I think it's really sweet that this whole game is just genuinely appreciative of the CDi games and the resulting YTP scene. It never punches down on its own source material or even defaults to some irony-poisoned take on the matter; it's just a continuation of games that, despite all reason, managed to resonate with people in their own weird way.

Gameplay wise this definitely shows in how the elevator pitch is pretty much just "CDi Zelda but playable". It's a rather short game that, crazily enough, isn't pushing any narrative boundaries, but the extra gameplay polish makes the quest hunting really palatable. One of my friends got into speedrunning it with some sequence breaks and has the world record so I'd say the world design has to be doing something right.

I know the main draw for most people is the meme factor, so I'd say it lands pretty well. Arzette is the distilled mythos of the CDi girlboss Zelda and her reactions to whatever arbitrary characters show up next are pretty good. The story isn't winning any awards, although Arzette's dad dying gives off some "overly verbose YTP lore" vibes which was fun. I don't think any of these people are going to end up iconic enough to where I'll see them singing Stronger than You next month but they were fine on their own. Really the only things that felt off were the blatantly sauceless Morshu and the one random Castlevania reference. Also I swear a Bubsy line snuck in somewhere.

Overall, I think it's a very cute game that provides a chance to reminisce on some old shitposty memories. Not really anything more than that, but I figure that was obvious from the get-go.

In puzzle games there's a distinction between games that give you all the tools needed and let you figure it out the answer, and games that hide things from you and make your brain go nuts for hours and hours, i like to compare that to "jigsaw puzzles", the first one, and "brainteasers" the second one. I myself am much more a fan of the first one, and Cocoon is for sure one of the best of this kind out there.

Cocoon is never too much, it's never too little, it always tell the players all the clues it needs while never letting too many things overload your brain by closing the finished paths behind you.

It teach's its verbs one by one, and use each one of the them to the maximum, and that goes to your basic puzzle piece to this game amazing world structure (not getting into it because spoilers). Every puzzle ahead is a matter of "what verbs do i have and what possibilities there are". To summarize this, the very last puzzle it's a lecture on this mentality, i had only one verb and from that i was able to logically codify the other ones in one go.

It's safe to say that Cocoon it's a must for puzzle fans, and i couldn't have had a better time with it

the ridiculously sluggish and hand-holdy tutorial made me so nervous that i would hate this game. thankfully it was another 10/10. probably the best one so far. i can't wait for Pikmin 5 to come out in 25 years...

extremely specific nitpicks:
- whoever did the treasure names this time around completely failed to emulate the style of the Pikmin 2 treasure names. Pikmin 2 would NEVER have named a tiny plastic sword "Bright Sword". way too literal. it would be called something like "Imitation Branch". someone needs to make a mod that changes the treasure names to be more Pikmin 2-y
- this is a problem Pikmin 3 had too: the production value on the music is too high. Pikmin 1 and 2's OSTs had a distinctive quirky and weird sound that has evidently been abandoned. bring it back!
- some characters' stories are essentially left unexplained. again. again. this time, it really starts to come off as lazy writing. the main story would have been much more cohesive with even like 1% more effort in this area
- text moves too slowly, especially compared to Pikmin 2 which was super mashable and friendly to speed readers

Something that surprises me about Capcom is how good they are at comeback stories. I wouldn't really call them an underdog of the video game industry, as they have a few consistently good franchises, like Monster Hunter, Ace Attorney, and Mega Man. But for every perfect series under their belt, there's another one that faltered at some point with an impossibility for recovery. Yet, despite the huge mountain left for the next game to climb, they climbed it nonetheless. Devil May Cry 3 is maybe the greatest comeback story in the industry done out of the developer's own ego for not wanting to be responsible for the worst game in the series. Resident Evil 7 took the series back to its roots with actual horror, instead of doing whatever 5 and 6 were plotting, and it saved the series from the brink of cancellation.

While not to the same degree, I would say Street Fighter 6 is in a similar boat. Street Fighter V is a good game and I will forever stand by that, but it took a hell of a while for it to get to that point. With one of the worst launches ever for a video game, the devs didn't make up for it until years later with much needed improvements, balance changes, and gameplay additions. Street Fighter 4 was responsible for keeping the genre as a whole from becoming obsolete, but as much as I love that game, it faltered near the end of its life and needed a change. SFV was a very safe play, because unlike SF4, there was very little risk involved.

