Street Fighter 6's World Tour is a Travesty

Depending on who you ask, there are a few different potential barriers of entry to fighting games. One is that they’re too hard, which itself could mean a few different things, such as requiring too much knowledge of mechanics and match ups or that the execution requires more physical dexterity than some players have, or requires more effort than they’re willing to put in. Another potential problem is that they don’t have enough options for people who want to play solo. Online and local versus are both guarantees these days, but how much there is beyond that is hard to predict, and how much value there is to those single-player modes is dubious. It doesn’t take a lot of thinking to realize these problems are very much related. Someone who doesn’t want to or feels unable to learn the finer workings of the game knows they’ll have a hard time competing online, so they want an offline mode to play instead. It’s an understandable demand, but how do you meet it?

Enter Street Fighter 6, or more specifically, Street Fighter 6’s World Tour mode. (You may ask why I’m writing about this now, a whole two years after the fact, and the answer is that I only just got around to playing it. Look, I said before that I wasn’t interested in covering new releases.) World Tour mode is one among many facets of Street Fighter 6 that serve to appeal to newcomers, along with others like the new Modern control scheme, which is beyond the scope of this piece. But World Tour mode stands alone as existing solely offline. This is the single-player story mode, or at least one of them, as there’s also a more traditionally designed Arcade mode with your usual story cutscenes for each character dispersed around a few fights. World Tour is something like an open-world Street Fighter RPG in which the player creates a character, learns moves, explores, and fights in the street, naturally. The way it was described by both Capcom and the games press made it out to be the missing link that would finally solve the issues of story, single-player content, and approachability to newcomers in fighting games.

Unfortunately, it’s a colossal failure on all counts. If it’s meant to be a form of onboarding for new players, it fails to do so. While it does contain tutorials that explain both the new system mechanics and the features that have been in fighting games for decades, those tutorials don’t matter much because the RPG mechanics make every fight a bloated mess of inflated stats and the consumable items render skilled play unnecessary. If it’s meant to provide an engaging story, it’s also a failure. The narrative such that it exists is dismal, and it holds almost no relevance to the Street Fighter series more broadly. Recognizable characters, whether they be veterans like Ryu and Chun-Li or newcomers like Jamie and Kimberly, play marginal roles, with a handful of characters exclusive to this mode being the stars. But even aside from those, World Tour simply fails to be a good game. It’s just an open-world RPG and a fighting game smashed together without the good parts of either genre.

This being the case, one must wonder who World Tour was made for. The simplest answer is that it’s meant for people who dislike Street Fighter and similar games, either in concept or from experience playing it. Expanding the player base will always require appealing to the skeptical, but this works best for people who are presently neutral, not opposed. Furthermore, the approach of appealing to players offput by fighting games through adding a separate an entirely separate mode that’s largely in a different genre is wrongheaded for a number of reasons. If the intention is that World Tour mode will win people over and convince them to play online, I fear it would backfire by introducing them to the game with a game mode that’s so fundamentally different from the rest of the game. Jumping into ranked versus after being acclimated to the various World Tour amenities would require quite an adjustment. If the intention is that World Tour will attract new players who won’t play other modes, then it’s not really expanding the player base, just increasing the number of sales, which would be good for the bottom line if World Tour didn’t cost so much to develop (the exact profitability is unknown to the public, so this is pure speculation).

Ultimately, the inclusion of World Tour speaks to the fact that it’s believed a fighting game isn’t good enough without having a lengthy story mode in a different genre. Curiously, this attitude does not seem to apply to other genres. Many of the most popular online multiplayer games like Fortnite or League of Legends have no single-player content to speak of. Overwatch managed to take home both Game of the Year and Best Game Direction at the Game Awards in 2016 despite being so lacking in offline features that the game is genuinely unplayable at present, following Blizzard’s decision to discontinue support for the game upon launching Overwatch 2. Paradoxically, fighting games seem to be held to a standard that is both higher and lower than other genres, even just within the realm of online games: the online experience isn’t enough, there needs to be a single-player experience even if it’s in an entirely different genre, but also, it’s not all that important if it’s good or not.

For what it’s worth, I do believe that story modes in fighting games are often underwhelming. Addressing that is something that needs to be done, but World Tour fails to do so. Such that Street Fighter 6 has a story, it’s largely found in the companion comic book. Tekken 8 does a better job in my eyes. It’s a brief story mode, but where World Tour is so bloated, that’s a welcome change. Fights are distributed at a decent pace and have some interesting design choices to set them apart from a regular player vs CPU match. Notably, it’s also not the game’s way of onboarding new players. There’s an entirely different mode for that, a sort of meta-narrative about a bunch of young people playing Tekken 8 and therefore learning the ropes. There’s a lesson to be learned here: if we’re going to take fighting game stories seriously, we can’t treat them as being either tutorials or an alternative to playing the game against other people. The story mode should complement and contextualize the versus modes rather than standing apart from them