Street Fighter 6’s story mode really is a low-rent Yakuza game and I love it

I truly cannot believe Capcom has done this. It’s made a gigantic fighting game with a classic arcade mode, bottomless tutorials and training options, a variety of new combat mechanics that all seem to gel… and also, on top of all that, the cheesiest, most absurd story mode in fighting game history. Capcom has essentially built one of Sega’s Like a Dragon (aka Yakuza) games, but replaced the gangsters with their own quirky NPCs who live to fight and think Chun Li is just as cool as I do.

I use the words cheesy and absurd with nothing but love here. Instead of taking its lore deadly seriously a la the Mortal Kombat story modes of the last decade, Street Fighter 6 started with the premise “what if everyone in the world freaking loved Street Fighter” and found a way to treat its iconic characters as celebrities in their own world.