A few issues that were introduced at the start, and some even persisting throughout, were character depth, universal mechanics, and freedom. Movesets were barebones, as the proximity normals from SF4 were removed. Every character was easy to understand, easy to pick up, and easy to master. The V-System was cool, but was different for every character, leading to loads of problems regarding balance and expression. Universal mechanics can be hard to balance, as some characters will naturally benefit from them more than others. In SF4, Balrog not only had no meaningful way to FADC (Focus Attack Dash Cancel) to extend combos, but he also had one of the worst Focus Attacks in general, having negative horizontal range. Meanwhile, Evil Ryu got a number of damaging combo extensions from FADC and also had a great Focus Attack despite that.

The overall barebones movesets and clunky universal mechanics limited the overall freedom and expression available to players. You want a max damage punish against a blocked DP? Great, do this exact combo and use your super at the end if you have the meter. EX extensions were limited, and any more combo variety was limited to the V-Triggers and V-Skills, which not every character could even use to their advantage. Some characters were just stuck with a shitty V-System. Both of Lucia's triggers and skills were limited to combo extensions and hardly anything else. If they did anything else, they were generally really bad at it. Very few characters got as fleshed out of a system as Cody and Akira; not to underplay those that were a bit worse but still useful, but about half the roster suffered from uninteresting game plans and movesets.

Thank the glorious bastards at Capcom who made SF6 possible. Right off the bat, this game grabs your attention with every fiber of its being. Every frame of animation and every nanosecond of sound oozes personality. SFV lacked any kind of signature style that made it stand out, so seeing SF6 establish a unique identity for itself even from the initial teaser trailer is astounding. Characters move with style, their hits leaving a powerful impact. Supers finally look cool again, most even looking cooler when they become their critical art variant when you reach 25% health or lower. Luke's level three is pretty brutal; he runs you over and unloads a barrage of punches while mounted on you. But his critical art? It's the same thing but he fucking kills you. Your character helplessly is stuck as they block each punch. It's only when they try throwing a punch of their own that Luke utterly obliterates them. He fucking kills his opponent. They explode and Luke just exhales afterwards as if it took little to no effort at all. When you get hit with something like this, you know you messed up.

One thing I will say that has irked me for a while is Capcom's neverending boner for SF2. They make it their job to include each of the original eight world warriors because they were the characters who revolutionized the genre, I think. I wouldn't have a problem if half these characters weren't the absolute worst. Ryu, Ken, Guile, and Chun are cool. I like them a lot, their gameplay is unique, and there's a lot to their characters from a lore and personality perspective. However, Zangief, Blanka, Honda, and Dhalsim suck ass. Although arguments can be made for their unique gameplay archetypes (I love watching Zangief kill with three command grabs as much as the next guy), there's absolutely nothing to their character outside of that. I have not met a single person, offline or online, that genuinely likes Honda or Dhalsim for their character traits or personality. Zangief is Russian and he wrestles. Blanka is monkey. Honda is sumo guy. Dhalsim is yoga. Congrats, you now know everything there is to know about these characters. It pains me to see some of these characters constantly returning when I'm positive that nobody likes them. I don't see why some of these characters couldn't be swapped with another that fulfills the same function. Hell, Lily essentially has all of T. Hawks moves, input for input, just with clubs instead of long arms, so if they're willing to let another veteran retire and pass on their legacy to someone with a more promising future, why can't they do the same for someone like Honda or Dhalsim?

I apologize for letting my SF2 hate leak into this review. While a lot I've said has been negative, I want to let it be known that I say this out of love for SF6. This game is the coolest thing ever. With that being said, I have another complaint: how is there not a Final Fight rep in the base roster? The main setting for the game is Metro City, the setting of the Final Fight series. Decorations based on the series are everywhere, including a massive statue dedicated to Mike Haggar. You can meet Carlos from Final Fight 2 just hanging around. But, nobody from the games is actually playable. They added Kimberley, a student to Guy, which kind of makes me more upset than if she had been absent. They really wanted to make ANOTHER Bushinryu specialist instead of revamping one of the two they already had? Zeku was awesome, one of the few new additions to SFV that made the game worth buying all on his own, and his style differed greatly from Guy. This was a perfect opportunity to get the gang back together, considering Cody is still the mayor and lots of the gameplay in world tour is just beating up the Mad Gear. The devs said in an interview that the hardest character for them to cut was Cody, which kind of makes me worried that he won't be playable at all. It just sucks to see all this tribute to Final Fight without an actual character to play as.

