Arguably the most interesting feature in Capcom’s latest fighting game Street Fighter 6 is World Tour mode. It’s this game’s story mode essentially, but rather than go the NetherRealm route and make a cinematic story where the fighting is sprinkled in here and there (which they did for Street Fighter V), World Tour instead is an open-world RPG that’s also secretly a beat-em-up game.
What if Street Fighter is a Yakuza/Like A Dragon game? This is pretty much it.
It’s a fascinating mode, something we don’t often see in fighting games. And it’s enough to get me, a lapsed fan of fighting games who last touched a fighting game five years ago, to get back into fighting games again.
World Tour is by no means perfect, but it does a great job of getting new players invested in the world of Street Fighter, and more importantly, getting them comfortable to put in time and get better at fighting games.
For a good hour or so, World Tour mode is just a series of tutorials, which, when compared to a typical JRPG, feels like home. The game guides you in the baby steps, from how to move around the open world (which seems odd, but you have to consider that some folks might play it while using an arcade stick), to the basics of how a match work. It also helps that the first chapter is mandated that you use the new Modern controls so that new players won’t be stuck for not knowing how to pull off quarter-circle motions and just get on and start playing.
Every player will start out with Luke’s moveset. He’s a shoto character, an all-rounder character with a fireball and a dragon punch similar to Ryu and Ken, which provides a good baseline to learn Street Fighter from. But the second character you get to meet and learn their moveset from is Chun-Li, which to a new player gives a glimpse of how more complicated characters work in the world of Street Fighter. Over time, you’ll meet the rest of the roster, some part of the main story while others tucked into some side quests, and learn their moveset.
There are side quests you can find that tutorialises you some of the game mechanics, and also signal more players that at this point in time, you should be familiar with these concepts. About three hours in is when I found a side quest challenging me to pull off a six-hit combo and do a perfect K.O., and the tutorials still keep coming even in the later stages of the mode. So World Tour really lets you take your time to learn the basics before it cranks up that dial.
There are smart ways in which the developers have designed the mode to silently tutorialise, and drill you on, certain mechanics. The fights you engage on the streets are more Final Fight than it is Street Fighter, as the game transitions from the free-moving 3D controls into a 2D plane with invisible walls. Usually, these jobbers are weaksauce, but they may have specific gimmicks, or predictable moves.
Every now and then you’ll face an enemy that just constantly blocks, so you should throw them. And there are enemies that will always jump up to dive kick. Which is where you should practice your anti-air options. Then there are the drones and not-Roombas, which test how you handle your aerial combat/anti-airs, and your crouching attacks respectively. Oh, and there’s even a sentient refrigerator that do fireball spams in the form of throwing various food items (though I don’t recall seeing a can of not-Spam which would’ve been funny). If you need to beat them, you gotta learn.
It extends into the side jobs you can do to earn a quick buck. The board-breaking one found in Chinatown is where you can learn the hitbox of your normal attacks (some of them have a shorter or longer range than the animation might lead you into believing). Hado Pizza will make you internalise the many motion inputs to pull off special moves, which include quarter-circles and dragon punch motions.
The Karate one seems simple, as it forces you to hold a direction for a certain time and then flick the other way plus any punch or kick button to cleanly slice empty bottles. This is secretly a way to learn the timing of charge moves. There’s even a throwback to Street Fighter III’s mini-game where you have to parry basketballs, as well as Street Fighter II’s special stage but you destroy a truck.
For the more experienced players, World Tour can be a slog. The pace before you finally get to unlock more moves slots and find the moveset you wanted by enrolling to a Master takes some hours, especially if your main character is the more tricky one which, understandably, unlocks later on. But the pacing, for the most part, is just nice to get a new player- or a lapsed player who wants to start learning from scratch again- to be invested in.
It helps that the cinematic bits during World Tour are well-done. It really hypes up the world of Street Fighter and its characters. The moment you see series veteran Chun-Li the game perfectly establishes her reputation, and whether you know your Street Fighter lore or not it’s communicated well how she’s a formidable fighter who’s now taking things slow.
Capcom knows its audience well when the first time Juri gets a close-up shot the camera is focusing on her foot first. Even the newcomers, which make up half the cast of SF6, got a good build-up to show to the players they’re strong fighters. Luke tearing up a punching bag, Marisa wrestling a lion, everyone chomping at the bit for the privilege to be command grabbed by Manon.
But to really seal the deal, you do get to fight the Street Fighter 6 characters one-on-one. And in the early game, that sense of how formidable these Masters are is communicated via gameplay. They have higher vitality (health), they have access to the Drive gauge (which you only get halfway through the story), and they just hit harder. World Tour mode is an RPG and it uses numbers and levels to let you know you’re starting out weak, but you too can be as strong as these characters if you put in the time.
