Of Course Street Fighter

[Colby DuLin]

Ontop of the games themselves, this course is also setting out to teach students about the origins of the genre, its impact on Japanese culture, arcades, the rise of the fighting game community and FGC-related jargon.

They also point out this class is covering the fundamentals of 2D fighters and specifically not platform fighters like Super Smash Bros though the main focus this semester appears to be on the Street Fighter series.

And then there's the final project, which is a group research presentation looking into a "historically significant player in fighting game history" where students will need to dive into a competitor's background, contributions and interestingly, an analysis on their play style.

Although this course is probably a bit too basic for most people here, it is really cool to see that fighting games can exist now in an academic setting to be studied and learned with its own rich history for new generations to appreciate.

When Street Fighter 5 came out in 2015 it broke my heart. It was incomplete, shoddy, and good things came piecemeal after the fact. Yes, I know, it got better, but it took years. Meanwhile, other fighting games were complete from the get-go and reaffirmed my love for good, modern fighters. If ever there was a game that needed to do a lot to impress me and win me back, it was Street Fighter 6. Nonetheless, for all that is dragon punches and footsies, the mad geniuses did it. On its continuing streak of great games, Capcom has brought one of their crown jewels back and reforged it into something altogether incredible - a proper return to marquee fighting game greatness for the franchise.

Of course, Street Fighter is about taking those moves and working opponents over with them, and there are tons of ways in which to do that in Street Fighter 6 as well. One-on-one and versus modes are here, as are extreme rules and gimmick modes. If you want to have a 3-on-3 bout with bulls sporadically running through the screen, you can. If you want to just have a typical match, you also can. There's also the option to take your favorite character against the CPU in an adjustable arcade Story mode. There, you can also put on modifiers like overall match count; round, time, and difficulty settings; and plenty more. Simply put, even if you just want to play vanilla-style Street Fighter, this game offers a lot of ways to play.

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.d...@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.

Hey, loser: What are you doing? Do you really think you're going to get any better at Street Fighter 6 by, like....training? Of course not! Everyone knows that training mode is useless and a complete waste of time! How do I know? Well, I bought these motivation speakers tapes from my new hero, Dan Hibiki! This master of Saikyo Style is a self-taught legend, and gave me some legendary advice: Need to improve in Street Fighter 6? Taunt! That's right, taunt the crap out of em.

However, it appears that Capcom has made one major omission from the training mode and not told anybody how to taunt in Street Fighter 6. See? This is what happens when Yoshinori Ono leaves Capcom. Important things start getting left on the cutting room floor.

The button combination to taunt in Street Fighter 6 is a bit different than in past games. You can taunt by hitting all punch and kick buttons together--which is to say, hit all six attack buttons at once. This is a change from Street Fighter IV, in which you taunted by hitting HK+HP. However, In Street Fighter 6 that will cause you to use your Drive Impact move. Each fighter as a number of taunts, and sometimes holding a different direction button will change the taunt.

This isn't a problem for Master Dan, but keep in mind that you cannot cancel the taunt animation. So, if you're gonna stick it to the man, make sure you're ready to hold it for the duration! Only cowards worry about leaving themselves open to a free attack! You're actually just lulling them into a false sense of security before you whip out your ultimate move: A level three Super Art on wake-up!

Trying to do something different here. I'm going to discuss a character build that I had a lot of fun putting together and playing on 1.1 PotD (probably the most fun I've had in Deadfire so far), but I'm going to use it as an entrypoint to teach-by-doing various game mechanics and how to think about them and use them for your own builds. People already comfortable with min-maxing their way through Deadfire might not get much out of this, but hopefully for everyone else there's something useful here, because there's a lot of information scattered through this forum, reddit, and the in-game cyclopedia and I hope to consolidate some of it here and put them to actual use. In fact, I would say something like 90% of this is just going to be talking about game mechanics, because understanding the game mechanics thoroughly is key to understanding this character build. I hope you find this useful!

"What the hell is an 'Umezawa?'" Well, while I don't play it anymore, I still follow and am a big fan of Magic: The Gathering. And with one of the more recent sets out (Dominaria), I got to thinking about a couple of cards that struck me as particularly flavorful:

The latter card is actually from a set more than a decade old and is/was so stupidly powerful that it's banned in one of the super-powered tournament formats (banned in Modern). The former card is just a nostalgic callback to the latter that was in Dominaria (which itself was a set all about nostalgic callbacks). It's not particularly tournament-worthy.(*)

Even if you don't play Magic: The Gathering, the takeaway here is a fragile, weak, but elusive hero, and a stupidly powerful tool-kit of a weapon that the hero is lorewise linked to. I liked the idea of taking a very blue (crafty, subtle, evasive) approach to stupid levels of power, and decided to personify it in Deadfire as a Streetfighter/Wael multiclass that I'll just brand here as an Umezawa build.