With those complaints about the roster out of the way, I really like everyone else. Veterans were implemented with revisions that allow them to keep up with everyone else while also remaining interesting, and new characters are fresh and varied. Ryu is somehow cool, he now has an install to improve his fireball, and a new palm attack that's great for pressure and combos. Ken has rekkas, giving him the same high/low mixup he's excelled with, but in a new coat of paint. Deejay was completely revamped to have decent tools all around, but with feints to fake out the opponent and get some greedy resets and fake outs. Zangief is finally scary again, unleashing damage that other characters get by expending multiple resources over the course of a combo in a single command grab. The new system seems to favor him quite a bit, so I'm excited to see the tournament upsets. The new characters are great, as well. Marisa hits like a freight train and has armor on everything. I'm sorry, you whiffed a jab at half screen? You fucking idiot, let me take a fourth of your health bar with a single charged special move. Lily is just T. Hawk with a new install, but I like T. Hawk, so I like Lily. Manon is somehow a scarier grappler than Zangief when she plays the long game. Each command grab she gets powers up the next one, meaning if you take her to round 3, you WILL be eating grabs that take a third of your health. Jamie has a lot of style and flair, but his ego does annoy me a bit, which is funny because one of his apparent dislikes is people with big egos. He's got a lot of unique combo routes, even after his level three, so I wouldn't be surprised if people are finding new combos with him for a while. JP has the best win animation in any fighting game. I love his parallels with Bison; rather than being an upfront dictator, showing his power to the world, he acts behind the scenes and prefers to keep himself unknown, which is portrayed greatly in his gameplay. A pressure monster who benefits from being in your face vs a long range poking and zoning monster who is more dangerous the further away he is from you.

Every character presented here has something unique and interesting to offer. I think I might have to give them all a fair shot, even the characters I typically don't like, just because the gameplay is impeccable. Instead of an EX meter, a new meter takes its place in the form of the Overdrive meter. EX moves are now OD moves, and multiple actions can be performed for specific amounts of the gauge. A Drive Parry is like the parry from days of old but done with a button press. Holding it isn't as broken as you would think it is; it allows you to avoid chip damage, but doesn't change the frame data of the move, i.e. you hold parry against a +4 attack, that attack will still be +4. Timing your button press perfectly will result in a perfect parry, with a highly reactable screen freeze, allowing you an easy punish, so getting good parry punishes still requires precise timing. Doing a dash input while holding a parry results in a Drive Rush. This is like a faster dash in neutral, but if you do a move at the end of it, its frame advantage increases. You can perform a raw Drive Rush from a cancellable normal by simply inputting dash, opening up new combo opportunities and frame traps. Drive Impact is a big, armored, unblockable lunge. In the corner, trying to block it results in a wall splat, giving the opponent a combo. Challenging these directly is a death sentence, so a jump, grab, or a Drive Impact of your own will get you out of danger. When your OD meter is completely gone, you enter burn out. In this state, you take actual chip damage, and each of your opponent's moves has greater frame advantage on block. Eating a Drive Impact in the corner while in this state will result in a traditional stun like previous titles.

The magic of a universal system that benefits everyone is that you don't ever have to balance the mechanic itself, but rather, balance characters around the mechanic. Like I said earlier, V-Triggers were cool, but each of them were so radically different, that they warranted individual balancing of how they worked. With any universal mechanic, some characters will naturally benefit from them more than others, and some characters will struggle to fight against its benefits, but as long as everyone can make some decent use of it and there are no apparent abusers of the system, then it's good.