Win or lose, the Masters will always encourage you to get better and stronger which fits their character. You’ll eventually be able to beat them in those sparring matches as you get stronger, both your avatar and yourself.
Also, you can learn more about these characters’ backstories by increasing what’s essentially a Social Link by responding correctly in conversations and giving gifts.
It’s these little things that help drive people’s motivation to keep learning, getting better, and more importantly, be invested in the game. There’s a good chance that on launch the casual players who buy SF6 messed around in versus mode a bit, do a few arcade mode runs and then set their copy aside and move on to the next game. If these players got hooked into World Tour, which can go over 20 hours long (20!), there’s a good chance they’ll stick around and play more Street Fighter, or even better, player other fighting games as well.
At the very least, it got one person to be that way. Now that I feel like I have the hang of it again after my time with World Tour mode, I’m ready to keep playing a bit more of Street Figther, as well as other fighting games, after this. This did it. It got me back into fighting games.
Street Fighter 6 has done a good job at explaining basic concepts, some that for the fighting game veterans come second nature. Because for newcomers, some of these concepts are never been taught or tutorialised properly in a fighting game. Mainstream games have been great at onboarding new players to get accustomed to the controls and gameplay mechanics quickly, but fighting games barely do this in the past.
But it’s not perfect. I think the gameplay from Chapter 2 to Chapter 7 feels a bit off. You’re blazing through the story, you level up ridiculously quick to the point that you start overlevelling, but the game is still being stingy with unlocks. So this part of the game can feel like you have to trudge through bloated content. The cool novelty of being able to challenge almost anyone on the streets for a fight becomes stale as opponents don’t scale to your level, and there’s enough of enemies wearing a cardboard box to satiate your combat needs.
But move past that point and it’s likely that you feel like you can’t do enough damage or that you lose life too quickly. Again, World Tour is an RPG where you need to equip the best threads to improve your stats (there is a cosmetic layer to outfits so you can still fashion however you want), pick upgrades on a skill tree designed to look like a tournament bracket, and use items mid-way through battle including health recovery stamina drinks. And you’ll get a rude awakening that you should be engaging in all that past the halfway point where things do get challenging. It would have been less of a rude awakening if the first half of the game gradually ramps up the difficulty, prompting you to engage with the RPG mechanics earlier.
Another fault of World Tour mode is that it still has blindsides of not teaching some fighting game mechanics. If you play classic controls, there’s no tutorial to teach you how charge moves work. The game assumes that if you’re a beginner, you’ll probably stick to Modern controls which use simpler inputs. There are jargons that you can find as a challenge for fights, but never introduced to the game as a tutorial. If you’ve been playing fighting games, or hear people who play fighting games talk about fighting games, terms like a cross-up and a command throw/grab should be familiar. But I didn’t encounter any tutorial for some of these concepts, and it could be it’s deeper into the optional side quests where they introduce this. But the fact is, you may find concepts you’re not familiar with and be asked to do it as a side objective in fights. Weird.
Lastly, World Tour mode sure is demanding performance-wise. The demo on consoles defaulted with fights running at 30 fps, which was a surprise. I am now playing the full release on PC (Intel Core i7 9th gen, Nvidia RTX 2060) and I still suffer slowdowns during fights. This game is bottlenecking on the CPU side from what I can tell, and the slowdowns are more apparent when a fight occurs in more open spaces. The RE Engine has been solid performance-wise on most games, but now we know that it’s not indestructible.
Still, even with some of these faults, I still find World Tour to be an engrossing, and worthwhile, feature for Street Fighter 6. Outside of the fun nature that the game lives up to the name more than ever with this mode (you’re a fighter! Out in the streets!), World Tour adds a substantial amount of content that cinematic story modes couldn’t do, and is brilliantly a tutorial to get new players to play an RPG beat-’em-up game and convince them that fighting game isn’t that much of a leap from there.
By structuring it as an RPG, Street Fighter 6 effectively teaches new players from zero, and slowly acclimatises them to the joy of fighting games, one small step at a time. That also means the pacing is purposefully slow early on, but it helps make the daunting task of understanding the many interlinking mechanics that has come second nature to fighting game veterans with over 20 or more years of experience digestible in hours. An impressive feat, even with some of its shortcomings.
World Tour mode is ambitious, and it speaks to the level of dedication Capcom is willing to make to get more people in the mainstream gaming audience into fighting games. And that is the overall vibe of Street Fighter 6: Capcom proving to the world that they are on top of the game and delivering more than what you would expect for its latest entry to its flagship series.
Never played a fighting game before? Or never really got into fighting games that much? Play Street Fighter 6 for the World Tour mode. Even if you don’t end up being a fan of fighting games, you will at least appreciate the great lengths the developers went into making an open-world RPG beat-’em-up game.