Applying the Think, Don't Mash! Approach to Street Fighter 6
Applying the Think, Don't Mash! Approach to Street Fighter 6
I’m not currently planning on making Think, Don’t Mash! videos specifically for Street Fighter 6. While I used Street Fighter V to explain the concept, the series was never meant to specifically be about Street Fighter. I was trying to show how the core idea of starting with a small number of key moves and then slowly expanding upon that over time can be applied to any fighting game.
That being said, some folks have asked for my take on Street Fighter 6. I responded to a few YouTube comments with how I approached SF6, so I thought it might be helpful to put that information into a blog post and expand on it a bit.
Disclaimer: I need to come clean. I played Street Fighter 6 for around a month when it launched and then went back to focusing on other games. This is one of the reasons I’m not really doing Street Fighter 6-focused stuff—it seems like it’d be disingenuous.
In my month of playing Street Fighter 6, I started with the same plan as I used in Street Fighter V and then expanded on it a bit. For a quick refresher, the Street Fighter V plan was to begin playing a character using only:
Universal grounded movement options (walking and dashing backward and forward)
A good grounded poke
My normal throw
An anti-air
An anti-fireball tool
I realized pretty quickly this plan needed a few modifications to work properly in Street Fighter 6. We’ll still need the same grounded movement options, we’ll still use normal throws, and we still need an anti-air—these three are staying the same. The others need to be tweaked or expanded upon.
Picking a Grounded Poke
Picking a grounded poke was always my starting point with a new character in Street Fighter V. I just looked for a poke that had good reach and was safe on block. I picked Chun-li’s standing heavy punch in the original Think, Don’t Mash! video. Chun’s standing heavy punch made it into SF6 more or less intact, so I should be able to use it the same way here, right?
Street Fighter V has the V-System, where you have a gauge that fills up during the round (mostly due to you taking damage), and you can spend it in a few different ways. The most obvious way is to activate your character’s V-Trigger once the bar is full, which temporarily either powers up your character or gives them access to new tools. At lower levels of play, I don’t think V-Trigger matters too much—if the player remembers to activate it at all, they aren't going to use it in a way that will drastically change the flow or outcome of the match. Because the V-Gauge is always empty at round start, it’s not a factor until well into the round.
Street Fighter 6 swaps out the V-System with the Drive System. It has some similar uses to the V-System, and many of these don’t matter much at lower levels of play, so you can safely ignore them starting out. However, there is one specific use which you will see A TON OF at lower levels of play: Drive Impact.
You perform drive Impact by pressing heavy punch and heavy kick at the same time (or you can just assign a button to it). It’s an attack that has two hits of armor (meaning it can blow through up to two hits without being stopped). It starts up pretty quickly. If it hits as a punish (which it usually will if it armors through an attack), it crumples the opponent and lets you hit them with a combo for free. Also, unlike SFV’s V-Gauge (which is empty at the start of a round), SF6’s Drive Gauge is full at round start, meaning from moment one, Drive Impact is a threat (and it only costs one chunk of the gauge, so you can use it six times in a row before running out).
If you try to use Chun’s standing heavy punch to control the ground the same way we did in SFV, a random Drive Impact can blow through it and destroy you.
Dealing with Drive Impact
Plenty of games have moves that can beat almost anything. Ryu can do an invincible dragon punch to beat any grounded button you press. Ryu can’t just dragon punch all day though because if he misses, he’s wide open—you can hit him with a full combo for free. Drive Impact does not work like this. If you block it and you’re mid-screen, it pushes you back but the attacker is completely safe. If you try to block it and you’re close enough to the corner, it causes a wall splat, letting them get a free combo on you. Blocking is not the answer.
Luckily, the solution is simple: you can do your own Drive Impact to beat theirs. The second Drive Impact will always win, so if you’re just sitting there blocking and see your opponent use Drive Impact, you can Drive Impact them right back, giving you the chance to hit them with a full combo.
So what stops the match from devolving into a game of chicken, with both players sitting and doing nothing, waiting for the opposing player to drive impact so they can beat it with their own? In Street Fighter, some normals can be canceled into special moves. Any normal that is special cancellable can be canceled into Drive Impact. This means that if you poke with a special-cancellable normal and your opponent Drive Impacts through it, you can always cancel your poke into your own Drive Impact and win:
There are two important take-home messages:
You need a poke that’s special-cancellable. When you’re just starting out, if you’re going to use just one poke, it needs to be special-cancellable.
You need Drive Impact in your own arsenal from day 1.
Instead of Chun’s standing heavy punch, we could instead pick back/forward medium punch (both back and forward give you the same move). It’s a good poke that’s special-cancellable, so you can keep yourself safe from random Drive Impacts in neutral.
Anti-fireball Tools
The most universal anti-fireball tool in Street Fighter has been a predictive forward jump over the fireball (unless you have some wildly floaty jump like Dhalsim). If you predict a fireball correctly, you’ll get your best jump in combo. This is still true in Street Fighter 6. There have also been character-specific tools to do things like slide under fireballs. These also still exist in SF6. When first starting out, these are still both solid options to pick to deal with fireballs. SF6 has also added a new defensive option which is great for this purpose: Drive Parry.
Drive Parry is done by pressing medium punch plus medium kick (or you can assign it to a single button, just like Drive Impact). Drive Parry mostly functions the same as blocking. The difference is that if you block a special move (like a fireball), you lose some of your own Drive Gauge (instead of taking chip damage like in most fighting games). But if you Drive Parry the special move, you don’t lose any Drive Gauge—you basically break even, since activating Drive Parry costs half a chunk of Drive Gauge, but parrying a projectile rewards you by giving you half a chunk of Drive Gauge back. This means you can just hang out and defend against fireballs for no real cost or risk. If you have the life lead, your opponent can’t just sit on the opposite side of the screen and chuck plasma—they have to come to you.
Putting the Pieces Together
Putting this all together, the SF6 version of the Think, Don’t Mash! starting plan would be something like:
Universal grounded movement options (walking and dashing backward and forward)
My normal throw
An anti-air
A good grounded poke that’s special cancellable
Drive Impact
An anti-fireball tool (probably Drive Parry, even if you’re still going to sometimes predictively jump over fireballs too)
*New stuff is bolded
For Chun, I’d try starting with back/forward medium punch as my special-cancellable poke, and I’d try standing medium kick as my anti-air. You can still use standing heavy punch sometimes too, but it’s good to have a different special-cancellable poke to fall back on if they’re relying too heavily on Drive Impact to win neutral.
I think Street Fighter 6 is a harder game than Street Fighter V to play starting out, just because at even the most basic level, you need to use more tools. The main high risk high reward option you needed to shut down pre-SF6 were jumps. Jumps in Street Fighter usually take around 45 frames (three-fourths of a second). This gives you a lot of time to react and ant-air, since human reaction time is somewhere a bit under 20 frames. Of course, even pros miss anti-airs sometimes because of the mental stack—when you have to look for lots of different things and react differently to each of them, it becomes harder to react quickly to any one thing. Drive Impact has just 26 frames of startup. This is still reactable, but it’s almost twice as fast as a jump, and jumps are already something new players will struggle against at first. You have to be ready with two separate actions to deal with the two universal high risk high reward options that exist in the game. This also brings us back to the mental stack—it’s even harder to anti-air consistently in SF6 relative to SFV because you need to devote some portion of your brain to reacting to Drive Impact as well.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Hopefully this at least gives folks a decent starting point.