The abundance of options within the system offers lots of creativity and flare. The drive meter refills itself over time, giving the player tons of meter to play with without having to wait too long to get bars like SFV. Nobody likes limited access to their tools, so you start every round with full OD meter and build it over time instead of according to moves that you land. Drive rushes and OD moves open up lots of combo opportunities. Characters with lackluster OD moves can still make use of drive rush for new combos and vice versa. Supers being tied to their own meter also gives more leniency to how they can be used. Everyone has a level 1, a level 2, and a level 3. These vary in terms of utility; some characters often make use of every super they have, while some characters would rather save up for level 3 and cash out at the end of a round. Bottom line is: the characters themselves are easy enough to understand, but the system mechanics give more depth to everyone, adding personal expression and tense optimization. I think the way the system mechanics work make everyone easier to get a hold of. I've been playing characters I never even thought of trying before, like Ken and Zangief, just because the system mechanics give a lot of leeway between characters.

While I don't take part in most of them myself, the efforts gone through to turn Street Fighter into a more widely accessible game are commendable. I would like modern controls a lot more if they didn't remove half of your moves, it feels terrible not having every option available to you. This sucks even more because I really want to try learning pad (I've been a keyboard warrior my whole life) but have been deterred because inputs on it feel awful. Modern controls could've been the answer to my prayers, but it just feels objectively worse. I'm glad it's getting other people into the game, and I'm glad it's an option, but if it were up to me, I would prefer the classic controls in terms of normals and modern in terms of specials. World Tour is another big selling point to get more casuals on board with fighting games that I'm not a huge fan of. People like making fun of modern open world games and simplifying them as "dude you just go to a place and do a thing and then go to another place and that's the whole game," but that actually is this whole game. The most you ever do in this mode is fights. There is one method of gameplay and that's it. I've only played a few hours and I'm already sick of it. I like how I can create an avatar that looks stupid as hell (if you ever see Grug from The Croods in the battle hub, say hi) and give them moves based on other fighters, but it's WAY too much work for what it's worth. I'll keep playing just so I can get more outfits without having to pay, but it's VERY repetitive.

Speaking of the battle hub, it's been a hot minute since Capcom made good online services. The online call for rollback gets annoying fast when most people don't even know what that entails. SFV had rollback, but it was still shit. Capcom is capable of good online, I still play SF4 to this day and the online is one of the only things worth mentioning about MVCI, but there's plenty of bad online services as well; SFxT online makes me want to die. But, the online in SF6 is pretty good. You join a lobby and can play casual matches with anyone in there. You still have access to SFV background matchmaking, so I think this should please everyone. It's fast, efficient, and easy. The battle hubs also have shops, display boards of who's on a big winning streak so you know who to look for, and a fighting ground for your avatar character. It's really fun, I'm surprised this kind of lobby hasn't been done this well before.

One last complaint because I don't know where else to put it: despite the incredible visual style, the music is pretty bad. Every character got a brand new theme (except Luke but that's because they made his SF6 theme first and then remixed his SFV theme based on it) and most of them are far cries from what they once were. Ryu has an upbeat jazzy tune which I dig, adds some more personality to him. JP has a nice theme, but it falls into this trend that most of the other character themes are under where it sounds like all buildup with no payoff. Some of them are just straight up bad. Guile's theme… look how they massacred my boy. This is especially out of place considering that the stage and menu themes are fire. The main theme, Not On The Sidelines, pops off and got me excited for the game on its own, and I can't ever remember hearing it in game. Hopefully legacy music options will be available, because the current selection sucks.

I'm glad Capcom is great at making these kinds of comebacks. That notion implies that I'm glad they screw up to being with, but those screw ups are equally as important as the redemption stories. We never would've gotten DMC3 if Hideaki Itsuno didn't see how bad DMC2 was and feel the need to save the franchise. We never would've gotten RE7 if the devs hadn't taken a step back to the roots of the series in the first place and remembered what made the games before RE6 so good. We wouldn't be here enjoying this masterful fighting game if Takayuki Nakayama and Shuhei Matsumoto hadn't recognized the abysmal direction that SFV was going in and wanted to make a change. This is the first fighting game that I've been part of at launch, and I'm going to stick with it until the end. It's not perfect, and it never will be. There will be broken characters, there will be long losing streaks, but never have I fallen in love with a game so quickly and been this happy that other people love it as much as I do. Thank you for everything SFV, but it's time for a new challenger to enter the ring.