. But this is shounen af too: you meet a rival in the very first 5 minutes and end up trying to save him from himself the rest of the game.

The actual SF6 cast look super weird because the character models weren’t meant to just walk around and talk, take Luke as an example… his arms are thicker than his head, so when you chat with him his movements just feel totally unnatural… those muppet arms don’t look like they’re part of his body, and most characters are pretty much the same.

Surprisingly, the characters that I felt more comfortable to use are Jamie and Deejay. Jamie has this weird mechanic where he has to drink from his gourd (an “energy drink” of course) to gain access to more moves and specials, and that’s not something I'm used to in other fighting games... for some reason this fighting style clicked with me: it's kinda unpredictable but still easier to manage for me (unlike characters like Rashid or Manon). However, when you start to train under anyone, you don’t have full access to their signature moves, so the combat feels very clunky until you level up enough and get access to more tools to play. Fortunately, since you can customize your moves, you can use super arts and specials from other characters which I find kind of fun. Deejay's "air slasher" saved my ass more times than I could count early on.

When it comes to world exploration, SF6 reminds me a lot of games of the PS2 era: the world is not that big at all and that allows it to feel more packed... it even has some weird roadblocks in strategic parts so you don't deviate much from your main objective, and so I initially thought that you'd have to use the subway to travel around the whole city. Instead, you travel around the world, but only two areas are explorable.

Despite the fact that I spent 60+ hours to complete the main story, I think that it probably took me 2 or 3 times longer than the average time and I still have some side missions to do, one that includes beating fighters 25 levels above my current one (At the end I was level 60 iirc). It sucks that there's no New Game +, so I could just go back to the beginning and keep leveling up. If you choose to start all over, you lose all your gear and your progress with all your masters.

All in all I had a ton of fun. The closest experiences similar to SF6 that I've had are Shenmue and Mortal Kombat Deception, both with an overall longer story; still, customization made SF6 feel quite unique... closer to Shenmue but with SFIII vibes. Would've loved to see Sean as part of the roster.