This character is very versatile and mobile, tanking on huge packs of enemies or jumping around behind enemy lines to assassinate troublesome foes. This character is not going to be great at doing burst or area of effect damage (at least until you have a steady supply of explosives), but it will do frankly a stupid amount of sustained damage, maximizing uptime for the Streetfighter's special (at least without resorting to just being a ranged blunderbuss dummy).

While this is probably not the most powerful Streetfighter build you can make (a Streetfighter/Monk is probably better for pure damage) and is fairly micromanagement-intensive, it can nonetheless be a very fun and engaging way to play.

SKILLS: roughly 2:1 ratio between Explosives to Alchemy. For your secondary skill, shove as much as you can into Religion, though you can respec out of this after a certain point. Be sure to pay 3000g each to train both Explosives and Alchemy.

ABILITIES: (active priest abilities with arabic numerals, active rogue abilities marked with roman numerals for their power levels, automatic priest spells in angle brackets, weapon choices in italics) Updated for 3.0: some skills reordered, dropped Searing Seal for Champion's Boon, weapon proficiency recs changed

You'll note that I list Escape as a source of deflection. And while it lasts an extremely short time (3s), with decent intellect and stuff like Meppu/Roe it can last almost 5s. Early on it can be a way to get some extra emergency protection without burning an Arcane Veil (especially since you don't have many other non-situational Guile-spenders you can potentially just chain together a bunch of Escapes to your current location since it has only a .5s base action time and no recovery), and at all points in the game can be used so that you can jump straight behind enemy lines and have a few seconds of unconditional +50 deflection protection to buff yourself or do something else. (If you want to be tricky, you can use Salvation of Time to extend the unconditional +50 defense of Escape by 20 seconds.)

Now, it's important to highlight that this character is not intended to be an immortal riposte build. We could just leave a large shield equipped and stack on all sorts of bonuses to be untouchable, but frankly I find that playstyle boring (I did that for my own The Ultimate achievement run and while it was certainly impregnable it was also tedious). What we really just shoot for is enough defenses and debuffs to not be squished into oblivion within a few seconds of being flanked, so that we can go on a killing rampage. This character picks up riposte not because we are going to rely on it for as a centerpiece for our damage, but as an accent of some additional damage in certain situations (which we maximize by dual-wielding since riposte does a full attack). In fact, in the late game, we may just want to deliberately get to near death ourselves and not worry so much about defenses, which leads me to another aspect of the survivability equation:

If you played Pillars of Eternity 1 with a priest, you'll be forgiven for ignoring Barring Death's Door and similar effects in Deadfire, since the effect in Pillars 1 was pretty lame. All they did was prevent you from dying, and dying in Pillars of Eternity 1 meant getting knocked down to 0 health (as opposed to 0 endurance), which would have been a permadeath instead of just a knockout. What Barring Death's Door and similar effects do in Deadfire is prevent anything from reducing your health below 1 (even instant kill effects from something like Death Ring). Fortunately for the Streetfighter, one way to trigger Heating Up is to get Bloodied or lower, and the only way to get On The Edge is a combination of being Bloodied or lower and being flanked. Both Barring Death's Door and Potion of the Final Stand give us a nearly foolproof way to trigger Heating Up and sustain On The Edge. But both Potion of the Final Stand and Barring Death's Door have low base duration. It's for this reason why we pick up something like Prayer for the Spirit (+5 intellect means an extra +25% of base duration for Barring Death's Door), invest in Alchemy (+5% duration per point in Alchemy to Potion of the Final Stand), and love food/drink like Meppu/Roe (+15% beneficial effect duration, additively stacks with intellect and power level scaling) and importantly why one of our most important late-game spells is Salvation of Time (+10 seconds to beneficial effects but as of 1.2 actually grants +20 seconds at least the first time you cast it per encounter). This stuff also helps Arcane Veil--which has a fairly short duration as well--but is more critical for these "can not die" effects because the moment they wear off with you at 1 health, you are probably going to be knocked out.

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